BURYING A FOX by Peter Balaam
The winter before I buried the fox I spent living in London. It was there, from my bed in a room at the top of the stairs of a Georgian house in Clerkenwell, that I first connected the scratchy shout of a creature on the move out there in the night with Vulpes vulpes, the red fox. When everything in the heart of the great city was quiet, so quiet you could almost hear the famed waters of Clerkenwell seeping up and out of the ground, the sharp “Whaa!” of the fox would sound a note unlike anything else in town: unharnessed, indifferent, entirely other. In fact, the bark of the fox has been piercing the night in Clerkenwell since long before medieval convents and the barracks of hospitallers arose in open fields beyond the Roman wall, since long before there were many humans in that part of England at all to hear the sound in the night and wonder at it.
It was January, and so those nighttime barks were likely the vixen’s mating call. And if she was communicating to designated local recipients important fox- related news, to me the fox’s bark had the sound of a paper contract being ripped in two at a blow: “Whaa!” Not defiant so much as stating fact: “We are here,” the vixen’s shout proclaimed, “out here in the night. And we have been. And will be.” Stirred out of sleep into curious attention by the sound of interspersed barks coming close and then receding away, I could track her surefooted course through the parish: up through Jerusalem Passage, with a bound through the fence of the park at St James’s church, then downslope between the blocks of council flats to cross the Fleet River where it flows buried out of sight beneath Farringdon Road. From my bed I was fondly tempted to think I might be on the brink of coming to know something about foxes. Already away, out there in the night, the vixen’s bark came back now faintly – “Whaa!” – as if in answer, that if it came to it, human knowledge, so new on the scene, had never been the only kind of knowledge in Clerkenwell, and had never been particularly good on the subject of foxes.
My ears attuned by winter nights in London, I returned home that spring to my small town in southeast Minnesota and was delighted to hear one night the same scratchy shout splitting the night beyond my bedroom windows. The sound was not new here, either, of course. The difference lay in me. I had in the past infrequently seen a fox bolt across the road or trot up the slope through my yard. But now I could match that particular sound in the night with foxes. If the barks were rarer than they had been in London, that only made sense. Mating season was past and, if successful, there were now kits to be nurtured in the den out there, under the snow, in a dry spot of the marsh, a sixacre wetland across the road from my house. The nighttime barks were fewer, in fact. But the year’s series of light- brush encounters with elusive red foxes had barely begun.
As classes ended, a wide- open stretch of summer days lay before me as far as I cared to imagine. Greedy to drink deep of June days like bowls brimming full of light, I began, mornings, taking my coffee out into the yard. The sun would be rising and green forms pushing out of the ground. A growing season was arriving within me as well and I began pacing out some desired innovations in my yard. My plan was to add several large beds to the garden and another row of apples to a small orchard there. The plot is ideal – a sunny and well- drained eight- or nine- thousand square feet of black, glaciated soil on a gradual slope to the road. It pleased me just to stand in it and look, and my pleasure increased to recall as I started in digging that in England a fox’s burrow is called an “earth.” Across the road from my plot – as if intended somehow for contrast, but clearly just by accident – stood the thicket of tall trees and woody understory of the Sibley marsh, lair of the neighborhood’s red foxes.
In those glorious June days, early and late, I found myself digging. A dozen mature cottonwoods in the marsh across the road blossomed, shaking down flurries of wool- swaddled seeds that caught in window- screens and piled up in drifts in the street. I was busting sod, staking fence, forming new beds in the earth, sowing seeds in rows within them; and, as days passed, I became aware that someone was out there, watching these daytime developments in my yard, and inspecting them under cover of night. Returning to my projects one morning, I spent ten minutes looking for the simple hatchet that I’d used just the evening before to drive a light metal post into the ground. Not finding it, I gave up and went to fetch my sledgehammer. But hours later, walking toward the street to greet a neighbor passing by with his dogs, I came upon the hatchet lying in the grass at the edge of my plot, sixty feet from where I’d dropped it. Things happen – who knows how? – but it was odd. I was pleased in those days of digging to be breaking in some new leather gloves. And I arrived in the garden the morning after the hatchet incident to find only one glove poised on the handle of my wheel- barrow. Its mate, nowhere to be seen. Annoyed, I took in that I would need to be more careful about putting away my things at the end of my workdays. But then, in the afternoon, heading north through the orchard on my way into town, I found the glove lying on its back in the grass eighty feet from my garden. Next to it, a pointed, ochre- colored fox turd.
