SQUIBS AND CRACKERS 2001-2016

Squibs and Crackers

(2001 - 2016)

R.I.P.

It was an old South Dakota joke from the times when there were many immigrants and languages on the prairie and girls often hired out to work for people with strange expectations.

For instance, the girl went to see about a job and the man liked her, but he said she must use his names for everything.  She agreed.  

He was "Master of all Masters."  His house was "High Topper Mountain," she must call water "cold pontolorum" and the fire was "hot cockalorum."  The cat was "White-faced Siamee".  His bed was his "barnacle" and his pants were his "squibs and crackers."

One night, not long after, the girl came knocking urgently.  (You have to say the rest from memory and as quickly as you can.)  "Master of all Masters, White-faced Siamee got her tail in the hot cockalorum and if you don't get out of your barnacle, put on your squibs and crackers and throw cold pontalorum,  all of High Topper Mountain will be hot cockalorum!"

He was so impressed that he married her.

FERAL CATS

Alan Beck, a pioneer zoologist who moved his attention from wolves in the wild to dog packs in the city, was very helpful in re-defining the way we classify dogs.  Unfortunately, the definitions haven’t really caught on.  To most people there are two kinds of dogs:  owned and stray.  Wild dogs, pariah dogs, dogs that belong to other dogs (one of the most interesting arrangements), family pet dogs, working dogs, confined dogs, abused dogs -- these go beyond Beck’s categories but each deserves some thought.  They are DIFFERENT.  Only a few aspects of categorizing are in the control of the dogs.  Their roles as mirrors, receivers, and interactors with humans are the determinant ones.  But the same person can love his dog more than his wife -- and hate dogs that raid his garbage so much that he (usually "he") will set lethal traps -- and he will happily attend brutal dog fights -- all the while introducing his children to sentimental tales of heroic dogs.  These guys tend not to be very self-aware or reflective people -- their brains are simply reacting and not necessarily attending to reality.

When it comes to cats, the situation is even worse.  Both cats and dogs are “interstitial.”  That is, they can fit themselves into the waste spaces between human households as well as occupying domestic settings and finding survival in the wild.  If there is a source of food and shelter, they will thrive in it -- until something destroys them.  I’m thinking all this stuff while I lie in bed this morning, hearing both gunfire somewhere close (it’s still bird hunting season and there are grouse on the airfield blocks away as well as geese on the lake), and my two fat cats purring on the electric blanket beside me.

Cats have about the same successful predator design as a komodo dragon: binocular vision, big ears that twist, a nose constantly moistened to pick up airborne molecular clues as well as an auxiliary sensor.  “Cats (along with snakes and a few other mammals) have a magnificent organ called the vomeronasal organ, most oftenly known as the Jacobson's Organ. It is located inside the mouth, just behind the front teeth, and connects to the nasal cavity. Opening his mouth slightly enables the Jacobson's Organ to open up the ducts connecting to the nasal cavity. The appearance of the cat as he brings air into the Jacobson's Organ has sometimes been likened to a "smile," other times to a grimace.”  Retractable claws are good, except when humans amputate them for the sake of upholstery.  Their muscles can spring suddenly, can sustain a tight crouch suitable for still hunting, and can stretch out in total relaxation.  They can go without food and water for a long time (they originally evolved in the desert) and can take a remarkable amount of abuse and still live.

Which is lucky, since there is a certain kind of person who hates and fears cats, considering them “sneaky” and -- more worrisome -- to have the worst aspects of female.  I won’t list them.  But at the other extreme there are people who react to “cute” and consider them human babies.  This is their other successful strategy: being soft, about the size of a human infant, sounding like a crying infant, purring (human babies should learn to do this!), using a litter box (ditto). 

“Working cats” are meant to kill rodents.  This can make them vectors, but they were certainly welcome on ships.  (I suppose as long as they didn’t kill parrots.)  They can be friendly to other animals, sleeping on the backs of race horses (and the fronts of sailors in hammocks) and so on.

Last summer a calico feral cat I’d seen for a couple of years began to hang around my back workshop.  (To get rid of feral animals or interstitial animals, it is necessary to remove habitat or make it impermeable.  Same with insects.  Some people feel it’s the same with humans, who can also be feral or interstitial.)  It’s a pretty cat and didn’t make trouble.  But along came another female, a tuxedo cat, who wanted the same space.  This building has a loft with a ladder.  The trouble with it is that the kittens can’t always handle the ladder and I’ve found their bodies totally decomposed to a splotch of fur under boards where they have managed to crawl when hurt by falling.  This ladder now removed.  I don't think I stranded any kittens up there.

