Encounters - Fox
Artwork & Words By Nancy Gerrard (@tired__poet)
Part 3: Fox
The fox was small, gangly. The awkwardness of adolescence is obvious in animals too. I was on my way home from a meditation group feeling light, unburdened. Soaking in the low golden sun of evening.
He stood on the pavement across the street. A couple of cars slowed so that the people inside could watch him. I stopped, and when they passed on I called to him as I would a cat. To my surprise he trotted across the road and stood at my feet.
My first instinct was to bend down and touch him, to run my fingers through his fur. The closeness and easiness of him made me forget for a moment he was wild. I didn’t touch him. Crouched down and took a cereal bar from my bag instead. Unwrapped it and held a piece out. His slender face watched, a little wary. But he came closer still.
At this point I took out my phone and flicked on the camera. He hesitated as I did this and I felt a little uneasy. I was ruining the moment. But I kept it pointed at him, and as my attention flickered, trying to press the button, he snatched the food out of my hand. This startled me. His tameness made me think he’d nibble the food from my fingers gently, as I’d trained dog to do. This quick snatching was a wild act, an act of daring and of mistrust.
I put the camera down for a moment, broke up some more of the bar and threw him a piece. He’d retreated a little to eat the first. I wanted to show my friends and family how close I’d been to this beautiful, skinny, wild thing, so I took out the phone again. Snuck a video of him eating.
I thought about my walk early this morning. Not long after the sun had spilled over the horizon, I walked the usual route up onto the Downs. The view was something special. Yellow-orange sunlight, as cold and refreshing as seawater. Mist, a plume of it. Low on the hills. As though a steam train had run through the landscape leaving nothing but its breath behind.
Dog had gone AWOL and run into the shooting lodge at the top of the hill. I stepped inside to retrieve her and found a man in hunting gear standing in the kitchen with two cream coloured labradors. I judged him immediately. But he offered me a coffee and told me about the sunrise. The best he’d everseen, he said. He took out his phone and showed me photos. I couldn’t see the wonder in the photos but I could see it in his face.
As I fed the fox I thought about how the human mind is so desperate to grasp and capture and keep and hoard. It wants to take a moment and make it everlasting. And the truth and the tragedy is that you cannot trap and own the sunrise. You cannot preserve that evening with your best friend, or those fingertips running down your back, or the best meal you ever ate, or that view, or the moment a little fox trusted you just enough to snatch some food straight from your hand.
A photograph is nothing but a ghost of a moment. All the same, it’s nice to feel the echo of it run through you. But looking through the lens filters away the living, like a UV screen. Better to be there, wholly.
After I’d fed the fox, I stood and watched him for a while, not wanting to let the magic go. Stretching it as long as I could. Then I turned and left. Watched him walk away down the road too. Life is a series of moments, and a series of letting those moments go.