Of course I was delighted to have my glove and hatchet back, but I was especially happy and curious that I should. Clearly, whoever had removed these objects might very easily have kept them, and hadn’t. Whoever I was dealing with, and I had my suspicions, she seemed to be not stealing from me, exactly, but was having her say, letting me know, possibly drawing me out. Unsettled and a little flattered, intrigued, and up for the game, I was curious to see what might happen next. In this inclination, I was conscious as well of breaking certain sturdy human traditions of thinking, millennia old, that frame the husbandman’s self- interest as the only possible grounds for operating. Well, if I or my self- interest had suffered harm so far at the hands of this shadowy trickster, to me the exchange looked less like cunning, duplicity, and theft than curiosity, mischief, some kind of salute. To a man working solo in his orchard, the engagement alone was worth the cost of time spent searching for displaced objects. So far, nothing removed had remained unfound, and nothing restored came back without a surplus sheen of experience. That glove had been, I had to suppose, carried around my garden in her mouth! I could not quite parse the communication, but surely something was being said in that turd dropped next to the glove and left for me to find? As Emerson, thinking of a pink January sunset, asked: “What was it nature would say?”
Not only were these thefts not theft, but there were also additions, literal ones, if temporary. Returning to the orchard one morning, I found everything in place, and then something more. There, in the grass, next to the half- buried blade of my standing shovel lay an immense ersatz bone of knotted rawhide, the kind of dog- chew a corporate pet store would sell, sized XL for a Great Dane. Likely borrowed from a neighborhood dog, the “bone” looked as if it had been cached in the earth for some time. I imagined my stealthy benefactor crossing the road from the woods into my orchard with this homely object in her delicate muzzle, and was touched. And why not? What could anyone properly know of the vulpine motives and actions that had delivered this grim object into my yard? Of course, possibly, it was no gift per se, but the result of somebody out there decluttering her earth? Gloves on, I took it up and rubbed some of the dirt away. Wondering how it came there and what it meant, I stood and slowly turned, eyeing the blank wall of trees in the marsh across the road. Birds calling. Crickets. I took it that the bone was an overture, a gesture, something like a bark in the night. I was glad of it. Wishing to signal that I had received it, I set it down thirty feet away, leaning against the base of a slender new cherry tree. I felt expectant, as if moving out a pawn, eyeing the path for my bishop. The next morning, the bone was gone.
The red fox is “the world’s most widely distributed terrestrial carnivore” (Stratham, et al. 53), its range spanning the entire northern hemisphere and mirroring that of no species so closely as Homo sapiens. Red foxes mate in winter and broods of kits arrive in early spring. The young spend only a month in the den, nurtured by their devoted and efficient parents (as well as subordinate vixens, sometimes). Taught to hunt and to fend for themselves, all young disperse before eight months of age (Castelló 215). Unlike megafaun wolves and bears, denizens of the depths of woods where humans rarely venture, the mezofaun fox, less physically- threatening, has long thrived in those reaches of the forest nearer to human settlement (Wackers 4, 10). Across human cultures in proximate relations to the red fox, there is remarkably unswerving agreement that by way of character, the fox is “clever, wily, shrewd, immoral, and cunning. A trickster” (Marvin 144). Such cultural knowledge must have its basis somewhere, and historian Paul Wackers concludes that “cultural ideas about foxes” must be “at least partly determined by their natural behavior” (4). But interpretive caution is called for. It is worth wondering whether, 142 to take up a case cited by Wackers, a proverb attested across medieval European languages – “When the fox preaches, beware your geese” – actually says anything about actual foxes. What this proverb actually knows is something about the moral hazards attendant around preaching, and it draws upon cultural ideas about foxes as amoral and deceptive to add piquancy to its point. From beast fables like Aesop’s through the medieval Chanson de Reynard cycle, to E. B. White’s mating- pair “of Peapack” to Roald Dahl’s rural fantastico and his cinematic avatar in Wes Anderson’s adaptation, western literary and cultural representations of foxes offer a record of human perceptions of the imagined up- and downsides of fox- existence: the claim of hunger, the demands of living by one’s wits, theft as first resort.
