five. ezra

Yeah, I would say I knew them.  I didn’t have any time for them.  Especially not that scrawny little grey wimp.  They were based out on the edge of the small wood a half day or so away, when my clan were on the edge of a small human settlement.  Good for raids.  They would neither of them (I don’t count the blind runt) think twice about coming into our territory.  We are not anti-social, but we have rules for a reason.  It’s like my ancestor used to say.  Now there was a tough fox.  They don’t make them like that so much anymore.  When he spoke there was silence.  His word was law, and if you didn’t like it, just try to fight him and see where that got you.  When it was time for him to die, he just walked off into the snow and didn’t come back.  And that was that.  Wouldn’t want to be a burden on the others.  My father told me; he watched him go.  Beyond the snow line, and never seen again.  There’s no room for sentiment with us.  I understood it from day one.  My first vixen’s litter was large; no way could she nurse them all.  So I did what I had to.

So these two would show up every so often and act like they were something special.  Around our females too.  Who fell for it.  Neglecting their duties, or their young if they had them.  The grey one would act like it was a big deal to go into the human settlement.  Scavenge trash from outside the dwellings, in the dark, of course.  Big deal.  We have been doing that for years, and by day too.  He would come back and talk about things they’d seen there.  Not to do with collecting food, but just looking around.  Looking around is how foxes get killed.  One young female from our lot who they got friendly with lapped up their rubbish.  Went into the settlement with them one night and we never saw her again.  Well, she was no loss to us.  Mentally subnormal.  Couldn’t hunt for herself.  We let that go.

But I couldn’t sit by when the grey one came sniffing around a young female I had decided would be mine.  As was no less than my right.  She was a bit crazy – eccentric, but well-built with a fine coat, with like a sheen about her.  You could tell she’d mother some fine cubs.  And I didn’t want another litter with the last.  She was lazy and neglected her cubs.  A few times I had to keep her in line.

So anyway, this time I caught them together.  In a small copse of trees on the edge of our dens, where we tolerated the three of them staying in some abandoned dens; really just enlarged warrens that an old fox who couldn’t dig used to crawl into shelter before he died used.  They were welcome to them; if they hadn’t the shame.  The female moved away, obviously ready to come crawling.  But he acted without any respect.  Slowly getting to his feet.  I remember her stretched himself.  But he knew he was in for it – that he had crossed a line. 

I walked over slowly, tail down.  Till I could see and smell his fear.  She was keeping her distance but watching.  It’s all just a game – entertainment – for them.  I asked him if he knew who I was.  He didn’t answer at first.   I told him if I had to ask again it would be worse for him.  He was shifting awkwardly, expecting the attack but clearly not having any idea how to deal with me.  He was a little younger than me, it’s true, but I’d been fighting since I was way younger than he was then.  He was terrified, could only manage a nod to my question.  Then you’ll know how badly you’ve fucked up by taking one of our females.  One of my females, I was thinking, but this was really official business I was transacting on behalf of the group.  He was trying to say something to get him off the hook, but it was too late.  I went for him.  He put up virtually no resistance and within seconds I had him pinned by the throat; I held him like that until I felt his muscles drain completely.  I could have killed him in another few seconds, the weakling.  But I let him go.  Told him that if he came back to our territory he was dead.  And he knew that I wasn’t kidding, and that would be him done for, if he was stupid enough not to take me at my word.  I left him there.  He didn’t even move.  Just lay still.  Not so cocky now.  She had been making noises from a distance… the usual.  But when I told her she had to come back with me, she came without a word.  Before we went too far, an idea came to me.  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ I said. ‘You won’t be seeing each other again.’  

She didn’t know what to do.  ‘Look back and call goodbye.  It’s only polite.’  She looked at me for permission again and I nodded.  She looked back at where he was still lying and called out.  And then again, her voice stronger the second time.  But he was silent, and wouldn’t look towards us, though of course he had heard; I could tell from the pricking of his ears.  You can’t fake that.  That was my way of showing her that I’d saved her from a mistake. 

I bore no grudges that she’s been with an outsider, who hadn’t sought the proper ways in.  She had a litter of my cubs the end of that winter.  Soon after she went out looking for food during a storm that had already lasted for three days.  She was killed on the road, maybe disorientated by the conditions.  I know because a friend found her body a few days later.  Of course, by then the pups were dead too.  I never saw her body myself.  I went up a week later but by then there was nothing left.  The crows, and the other scavenging animals will pick you clean; your bones will end up gnawed by rats.

fuchs!

