The Fire Fox

The gray fox was sitting in the driveway when we got up. A blessing, we thought, returning its gaze from the veranda. To have found a place in the cool regard of a creature so at home in the forest & so seldom seen by day — it felt like a message: that we belong here on the mountain, that our presence is acceptable. We were already rehearsing the story we’d tell about it as it got to its feet, that lovely animal the color of ash & flame, & trotted up past the garage & out of sight.

We’re still basking in the warm glow of chosenness when later that day we see it again, wandering in circles around the stark sunlit field. Now it wears a beard of bloody foam & keeps shaking its head as if something has it by the throat. We watch through binoculars as it sinks into the grass & disappears, then rises again: undead. Rabid. What we took for friendliness is instead a violent kind of taming, the virus robbing it of every wild instinct.

I get close & watch as long as I can stand to. Its jaw works & works. Its eyes close for long moments. If my presence registers at all, I doubt I’m anything but one more, minor torment. The brief convulsion after the bullet shatters its skull is almost refreshing to watch — a return to the expected order of things. I dig a deep grave between the roots of a wild black cherry, break the brick- red clods with the back of my shovel & trickle the soil over that shining coat.