The two queens fought my two fat pet dowagers and did them grievous harm.  I ordered a live trap, but then Patches began to bring her kittens born elsewhere, and one was a runt so small that I thought the spring-loaded trap would kill it.  I did trap some cat early on, but with a lot of thrashing and screaming, it managed to escape.  No clues as to identity -- I only heard it -- but the black tuxedo queen was not seen after that.

I began to feed the calico, calling her “Patches,” and thinking she would tame down.  She didn’t.  Caspar, the huge spayed female from across the street who thinks she owns this house, watched carefully but made  no trouble.  There were three kittens: one I call the Tiny Mite is hungry enough that I’ve managed to touch him once.  It was like touching smoke.  These are very thickly furred cats.  His buddy, the biggest kitten, is white with caramel patches and the most curious and athletic of the bunch.  He has big ears with pointed tufts on the ends, almond eyes (a lot of cats here are like this), and a big tail with a curl on the end.  The third kitten is a calico, therefore female, and the most spooky. 

The Tiny Mite had a hurt front leg for a while, but it healed.  Now it is Spooky who has a front foot that is broken at the joint.  She’s not healing very fast but seems healthy and travels around on three legs.  A BIG caramel and white cat has begun to butt in on the feeding program.  Caspar, stepping in, did her best to put hurt on him, a whirligig of wailing, but it just made him slightly more cautious.  I take him to be the father cat.  So you see that by now I’ve woven a web of narrative, personality, naming, and emotional involvement that complicates everything.  They are nearly grown cats.  When I used to go into the yard, little as they were, they'd streak for the loft of the workshop where they sat in a row looking over the edge at me.  If I went up the ladder, they threatened to jump, which may be how front legs get hurt.

We’ve talked about this at town council.  The toughest among us, at least those who don’t simply shoot stray cats, can’t help putting out scraps.  But we’re aware that people who don’t spay their pets will bring kittens to town and turn them loose, imagining that this is a community of former farm wives who feed all animals and will provide homes.   They forget about the retired farmers who love to watch birds at their feeders and who despise cats.

If I succeed in closing all access to my back building, maybe even tearing it down, then the cats will be displaced, probably to their burrow under the shed, but they will still come back and sit under my kitchen window with imploring eyes:  Patches, Big Boy, Spooky, and the Tiny Mite.  The Inside Dowagers will not care.  Caspar will guard his territory.  Game of Thrones.  This could get out of hand.  

I once helped a woman feed feral cats in a very classy Hollywood neighborhood.  Two skunks joined the cats.  That neighborhood had a rather different sociology, but the forces were similar.  

DARWIN'S DOGS

When I first began to blog, I found another blog (http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/) called “Querencia” after Bodio’s novel by that name. This blog touched on many of my interests (high east slope prairie, archeology, ranch culture, Bozeman literati, and dogs). The phenomenon of blogs touching blogs touching blogs (called “linking”) is what makes a technological phenomenon into an organic human network coming from real-life knowledge and pursuits. This is parallel to, uncontrolled by, and often far more honest than the usual media outlet networks.

One of the great dog blogs is http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/ which is written by Patrick Burns, one of the most literally grounded dog people on the planet. As a former animal control officer and constant dog companion, I find him a joy and a source of insight. His special interest is in “digging on the dogs” which consists of taking working terriers into the fields, chasing varmints (groundhogs, possoms, foxes, raccoons -- those smallish pesky mammals) down their holes, and then digging them back out. (The opposite of using hounds to tree a big cat.) What happens to them then varies, depending on the local population, the health state of the critter, and so on: some are set free. There are often photos. It’s got to be one of the most aerobic sports possible.

Terrierman links to a whole circle of dog people full of common sense. Lately this circle has begun to form and toughen into a counter-movement responding to HSUS and other publicity machines intent on raising money by monopolizing the subject. I’ve known the latter since my animal control days in the Seventies when HSUS was trying to discredit other humane organizations, esp. the American Humane Association. Their tactic is to portray something as an atrocity (in those days a high-altitude machine as a method of euthanasia), tie it to their enemy, and thereby demonize the enemy into extinction. In this case they didn’t manage to eliminate AHA, but they did make that method of killing impossible to use anymore.

