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Something light and funny

Ann Swanson

One thing I love about the snow is coming out of my house each morning to see what’s been around.

Even living on the less than rural outskirts of the city, I have deer, foxes, cats, rabbits, and birds visiting my yard nearly each evening. I’m pretty sure at least one of the rabbits lives beneath my porch. The deer tend to wander into the yard for the Rose of Sharon branches around this time of year. The rabbits, I’m assuming, are after the same thing, as the majority of the tracks tend to wander between the two large Rose of Sharon in the side yard. The foxes and cats are more than likely after the rabbits or, on Sunday nights, the garbage that I and my neighbors leave curbside for the next morning’s pickup.

I’ve seen one red fox, in particular, returning to the tank yard at the bridge end of the refinery many mornings on my way to work. He’s crossed the avenue at a trot with a mouse or small groundhog dangling from his mouth more than once. I’ve enjoyed watching him develop from a dusty brown this spring to a big, beautiful copper-coated adolescent through the fall, and have been pleased to see that his amber eyes have stayed the same color.

I love foxes. You know that question everyone gets asked at least once in their life? Whether it’s a Cosmo personality test of questionable validity or a middle school writing assignment. “If you could be any animal, which would you be,” it’s sometimes put, or, “which animal do you feel best represents your style?” For me it’s always been the fox. They’re just so delightful. Technically dogs, but with distinctly feline features. Clever. Curious. Darting and swift, with a preference for subtlety and caution over brute displays of strength or aggression. A fox will avoid a confrontation if possible, and they do so with with an almost dismissive air. As if becoming entangled in your petty shenanigans is beneath them.

Memories of seeing foxes in the wild are inextricably linked with snow, for me. I remember one evening, in the house where I grew up, sitting at the kitchen table looking out the large picture window there onto the pond. Just beyond the butcher house, where pigs were slaughtered and sauerkraut fermented each year, past the corn cribs where I’d lay and read my way through the majority of damp-aired summer afternoons, past the electric fence and just beyond the herd of red and black beef cows standing still, ankle deep in snow that mirrored perfectly the fresh bruise blue of the twilit winter sky, a handful of smallish doe ran across the frozen surface of the water followed closely by a red fox, struggling through the deep snow that bordered the pond to keep up. The chase was pointless. The deer were too fast and too big for the fox to begin with. I have no idea why he’d waste his energy on them in the first place. But the end came in earnest when he slid on the ice, going belly down to laughter all around the table.

I’m always pleased to see that one has been spending time on my property. He’s certainly welcome.

So when a video titled “Fox and Snowy Owl Meet at Night” showed up as I scrolled through things shared by friends on Facebook one night, I couldn’t resist giving it a tap.

I mean, the title itself is poetry. I watched the video, three minutes long and some change, and smiled. An arctic fox in Hudson Bay, Canada, is seen standing off against a snowy owl. While the first inclination is to worry for the owl, who lands quite confidently in the snow beside a straight line of tracks left by the scavenging canid, the truth is that snowy owls are no shrinking violets. According to a National Geographic commentary about the interaction, snowies are known to take their chances with the likes of predators as large as caribou and polar bears, when the mood strikes.

Generally, the commentary also explains, the mood tends to strike when the issue of territory and – more importantly – the food within said territory is threatened by the object of their frustration. This fox and owl, it says in the little essay, had this same interaction for about a week, and it was likely due to the fact that both were after their main food source, lemmings, in the same area.

What struck me, though, as I watched the encounter – the silent video deftly mirroring the silence of the snowy night in which the encounter took place, setting a perfect poetic tone to match the title – was not the encounter itself, but what was left at its denouement.

At the end of the video, the owl takes off again into the black, starless winter sky and the fox trots off into the ether of downstage left. It’s a quiet, short encounter.

A tiny, magnificent moment.

But what had been at the outset an unmolested blanket of twinkling snow was now scarred with the initial straight line of tracks showing the fox’s deliberate movement from point A to point B, but also with an aimless set of tracks in semi-circles, turn-arounds, and the half steps of exploratory pounces, as the fox returned to where the owl had landed, investigated, interacted, and then ultimately left again.

Those tracks were likely seen by whomever was first to arrive at the marina in front of which the encounter took place. That person may or may not have wondered what sort of interactions the tracks implied. Maybe that person didn’t even care. But to me, those tracks are not unlike what I imagine the tracks I’ve left behind in my own life would look like, were I to take even the last ten years of it and give every interaction a physical form.

How often are we, like that little arctic fox, trotting along on some mindless errand or another, when we are confronted by an unexpected variable? A relationship, an interaction, a crisis, or a miracle often takes us off the path we think we’re on, and twists what ought to have been a linear trek, from here to there in time, into what might look to some – what might even look to us – like an incomprehensible mess.

But is it?

Does being disordered necessarily make something a mess? Does being off track necessarily make an event negative? Or even meaningless? I tend to worship at the altar of routine and order. I like to know what’s coming up. I like to feel that my expectations – those I have for myself and those I have for others – can reasonably be relied upon.

I tend to value predictability, above all else, as the best quality of experience.

And yet, how like those tracks are the steps I’ve taken in my life?

How like yours?

It’s true that some of the worst experiences, the most profound traumas, that a person has are often unexpected. But can’t some of the best be just the same?

And, looking at the still frame at the end of the video, isn’t there a sort of beauty in the wildness of the tracks left behind? In the uncontrived spontaneity, in the abstraction, of what remains?

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