But human admiration for red foxes is widely attested as well. The English word “fox” comes from Germanic roots such as the Old Icelandic root, refr, which, linked to the notion of shining, seems to acknowledge the strikingness of the fox’s red coat (Liberman). The 15thcentury English folksong widely known from old LPs by Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Odetta, and others (“The Fox went out on a chilly night”) is downright carnivalesque in its pro- fox perspective on a father fox’s moonlit trip into the “town- o” to raid the “great big pen” wherein the ducks and geese are kept. This entanglement of resentment, admiration, and wonder goes deep: “A fox goes by / in the headlights / like an electric shock,” a poem by Mary Oliver begins. And if the fox “pauses / at the edge of the road,” the human observer’s “heart, if it is still alive / feels something – / a yearning / for which we have no name . . .”
She’d been hit by a car, a hundred yards from my house, and by the time I saw her she had been dead for more than half a day. By “hit,” I don’t mean sent flying. Her body had gone under the moving tire: skull and rib cage, crushed; one back leg lying askew, broken. Bright blood stained the white blaze on her chest and congealed at her mouth half an inch thick on the asphalt. Awful. Unspeakable. But also just stupid. A travesty. How could such a thing happen? I don’t mean the horror of what a car does to a compact mammalian body. I mean, how could this creature, so watchful and attuned, so knowing and fleet, misperceive so badly her position in relation to the moving car? It likely had happened during the storm that arose without warning the previous afternoon. Flashing lights, booming sounds, driving torrents of rain at us, the storm for over an hour had made the world crazy. I’d been out in it, myself, biking gravel roads with friends. Unprepared for skies to blacken, miles away in a neighbor- 143 ing county, unhoused and exposed, we got thoroughly soaked. As we rode on our bikes back into town, good-sized tree branches lay on the ground in the streets. Cars were delicately threading their way among them. Steering into my driveway, I noted one strangely stopped in the middle of the street down the block, brake lights shining. When, walking out early the next morning, I saw a woman in the same spot pulling her straining dog away from a rust- colored form lying in the street, I knew what it was I was seeing.
There would be no need for a regular citizen’s action in this matter. A crew from City Hall picks up large roadkill to dispense with out of sight (and local crows make short work of the smaller fry daily sacrificed to the automobile). In fact, municipal workers in official city pickups were already out that morning, monitoring the pumping station a few yards from where the fox lay in the street. They would certainly call in the job. Not thinking, not needing to, I started. Grabbing gloves and a shovel, I threw them in the wheelbarrow and launched off the curb into the street. Feeling out of my lane, my heart racing, I approached almost stealthily, aware that in conditions that I’d failed to imagine, I was about to make closer acquaintance with the fox from my orchard.
Drenched by the rain she lay, her elegant proportions shining: long of leg, long of tapering waist; the wondrous tail, full and long, like a second self, dipped at the tip in bright white; orange- red fur down her flanks mixed everywhere in white and black, offset by pure white underneath the chin and down the chest to the belly; her head, a tilted chevron, with large, black ears balancing the long, tapering, blackening muzzle, and a yellow eye, unseeing now, set well in the front half of that shape; the black of her ears descending to dapple the red across her back, emerged again jet- black down the forward edge of all four legs. I stared and stared. Nothing in her lean and spare body predicted the lavish full brush of her tail, cantilevered out behind, a proud banner. Outraged, heart racing, part of me was also curiously cool, almost grateful for this chance encounter, close and sustained, with my orchard thief. Gloves on, I stooped at her paws – eyeing her eye just in case my touch should wake her – and took firm hold of her ankles to lift her. She was light, and her long legs, stiff. It was easy. The fox then strangely lay in the metallic- blue bottom of my wheelbarrow, her rust- colored brush flopping over the edge at one side. I was aware of the city workers at their pickups behind me. A smear of thick blood lay in the road at my feet. With the fox now lying in my wheel barrow, I was self- conscious of my increasingly legible intentions. My shovel suspended over the fox on the thwarts of the wheel barrow, I pointed 144 its metallic prow toward my yard and, feeling like a thief, in the very act of stealing someone’s fox, I set off down the street.