When the public gets it into their heads that something is demonic, there’s no arguing with them. Also, if they get hold of the idea that something is linked to high status and possibly big money, they hang on just as hard. An example is the American Kennel Club. Based on British class system assumptions plus early domestic animal breeding, for a century or more dog “breeds” have been defined and enforced by the AKC, convincing people that having “papers” means a dog is worthy in both senses. But, also like the Brit landed gentry, the control of pedigree by inbreeding has created dogs with deep genetic flaws and validated the assumptions that make puppy mills possible: forget the dog itself -- consider the piece of paper that comes with it.

The AKC makes money by issuing these “birth certificates” that claim a particular provenance (parentage) without any information about the actual genetic inheritance of the pup, which can be badly compromised by various forces, but esp. the practice of canine incest. Incest, as defined by law, is not meant to be a moral law handed down by God and the Bible, so much as a practical prohibition to prevent damaged babies. But a dog that is prone to joint trouble, deafness, heart trouble and so on is still considered valuable if it has papers. In the early days the faulty pups were destroyed. Because of their “papers” they are now commodified for the gullible as pets.

But that’s not all. Having co-opted the idea of certain classes being “better” than others, based on appearance, the practice of “dog shows” arose. In fact, back in the days before Hitler showed where this would lead with his strange notions of an “Aryan” breed, for which he himself didn’t qualify, county fairs used to hold the equivalent of dog shows for humans, which were generally won by big blonde people. Appearance-based dog shows, added to the idea of provenance or inheritance, have created dog “breeds” with cruel, life-shortening defects. Ask any veterinarian.

The circle of dog people who write blogs I read are also fond of forming loose organizations based on dog breeds but their “breeds” or types of dogs are not grouped according to appearance. Rather they are based on performance. So terriers (terra=earth) are suited by size and temperament to pursue critters more or less their size and chase them down holes -- then dive into the holes after them. This is only helpful if the person with the dog has a shovel and spud bar, plus the energy to dig.

So what’s a “good” dog in this way or in the many other ways that dogs work with people -- specialization that formed the breeds in the first place, esp. since the specialties tend to be local -- is an effective dog, a dog that can be shaped by circumstances, evolved. Patrick is constantly reminding us that a dog with a large chest can’t go down a groundhog hole, no matter how motivated it is. And a high energy terrier kept as a pet in an apartment where no one is home all day, is going to raise hob, quite aside from the fact that as Temple Grandin remarks, a dog that lives in solitary confinement is suffering more than a hog in a factory farm, where it at least has companions. Dogs need things to do and friends who are present to do them with.

Though dogs can “speak” and defend themselves, in the face of intractable and predatory humans they are -- um -- out-manned. Therefore Patrick and his friends have made themselves into publicity terriers and are providing polemic artwork, often based on the idea of evolution. At Patrick’s website you can find examples, in case you want to go walk around the Crufts Kennel Club show, “barking” visually.

Around here people are not sentimental about animals. They love their companions and take good care of them, but they also deal with livestock as their living and know that fancy credentials don’t guarantee conformance or performance. The result of reproduction might simply be the usual hamburger. They want to see the genome, since often they buy only the sperm of the bull, not the bull.

Neither will they tolerate cruelty. Right now the Montana legislature is wrestling with the problem of how to write a bill to close down “animal hoarding” and puppy mill operations. Not easy, since hoarders are often certifiable dementia sufferers who think they are being kind to confine animals they cannot feed or care for and puppy mills who think they will get rich. They are protected by those sentimental enough to approve of outfits like HSUS who show up, offer sound bites to the media, accept checks, and leave.

As we struggle to dis-commodify so many things by restoring them to their rightful value, dogs should take a high priority.

REZ DOGS/PYE DOGS

It’s well understood that the brain addresses reality through concepts it already has and that it is difficult to create new concepts except through new experiences. Much of science is a matter of devising ways to look at reality in new ways through experiment and statistical analysis to see whether subjective assumptions are right. Recently people have begun to look at the most subjective of our realities, our pets and, in particular, dogs with a cool eye.

Much of the motivation comes from the obvious atrocities of inbred “purebred” dogs that have resulted from 19th century assumptions, particularly the drive to make dogs the subjects of prestige and beauty contests. “Champion,” “with papers,” “not a mongrel” migrated over from the European entitlement class system to the genetics of these animals capable of unconditional love for humans. In the process the fancier breeds have become so twisted with so many painful afflictions that their shortened lives must be a misery.

