This Month's Story

It’s early and the fog has almost been dissipated by new rays of the morning sun. It’s September and the days are getting shorter; now at eight, it’s not as bright as it was a month ago.

Stella and I will be in Pittsburgh much of the day and Danny is here to start placing the under girders on the new deck we are building by the fire pit. He and I planted the basic posts in concrete last week. They’ve set and are now strong enough to hold the wooden deck girders. Danny wants to get started on them and the decking today. I’m fussing, worried about leaving him here by himself. Danny insists that he doesn’t need me and it will be all done by the time we get back. He won’t even be alone. He’s brought his brother to help with the heavy wooden girders.

Even if I stayed here, I wouldn’t be able to physically help. I’m still on the disabled list and our trip to Pittsburg is to talk with the surgeon who worked on my neck and back. If I did stay, all I could do would be to sit on a lawn chair and micromanage, while the two of them did the work of placing the heavy girders.

The truth is that Danny doesn’t need me and I know it. I’m just being me. As we talked, I realized he had some very different ideas on the deck and wisely, I became quiet and listened. Now, this is important. I mean about my standing there quietly listening. It is the real reason I could see what I would otherwise have missed. As I said, we were back by the fire pit. Danny was explaining his ideas on the construction to me while at the same time facing toward the house. I was facing back toward the back field and the side road on the east side of the field.

As Danny talked, I realized something was coming down the side road toward us. It was so gradual a realization that it was several moments before I was aware what it was.

It was our gray fox.

Stella and I had been looking for this same gray fox for almost a month without success. All told we had spotted her from the vantage of our porch on about four different occasions. The field had been brush hogged at the time so we had an unusually clear view of our neighbor’s open field.

The gray fox we had seen then was the first we had ever seen. All the literature on gray foxes I had referenced since state that the gray fox is rarely seen in the open, preferring to stay in the deep woods and heavy brush. Their description and the fox we had been seeing is distinctive. They have a distinct reddish face outlined in gray fur, a rich gray coat and a long bushy tail that sports a broad black strip running from rump to tail tip. They’re not small, more the size of a basset hound with the bushy black stripped tail adding to their apparent size.

Our thoughts as we watched from the porch then were that our fox was a vixen since the few times we saw her she went about methodically killing field mice and chipmunks. One time she killed at least five chipmunks before carrying the whole kill back into the woods. There had to be a litter somewhere back in there driving her to hunt so aggressively.

But all this was about a month ago and we had not seen her since and here she was walking in the early morning light not in our neighbor’s field but on our side road not fifty yards from me.

Remember, how I said Danny and I were standing. His voice while at its normal pitch was not really loud and he was facing me, away from the oncoming fox. So, the momentary tableau really only included the gray fox and myself.

The fox paused in stride registering my presence almost at the same time as I did hers. I could see her perfectly; her bright red face, her gray mane, and her faintly waving long gray tail.

It was all just a fleeting second; then several things happened.

I surreptitiously held up my hand to stop Danny from saying anything further. He looked at me and understanding that something was happening behind him stopped talking. On her side, the fox started toward us again, moving in a quiet grace as if we were not there. Then, she began passing a large tree and a small bush about fifty feet from us. As her head passed behind the clump, I silently pointed and Danny turned and looked.

We waited. But the fox never remerged from the other side of the clump and tree!

Good lord I said to myself it’s not that big a tree! It was almost like the squirrel gambit where it always stays on the side of a tree where you can’t see it. But this was a fox; a big fox; a fox with a long absurdly bushy tail!

I ran to the tree and small bush, yelling to Danny what I had seen. When we got there, there was nothing; just a few feet of grassy ground and beyond that a three-foot high field of hay. She had evidently turned at right angles once behind the tree and went directly into the hay.

“Are you sure you saw a gray fox, Mr. Paul?”

I looked at the ground that showed no paw prints in the dew wet grass and beside us a yard or two away, there was just the hay blowing softly in the wind.

It was quiet, not really silent, just the normal morning farm quiet. The sun had risen an inch or two higher and the morning fog was completely gone. I looked around us for a moment and turned to Danny.

“Well, I’m not sure, but I think I did.”

But I did see her and evidently, from her actions, she saw me.

I intend to be on this small farm on the foothills of Chestnut Ridge for a long time to come. I think we’ll meet again.