I’m just thinking off the top of my head about animal novels.  What are they for?  Watership Down, Animal Farm.  Charlotte’s Web.  Some are allegories.  Others feature animals to create an alienation effect – to highlight irrational aspects of our own behaviour that we have ceased to notice because of our entailment in the symbolic order of ideology.  Others still use different animals to represent different human behavioural types and to characterise, within the scope of some marionette-steered coda or other.  I didn’t want to do this, but did want to impose limitations: a language devoid of human referents – very hard to achieve and fundamentally impossible if etymology, logic comes a-knocking.  But also a convenient way of avoiding mobile phones; hashtags; stuff that wrecks suspense and pins you to the mundane concerns of now...  too much x-box.  And the quoting, name-dropping, the necessary web of allusions which is a secret handshake, passive-aggressive, with the reader.  Foxes don’t do that.  Not that we should aspire to the timeless, to ahistory, which is an easy myth that contains so many easy answers – as if we could stop the world and subject it to our examination, our judgement!  Just lose some of the baggage.  And get some defamiliarisation, like good old Coleridge (foxes don’t do that).  “Thinking off the top of my head” – foxes have heads, so they might use that idiom.  And they might have dark thoughts or be cold to each other.  But they wouldn’t be on the ropes or on the back foot.  And they don’t have such connotations or collocations.  If they are blinded then they literally or metaphorically cannot see - they don’t use screens to keep the sunlight from their dens. 

four. bilka

When you’re young, you spend your time thinking others don’t understand you.  When you are old, you realise they understood you all too well.  We think of ourselves as individuals whose nuances of personality deserve close scrutiny or psychoanalysis.  But we don’t feel that way about rabbits, or about humans.  When you’ve seen five or six, you’ve seen them all.  You can call yourself an expert.  So maybe what we perceive as differences in ourselves are only mistakes based on not having the right common denominator.  I think about that a lot.

Which is why I was initially attracted to that group.  They seemed different to all those that I had been brought up with.  Old J kept this group under pretty tight control.  There was never much room for dissent.  Now I think, obviously, that the apparent difference is itself an impossibility, that I just can’t see the feature they have in common.  I’m not capable of it.  But if I was something stupid like a rabbit, or maybe even a spider, I’d see it all too well.  Because they see of us what they need to see.  Humans are cleverer, in a way.  They are more powerful than us.  They can judge us.  But their understanding will always be flawed, all the same.  Because they can’t help but attribute their own values to us.

And it’s hard for me to see, and even less to admit, that I might be the same (or indistinguishable to an outsider, a rabbit-God), to X.  But maybe it’s not so hard.  Self-interest, self-preservation.  Selfishness.  Self.  Our intellect is designed for a purpose.  To kill rats, rabbits.  To dig dens.  To fuck.  To rear and teach our young.  Teach them to be like us.  To put away their capacity to understand things we have learned to ignore, they used to say.  (Speaking together.)  Teach them stupidity.  But if our intellects are designed for the narrow parameters of our existence, then maybe we shouldn’t try to stretch them.  A project doomed to failure.  Abuse of the intellect: philosophy.  Beyond the elasticity, a snapping.  Madness, death.  At least the realisation of what we are… nothing.  So we have two types of being, one that is a machine without knowing, and one can see the mechanical behaviour of others and so realises we are all machines.  Fine.  But to see the mechanics of others’ behaviour and think that this appreciation elevates you to something else, which is not simply mechanical?  No – I don’t accept that.

three. byala

Life is hard.  Especially, of course in the months of frozen ground and slim pickings.  Only last week I saw a friend of mine killed.  He was torn apart – literally – by the dogs that come in the winters with the men.  And he had been strong.  We wedged ourselves deep into a rabbit warren and the stampede passed us by, though we were not so naïve – we knew it was because they had fixed on another quarry.  We heard the sounds and waited. 

Afterwards, the others and I hid the body so that his family wouldn’t have to see the mess.  Around here, you have to grow up quickly.  There’s no time for messing around.  Those four, they were strange.  Jokers, into kids’ stuff.  One of them in particular, spent a long time around the cubs.  Not bothering to learn to hunt.  Eating others’ pickings, or eating spiders and slugs.  And one was half blind.  A weakness that we cannot live with for long.  Two of them didn’t take females in their second year, and none of them bred a litter.  And now they have all gone, without increasing our numbers.