Another part of the motivation comes from the need to understand pet overpopulation, the public acceptance of mass killing of dogs to get them off the streets. Or perhaps the specific elimination of a troublesome animal. Maybe you remember my earlier blog post about the Lady Princess, living under a trailer on the back of the block, producing ten black wiggly lovable pups, resourcefully eating cats when there was nothing else available. She acquired her name because “Petunia” and I were feeding her and to feed something is to claim it in some way, to take responsibility, and to feel affection for it. Indeed “Petunia” became quite attached to this big, mangy, feral bitch with the sweet face and huge ears. When the sheriff finally shot her, Petunia grieved hard. I felt it myself.

Breed? Some guessed golden lab/shepherd/Akita. That’s what I’d put on an impoundment card if I were still an animal control officer, though after a while in that role one learns that “breed” is a pretty tenuous concept. Lady Princess was a rez dog. This might be a new term to you unless you drive through a reservation. A rez dog, in my opinion, is not a “stray,” which implies that someone somewhere owns it and takes responsibility for it except that it has escaped restraint. Neither is a rez dog a true “feral” dog which is a dog that has been domesticated and then gone wild. Rather the term that comes closest is a pye dog, or a pariah dog, which is a dog that lives with a human community but is not a pet unless someone tries to domesticate it. Otherwise, it lives in that ecology the way a raccoon might or even the whitetail deer that have invaded many towns. On a rez several households may feed a dog, name it, be guarded by it, but no one takes responsibility for it in the way we expect pets to be licensed, vaccinated and possibly spayed or neutered.

The Lady Princess was found in a garage in deadly cold weather with two pups, one dead. She was bone-jangling thin. The household had a split domicile, partly on the rez and partly in Valier, and a LOT of kids. The little girls of the family begged for the salvation of the dog and pup and brought them to Valier for care. In fact, they still have the pup as an “owned” dog. But the Lady Princess was not spayed right away and soon came back into heat. The pack of male dogs in Valier (which is not supposed to exist since we have leash law) drove this female away from the family so that she began to look for burrows around town. There were enough feral and pet cats in town and enough pheasants and grouse in the surrounding wheat fields, that she was able to produce the ten-pack of pups, but lactating pushed her into being more and more bold until I looked out my back window to see her nearly nail Squibbie, my cat. This got my attention. Also, Valier is not a town that tolerates big dogs of unknown origins in their yards. Most people are grass-proud and do not have fences. And they keep their garbage tightly controlled.

The sheriff’s deputy as well as “Petunia,” and I began to work on the problem. At first we women could almost hook a finger under her collar (no tags) but when Petunia did that, the dog went crazy and threatened to bite. In the following weeks people yelled at the dog, threw things, chased her -- then no one could get near. We began to feed the pups as soon as they came toddling out, so eventually we could catch all of them but one. The original family took them back out to Heart Butte. I don’t even want to know. One pup was left, grew waddling fat, and was finally captured, going off in the back of a squad car, curled up on the seat. “I hope he don’t throw up,” said Petunia.

“Oh, the drunks do a lot worse back there,” said the deputy.

In the end the Lady Princess came back into heat, began to fight other dogs and scare people, and by that time she was scabby all over with mange. Mange among dogs and horses has been a sort of animal non-deadly smallpox on the prairies, killing mostly by leaving an animal hairless in a harsh climate. At various times mange plagues have triggered mass killings to try to eliminate it. There are terrifying historical descriptions of whole tribal horse herds gunned down while the people wailed. So the Lady Princess was eliminated. This is a country town. Most people are not sentimental.

I googled “pye dogs” and was startled to find that they have fan clubs and there are even efforts to declare them a “breed” in that stubborn insistence to force reality into human-defined categories. In India there are efforts to capture, sterilize, vaccinate and return them to the street, in the same way that groups hereabouts are treating populations of feral cats.

Rez dogs, pye dogs, call for a whole new way of looking at animals that we think of as “domestic,” meaning “owned.” Our most overriding category is always “property.” The idea is to assign ownership to every creature and kill or exclude the rest of them, rather like the Dawes Act divvying up the prairie, assigning plots and taking the rest. That’s far-fetched, but not by much. The next step is "my dog is better than your dog -- therefore I am also better than you!"

Rez dogs are a survival of the wild pre-white prairie and nomadic settlements. Once again I recommend the “Rez Dogs” video produced by Robert Hall. www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs (Not to be confused with Ironman Mitchell’s vigorous comedy/mocumentaries.) The video explains how dogs are woven into tribal life historically, mythically, and practically. One of their themes is that the dogs are so much a part of the lives of the street people that they might be reincarnations of dead winoes. Another is that rez dogs take responsibility for themselves, rustling for food, finding niches for sleep or warm walls for sunning. They are like a parallel and interwoven tribe with its own rules and ordering principles.

