I’ve only had a couple of foxes meet with me in the woods. I really don’t know how many have seen me, but I am aware of only three times that we were aware of one another’s presence.
Once I was climbing slowly down a barren hillside along a denuded pipeline route, into a small ravine at the bottom of two tall hills. I looked up from my feet and at the rising slope before me. Half-way to the crest, there was a red fox, looking back over her shoulder, watching me. She had paused part way up the hill. Our eyes met for a brief moment, staring at one another for seconds that opened into boundless time.
For me it was a pin-hole, instant vision into a world I have never forgotten. I can still sense her redness, her cautious curiosity. She paused, then in tense haste, she vanished. For an instant we had been in one common mind as we both lingered and wondered who this was who had seen us so exposed.
I was riding down the paved road leaving my cabin in Wisconsin. There was movement in the trees along the road on my right. Suddenly there she was, running through the trees thirty feet away. She was almost a blur, but clearly a red fox. There was no pause this time, no curious stares. Only running feet, a bushy tail and red haste.
There were young foxes, I was told, in a den up a wooded hillside not far from my home. I looked up the hill anxiously, hopefully and I saw movement around where there was disturbed soil. I am not sure what I saw, but I know I had been in the presence of young foxes.
Perhaps they were too young to be aware or wary of me. Maybe they simply became invisible once they sensed danger. But for me they made this a special spot and a unique moment. It was another fox-time to savor and remember.