The Foxes (and chipmunks)

Looking up from the kitchen window in the early morning twilight, I saw one across the street. Then another that had been invisibly still playfully pounced on the first and they dashed off. I was pleased to see these two fox in our urban neighborhood and welcomed their early morning shenanigans from a distance.

A few minutes later as I was about to go out the back door to verify the weather, a small red fox with an almost comically bushy tail went trotting by at the foot of the stairs, not even ten feet from where I stood. I was delighted with her (his?) insouciance and ease, moving as if this were her God given right and the garden she was headed into was made just for her. As I paused to take it in, another smaller fox, clearly a juvenile, jauntily padded past.

Neither had made a sound. I kept quiet too.

Urban Red fox (Vulpes vulpes) juvenile and adult, London, May

It was clear a baby fox was on the morning rounds with their parent. For psychological reasons that are unclear to me, I decided the little one was male and he was out on a training run with his mother. He must have been the leaper-oner from across the street. Jumping playfully on his mother as they make the morning rounds. She was in the business of hunting for breakfast and of teaching him how to survive.

I’m happy to have them in the garden. I hope they eat all the bunnies and the chipmunks. Now this may not be a nice thing to say but I have to confess a long-standing prejudice against cute animals that eat things in my garden—especially my sunflower seedlings which rarely seem to make it past a few weeks.

A friend once told me that chipmunks cause more damage to human property than any other animal. I don’t really believe this, but it justifies my irritation when a batch of seedlings are dug up or eaten off at ground level. It could be bunnies too, but I think the general nervousness of the chipmunks makes them the more likely suspect. They are cute, but their anxiety must come from the guilt they carry from all the damage they do.

Fifty years ago, a chipmunk gnawed through my nylon pack to get to some flour I had brought with me. I was an inexperienced but enthusiastic hiker—in the woods of northern Minnesota hoping to have a Walden Pond moment and encounter God. (I have to confess that I had not read the book carefully and my romantic intention was quite out of line with Thoreau’s careful observations and studied reflections.)

I brought the most nutritional flour I could find – soy flour. And I brought molasses as it was the most nutritional sweetener. And I made soy pancakes with powdered milk and one of my four precious eggs and ate them with molasses. I could barely choke them down, hungry as I was. After that particular trip, I tried to balance nutrition and taste on my adventures. (Though a week later I was high up in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana and spent three hours cooking pinto beans in a pot over an open fire. It gave me something to do, for which I was grateful, but the beans never softened due to the lowered temperature of boiling water at higher altitudes—something I hadn’t considered. And the molasses tasted no better on crunchy beans than it did on soy pancakes.)

But a particularly cute chipmunk had been lurking around my campsite by the lake in northern Minnesota. A couple times I shoed him away, but he was persistent. Around mid-morning, while I was reading Walden and trying to be spiritual, I looked up to find him, not ten feet away, happily gorging on my soy flour—and I swear he was smiling at me. I was incensed by his courage, determination and wonton destruction of my necessary property. Not only did he get at my food, he put a permanent hole in my backpack that subsequently sported a clumsy but perfectly functional patch for the rest of its useful life.

I determined to teach that chipmunk a lesson. I put a little bit of my food under a heavy rock propped up with a small stick. I attached a string to the stick and sat very still a small distance away. When the chipmunk returned and crawled under the rock to get more food I would pull the string and the rock would fall and crush him—just like I had seen in the cartoons.

I didn’t have to wait long. I felt a surge of delight at my cleverness as the chipmunk crept cautiously under the rock to get the food. Just as he got fully under, I yanked the string hard. But instead of pulling the stick out and the rock falling on the poor little chipmunk, the string stretched, the chipmunk scampered to safety with more of my food and the rock came down without incident. I repeated my experiment several times, working hard to keep the string taught, but it never worked and I moved on to another campsite.

I suppose I was lucky to fail. A crushed or damaged chipmunk would have actually been a messy and terrible thing—not at all in line with my alleged pursuit of God.

But the foxes here in the Temple garden might have better luck and will, of course, have no remorse. For them, it’s not personal, it’s just survival. They’re born hunters and scavengers. Small and quick and agile, they live fully in the immediate urgency of the moment. Without hope or regret—just rumbling stomachs and silent feet.

I, however, have nursed my grievance with chipmunks over these many decades and wonder if I might, at some point, come into a better relationship with these common and quite stylish little rodents. I suspect not, but if I meditate real hard, who knows what is possible.

Meanwhile, I’ll root for the foxes to keep the rodent population low and to continue grace the early morning garden with their silent and bushy tails.