It made a major impression on me that when all the dogs actually WERE eliminated from the streets of one of the small rez towns, the bears and cougars felt free to prowl all night. Ecological niches are always filled by something. I have a friend who suggests that getting rid of all the deer in town is simply a matter of suspending the leash law.

I try to be anti-romantic and not overly idealistic. Rez dogs, pye dogs, may have a lot to teach us about our need to impose ownership and neatness on the world. And what about this: is there such a thing as “pye people” who live like pye dogs all through our human settlements, not belonging, living off our leftovers?

REZ-DOGS, THE VIDEO

Strangely enough, it was someone in Paris who told me about a video made on the Blackfeet Reservation here by me. It’s called “Rez Dogs” and was a Documentary Production (March 495) at the University of Montana in 2007. Sean O’Brian directs the “Teaching with Film” program. This specific film can be found at http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs. I’m on dial-up, so I couldn’t download it very well. I asked for a DVD and Mo Mislivets sent me one, no questions asked. Robert Hall was the rez connection, but -- predictably -- no one is quite sure where he’s staying just now.

I chased this video because of a number of factors. One is that I have a few dog stories about Browning myself, dating back fifty years. Another is that I’ve just finished a book about my dog-catching days in Portland (available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary). In an earlier book, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” I put dogs in all the stories. And another reason is that the media spreads a wildly sentimental and unreal vision of pets demanding that they never suffer, be kept indoors, be given constant veterinary attention, and generally become children. This video is about grown up animals. There are no cute puppies.

But mostly I just thought this video was brilliant for the following reasons:

1. It was filmed in late winter when the land is still rawhide encrusted with snow and the wind has torn all flags back to mere strips along their ropes. But there are bare places and busy dogs traveling around both in town and across the hills. This is the rez that no tourist and few anthropologists ever see. The editing returns again and again to the Rockies, the Sun Dog in the sky, Chief Mountain, highways going on and on -- up and down over the hills and into the coulees, and the guardian warriors that stand at the borders.

2. It starts with a stereotypical street drunk -- they say “wino” -- hanging around snarling and knowing at all, about half dog himself. (He’s from a family that I know -- artisans, craftsmen.) Then there begins to weave in an old Blackfeet story about the “lost children,” kids who were so bad that the tribe moved on and left them behind. This is told in Blackfeet with subtitles -- sometimes the red subtitles linger after the image is gone, making them “rubrics” -- the red writing in the Bible meant to be emphasized. We never see this story teller.

3. But we watch serious interviews of people. One is an intelligent and handsome young man who speaks of the importance of dogs in Blackfeet history before the horse, about dogs in his own life (“Lucky” who survived one runover by a car, then succumbed to the next, so was renamed “Unlucky.”), and about “we’ve gotta love the doggies and not be sunnavabitches to them because they are our link to the land and the culture.”

An older man with a gray-streaked ponytail sits at his kitchen table, looking out the window, and explains the dogs he sees out there. (I think he’s in Starr School.) “That dog over there is really smart. Her real folks are in Cut Bank right now, so she comes here and we feed her or my mom’s over there and she can go there for food. A dog like that knows how to take care of herself.” He tells about a dog with a broken leg that he splinted and how the dog, in gratitude, now guards the place, feels a connection to the family. Might even run off bad spirits.

But a boy interrupted at a basketball court has the idea that, since the dogs always hang around the street drunks, they are in fact reincarnations of past drunks, hanging with their buddies, “chilling” just as they did when human. Why else would a person always see them near the places the drunks hang out?

The intelligent young man claims that rez dogs are different: “they walk different, they pack more weight.” But they are Blackfeet. “You don’t see them in the white towns.” The man at his window says, “Winter really thins them out” and speculates that they are all related in the same way as all the Blackfeet are somehow descendants of the 500 survivors of smallpox and starvation. The young man relates them to young people who can’t really nail down their Blackfeet identity because of mixed blood or not having local roots and how they become “lost mutts.”

4. Which brings us back to the legend of the “lost children” which in this version is eventually related to the acceptance of one-quarter blood quantum as the definition of “Indian.” A subtle point for white people far away, but a crucial and telling one for locals.

There’s a goofy conclusion in the parking lot by “The White House” or “Ick’s” which has devolved in my time from the best cafe in town (white-owned) to a source of alcohol and other things. Street toughs make a speech about how tough you have to be to survive in Browning, showing their muscles and fists, and then a last remaining guy -- after the others have left -- tells us “I love you, man, and we pray for you in a good way and hope you stay safe.” He knows what you’re supposed to do in show biz. The dogs look on, serene and patient.