A minute later, I was siting a grave, best I could, right in the center of my orchard. Why the center, I did not know. I was acting on impulses murky and nameless. To do something. To undo what the moving car had done. To honor an ancient creature caught in a contemporary trap. It was early on a Saturday, not yet eight o’clock, the neighborhood still quiet. There was time, yet I found myself rushing. I evidently did not wish to be seen burying a fox in my yard and to need to explain. As I sliced through clumps of summer sod, a memory rose of a passing neighbor’s complaint about the foxes in the marsh: a threat to our chickens, to small dogs and cats. I recalled the sight two summers before of neighborhood boys armed with .22s and piled into a quad, patrolling the boundary between the marsh and the civilized world. Their faces shone. Now, the dead fox lay in the grass near where I dug— digging steadily, hurriedly, racing against something, piling up the dirt from the hole to one side. Somehow, I sensed that the fox must lie in the ground with her tail extended fully behind her as in life, an effigy of her sure- footed running. I was rushing: the hole would need to be large.
And what on earth was I doing, after all? As I dug, my own human acts of meaning- making foisted upon a wild animal’s broken body seemed suddenly as ramped up as the game of the boys with their guns in the quad. Working my shovel, gripped by motives to place a fox’s grave in the middle of my orchard, wasn’t I, too, aestheticizing a wild animal, actively transforming her into a symbol of something entirely distant from whatever it was she was? And obviously closer to me?
Would it have been less human, I protested to myself, more honoring to her, to leave her lying in the street?
No, no: I had my wits about me. This wasn’t sentimentality – I was clear- eyed and furious about the car. Nor was it Christian burial – could any creature be less submittable to Christian burial than a fox? I had acted on a compulsion to honor the fox’s beauty, to acknowledge (and extend) the surprising interactions once begun between us in my yard. I had acted as well, or so I’ve thought since, on an intuitive sense that, for humans, plots of land become places only as we dig in the dirt, plant trees, and above all bury our dead in the ground within them. Under the circumstances – so I justified it to myself – burying the fox seemed acceptable. Possibly, it might be more than that, but it was hard to say. Such thoughts steadied me as, lifting her again by long legs, I laid the dead fox in the hole. See- 145 ing her in it, I could see that the hole ought to have been half a foot deeper. But I was rushing. I was on my knees in the dirt, leaning over the fox now lying composed in the grave – her unseeing gaze level to the east, her tail at full extension as in death she ran. I pulled sweeping forearmsful of dirt over her into the hole. I arose and tamped the dirt in firmly around the fox with a boot heel. I assembled the clumps of sod again over the broken ground like a lid, and walked to the house.
“To be human means above all to bury,” Robert Pogue Harrison observes, expanding on the views of Enlightenment philosopher, Giambattista Vico: the word “humanitas comes first and properly from humando, burying” (xi). Robert Macfarlane concurs, adding that “across cultures and epochs” humans have left evidence of an impulse to place into caves, grottos, graves, and other spaces underground “that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save” (8). In this way, the burial of the dead appears to be less for the dead than for the human survivors.