The first time the pair that were always together came back, looking scrawny and grey and generally unhealthy, they had no dens to stay in.  Had to beg shelter where they could get it.  That kind of behaviour weakens the whole group.      

two. aynr

They used to play on the field that adjoined the woods.  Of course I can remember it.  Though it was many years ago, and I am old.  By they, I mean the greyish one, and the other.  Those two were already inseparable at that time.  Of course, there were many other children around, either cubs of less than yearling stage, who couldn’t be too far or too long away from their mothers, but used to watch their bigger siblings at their more violent play, which was by that time already more than play, and in which might be seen already the personalities and hierarchies that would be fully formed in no time.  They watched them play, with that familiar mixture of envy and fear in their eyes, just as they chatted on in their childish way, half in a language they had made up, the language their brothers and sisters were anxious to forget.  There were also older ones, practically adults, who were being initiated into the ways and cares of adulthood, and who regarded the play with a disdain that had begun as affected and had become more and more genuine as they grey up.  Occasionally one of the young ones would get over confident and mount a challenge to a younger adult.  When this occurred they would be put in their place, sometimes quite brutally.  One of my own sons lost an eye in this way.  He found it difficult to hunt after that.  Last winter he died, aged four.  Not old, but not young either. 

This son of mine knew these two, and they were friendly.  They would hunt together.  After the injury, they would often bring him food, despite being far from the most adept hunters in the group.  He appreciated it, though of course he was ashamed.  And I was ashamed of him, in a way.  It was right that he died when he did.  Else he would have been a burden.  It was after they went away for a while, the first time, that he died.  When they returned, he was dead.  They looked for him over this way, at the den he used at the edge of the wood.  I went to see what was happening, as he stayed with a vixen who had given birth to a later litter of mine.  I arranged it.  They didn’t say much.  I asked them where they had been, and they said to the city, father.  We weren’t related but lots of the young ones called me father and they still do.  I didn’t think so much of their having been away, as they were always disappearing for longish stretches.  Some just do – they have a longer range, whereas others are content to lead their whole lives within a short radius of the hole they were born in.  What was unusual was that they generally went together.  Well, it won’t be long for me now.  Another winter perhaps.

one. varna

Some think of themselves as quite cowardly.  Others (there are probably more of them, or maybe the numbers are about the same) are convinced they are brave.  But either self-view is misleading and might be dangerous.  Once you commit yourself to either view, your memories of experiences will align themselves to the interpretation – you will only recall things in such a way as to fit the pattern.  I am brave.  That means I remember and exaggerate in my memory episodes in which I have shown bravery.  And I forget the many episodes when I have been cowardly.  I am kind.  Generous.  All the same.

I have seen a brave elder reduced to a whimper, stronger jaws ready at his throat to tear the vital connection.  He was spared by the victor, and of course he did not permit memory of that which would have shamed him, either publicly (he still had that influence in his earth) or in his thoughts.  A sequel: much later even the stronger fox (again raiding) was bemused – he thought he had played a quite different character in that life.  The elder was near death then, but his sons, strong now, saw the raider away, and the subsuming of a rival narrative was a stage nearer completion.

As you remember thus, selectively, your behaviour will change.  The whole thing will become what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I say this might be dangerous.  But sometimes I think that reinforcing one’s self-story is the strongest sign of normality.  Those who do not do this know that we are all running over a precipice – but they alone are burdened with the idea that should they look down and see the teeth of the jagged rocks below, they will fall.  As with language when you speak in public.  If you allow yourself to think about where the next word is coming from… O vertiginous calamity.  They do not know who they are and must cling to roles as and when they arise.  They have seen them played by others, and know the words passing well, but there can be no conviction or authenticity in that delivery. 

Those whose stupidity never lets them falter: sure-footed speakers, eloquent hunters.

Of course, this illustrates too the need of a scale.  We can’t tell how brave we are except via reference to the relative bravery (or lack thereof) of others.  We are constantly re-calibrating, again, one category makes the assessment in their own favour, the other makes it to their detriment and has lost the fight before it commences.  Slinking away, tail down.  Easier for them to see that the fight is part of a nature we do not need to be in thrall to.  But whether this knowledge is a consolation for being an outsider, that is a harder question.

how I long to feel that summer in my heart

My fellow foxes:

As you read this text, which is life, you should of course ask yourself the standard questions: ‘Whom should I believe?’ and ‘Why do I believe them?’, or ‘Why do I need to believe anything?’ 

Ask yourself a further question:

‘How am I to believe?’