That’s about as accurate a version of the reservation you’re likely to find. Full of contradictions and characters, swept by devastating political and climatological changes, watching from niches, going on about daily business. Tragedy walks with jokes. Sometimes the stories help. Always this self-consciousness: the world is watching. They judge us. They might come after us again.

There are people in Browning who scold careless pet owners, who try to rescue hurt animals and find homes for the puppies. There’s also a shelter for street people but they don’t like it much. Freedom is a way of life with its own reasons and pleasures. So what if it’s tough sometimes? The dogs understand. Survival of the most resourceful, man.

SLEEPING WITH FOXES

On a summer afternoon I was taking a nap when suddenly Bob dropped this little creature into my lap. It took me a minute or two to figure our what it was: a baby fox just barely old enough to leave its mother. “The Boys” and Bob had spent the day digging it up. (Part of the reason people liked to work for the Scriver Studio is that they never knew what the days work would be.) I hope they left the other cubs. I was always careful not to ask too many questions.

But the critter was hopping with nano-livestock, fleas and other small stuff, so into the shower we went that very minute -- clothes and all -- and baby shampooed us both. It was a sort of baptism, a death to the wild world and a rebirth to the world of the domestic pet. But the way we treated our pets was not unlike the wild -- that is, we all slept in a heap together at night though the den was replaced by a bed. It wasn’t a problem until Vixen began to teeth and chewed her way through the electric blanket, wire included. Luckily, it wasn’t plugged in at the time.
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Bob became mother. He took this pheasant out of the freezer to mount it and as it thawed, he fed the meat to the foxlet, until the bulging latter slumped down asleep in the middle of everything.
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Bedtime was playtime for us all. The growing fox made a home for herself behind the books in the bookcase alongside Bob’s chair, so she could easily come rushing out and attack by surprise. Predator babies love to play -- it’s how they learn to hunt and it makes them lots of fun IF one enjoys the play.

Bob dearly loved playing and stripped for action, pressing his smelly old work glove into service as a lure.

Vixen had her favorite prey to drag "home" under the ironing board: the hot pink plush accessories in the bathroom (scales cover, bath mat) and the soap I got from Caswell-Massey that was supposed to look like a tomato because it had tomato juice in it. She hid these bits all over the house and every Saturday I’d find them and put them back where they belonged so she could drag them “home” again, stopping now and then to “shake them to death.”

Vixen and I had quieter times. Now and then I’d read her a story from a magazine. She was very attentive, esp. when the story was about birds or mice.

Then one day when the fox was about grown and had developed a passion for miniature marshmallows, Marie MacDonald -- elegant wife of a lawyer -- stopped by to visit, wearing her signature pearls. Interpreting her pearl earrings as marshmallows, Vixen leap into action and made off with an earring. It took me two days to find the earring poked into a corner under a rug. I was grateful Marie didn’t pierce her ears. She took the incident well. No lawsuit.

Not long after this photo was taken the story came to its inevitable and classic denouement. Like “The Yearling,” like Elspeth Huxley’s little antelope, the fox had grown and went about her own business. She might have found another fox and mated or she might have been killed. People don’t all like foxes. A fox in the wrong place is just another predator. A fox on an island where it is not native can devastate a whole ecology and extinguish species. They are not benign and harmless.

We didn’t keep this fox in a cage. The bedroom window was open at night and unscreened. If there was a full moon like the one last night, she’d leap out while we slept and come back just as we woke up and went to shoot gophers to feed the pets, so she’d be lined up to get one. One morning she just didn't show up. I have very mixed thoughts about all that.

My feelings are something quite different. To sleep with foxes, not metaphorically but actually and when they are young (You think adolescent humans smell bad -- they’re nothing compared to a fox coming into its skunky tomcat hormones.) is not that different from sleeping with cats. Except that when a fox cub wants to wake you up in the morning, its nose is sharp enough to stick it right into your ear. And if you twiddle anything under the covers, it will jump up a foot in the air and come down with all four feet on the twiddle. Fox fur is thicker and deeper than any cat’s fur, but it’s feet are like a dog, for digging.

In my mind it’s all mixed into a Japanese myth I read as a child, about an ill princess who could only be saved by the liver of a fox. A female fox sacrificed herself for the princess and then the mate of the female also sacrificed himself so that the princess would keep his fur always with her in remembrance.