The body had not been moved at all, nor otherwise disturbed; but much of the soil in the grave had been dug out. Half the fox’s muddy right flank lay revealed to the open air. As was my way that summer, I had walked out into the yard to see the day arriving. The sun was up, the grass wet, and around the grave where the body of the fox lay still, the sod and much of the soil I had carefully tucked in around her had been scattered in a ring a few feet across. Once again, I found myself staring. The diggers may not have been foxes, of course. But if dogs or coyotes, and if after the fox’s body as a source of food, why had they stopped short of the goal? To me, the scene suggested that the diggers had not stopped short of their goal, but reached it. The scene suggested that diggers in the night, drawn not by hunger, and with no motive of un- burying, of un- doing what the human had done, had taken steps to remove enough of the soil so as to reach the body, to make contact, by sight, smell, and touch. Foxes live lives of closely bonded relations; was it implausible to imagine that a killed fox’s comrades might need to make sure? The strange unsettling of the previous weeks’ orchard negotiations flooded back in. I was ready to bow toward whatever these unseen neighbors might need, but I perceived in myself as well a human taboo about corpses. With a rake I quickly restored the scattered dirt to the hole, covering the fox’s body. Again, I tamped everything in tight. They now know that it’s her, I thought, and that she’s dead, and where she lies; what need would there be to dig her up again? These thoughts seemed reasonable to me as I put the clumps of sod back into place. So long as the sun 146 shone that day, it was fine to think I’d likely solved the problem. But as shadows lengthened through the long afternoon, I had to admit I had no idea what was reasonable to a fox.
In the morning the grave was dug out again. The lower third of the fox’s body lay exposed to the air. I stooped at the hole and peered in. Four blue- black flies burrowed in the fur over her belly. Rising, I raked the soil back in, again replacing the cap of sod. Then I wheeled to the gravesite ten slabs of limestone I had saved from a disused garden path I’d broken up the year before. With them, I fashioned a tight- fitting stone roof over the fox’s body in the grave. This surely would settle them, I thought. Of course, it did not. In the morning, more signs of visitors in the night. The flagstones centered directly over the fox had only driven the diggers outward. Two tunnels now led down into the ground where the fox’s body lay. The tunnel at her head had been abandoned, but the other had reached the fox’s right haunch and exposed the fur ten inches down her back leg. Again, blue- black flies buzzed down in the hole. Seeing the flies, I caught (or imagined) a whiff of carrion. It was enough. Quickly filling the tunnels with dirt, I then raided more deeply my own stores in stone, bringing to the grave two wheelbarrows full of heavy, rounded rocks left behind by the previous owner. On top of the flagstones and in a wider circle beyond, I piled up a somber, multi- colored cairn over the fox. Each stone weighed more than a fox; that, and the width of the pile seemed to frustrate the diggers. Several days into the period when the digging had stopped at the grave, a newly dug fox- hole appeared overnight at the base of an ash tree a hundred feet away on my side of the street. The narrow oblong tunnel dove three feet into the ground, but was no sooner begun than abandoned. And then the nighttime digging stopped altogether.
I never laid eyes on the diggers. They may, and may not, of course, have been foxes. But that they did not disturb the body they spent so many nights exhuming, and that when they tunneled what resulted was fox- holes, seems something. My stonework at the grave may have had a role in dissuading them. As plausibly, the diggers may, through nightly contact made with her body, have come to know that the vixen was dead. As summer wore on, it came time for juvenile foxes to disperse from the den, as is their way, and precisely what they know to do. The fox I encountered in my orchard in June molders now in the frozen ground of a new January, beneath a large cairn of rounded stones. I’m sorry about it, for her sake. It’s more monumental a grave than I wanted, or than seems right for a fox. And when the snow melts in spring I intend to remove it.
WORKS CITED
Castelló, José R. and Claudio Sillero- Zubiri. Canids of the World: Wolves, Wild Dogs, Foxes, Jackals, Coyotes, and Their Relatives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018 .
Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.
Lieberman, Anatoly. “’Vulpes vulpes,’ Foxes have Holes, Part II.” The Oxford Etymologist blog (23 March 2016) https://blog.oup.com/2016/03/fox- etymology- word - origin/ Accessed 24 Jan 2024.
Marvin, Garry. “Unspeakability, Inedibility, and the Structures of Pursuit in the English Foxhunt.” Representing Animals. Nigel Rothfels, ed. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2002. 139– 158.
Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: Norton, 2019.
Mark J. Statham, et al. “The origin of recently established red fox populations in the United States: translocations or natural range expansions?,” Journal of Mammalogy, 93.1, February 2012. 52– 65.
Oliver, Mary. “A Fox in the Dark.” Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. (Boston: Beacon, 2010).
Wackers, Paul. Introducing the Medieval Fox. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2023.
Peter Balaam is the author of Misery’s Mathematics (Routledge, 2009). His most recent publication appeared in Close Reading the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2021).