Рита Браун - Animal Magnetism

Foxes fascinated me as a child. Still do. If I didn’t have my retriever Chaps with me on a walk, they’d pop out of their dens to look at me. A bark or little gurgle might let me know their opinion of me. Sometimes a fox would walk along with me about twenty yards off. As they are omnivorous, whatever I chewed on interested them. I’d leave out hard candy or pieces of my sandwich. This found favor with them. In many ways, a fox is like a dog: intelligent, curious. But they hunt differently than dogs do, which I figured out by following the gun dogs, usually English Setters or small Irish Setters. Some of these setters were red and white, and are now recognized as a separate breed by the AKC.

Foxes hunt like cats. They stay still, then pounce. If there’s snow on the ground they’ll cock their ear in one direction, then the other, only to pounce in the middle where imaginary sound lines intersect, for they can hear the mice under the snow. This only works if the snow is light on the ground so there’s air and tunnels. If it slicks down like vanilla icing, the mice stay in their nests. Who wouldn’t?

I also realized that the fox mind works more quickly than my own. Yes, humans gave us the Brandenburg Concertos, As You Like It , the Sistine Chapel, etc., yet grand as these contributions are, you can’t eat them. Even if a fox could write the vulpine War and Peace I doubt he or she would. What’s the point? We need distractions and lessons in a way no other species seems to, which, as a child, I found confusing. I loved to read, I’d even read to the foxes and the birds. Mickey and Chaps would sit and listen and sometimes the wild animals would tilt their heads and listen for a time. I expect my cadence held their attention.

What mystified me was this: What is the human gift? I’m still working on that. What I was told in school proved untrue. My teachers would trumpet the superiority of the human animal. Point one: we walk upright. That’s a recipe for slowness and a bad back later in life. Point two: we create tools and other species don’t. Apparently, my teachers never watched a blackbird, a monkey, or even a house cat use an object to acquire what they want. Then came the big revelation of the opposable thumb. It’s helpful, but it isn’t the end-all be-all. Finally, they seized upon language.

Chaps understood nouns and verbs. How many, I didn’t know, but he knew language, even though he couldn’t reproduce it. The draft horses and mules in my life clearly understood commands in English. Humans do seem to have a more sophisticated level of language skills, but I suspect that this is as much a curse as a gift.

Mostly it’s noise. Few people say anything of consequence and mostly they talk about themselves or their family. Nothing too original there, but being another human, one must listen and pretend the news is incredibly fresh. For any of us, probably one percent of our talking life we’ve uttered something profound or important. I count myself in that number. My advantage is I don’t talk much unless I am called upon to give a speech.

Mother, shoving me into cotillion, harangued me to be a good conversationalist. I can do it. Hell, after twelve years of various forms of cotillion plus her relentless instruction, I’d be a blistering idiot if I couldn’t chat. That doesn’t mean I like it one bit more than when I was a child.

When I would sit a ways from the fox dens, I could hear them chattering inside. Sometimes one would come out and chatter at me. It wasn’t a “Get out of here, Two Legs” bark. It was “Hi” or “You won’t believe what my wife just did.” By age seven I knew the difference. Yet the fox, for all its intelligence, evidenced no need to say much more.

The one time a fox isn’t intelligent is if you give the distress call. There are little wooden horns, sort of like geese call horns, that make the fox distress noise. They’ll run out to help, and in this way they are trapped. I am bitterly opposed to trapping unless it’s a humane trap. John Morris, who works with me, traps our foxes so we can get the rabies and distemper shots in them. We can only trap them once in the Havahart traps. They know the drill after that. Since chasing foxes is the grand passion of my life, their well-being matters. I’m proud of Oak Ridge Fox Hunt Club’s work in keeping them healthy. Hunt staff perform numerous services that benefit pet owners, but we don’t advertise our efforts. People in our territories, much less cities, don’t realize that in a small way we are reducing the incidence of rabies, distemper, and mange in these beautiful creatures. (And no, we don’t kill foxes in our foxhunts, so don’t get your knickers in a knot.)

Bird plumage never goes out of fashion. Photo by Judy Pastore .

The Purpose of Plumage

A unt Mimi’s best friend, apart from Mother and Delphine Falkenroth, was Butch, her Boston Terrier, which she insisted on calling a Boston Bull. A large fellow, Butch was always the picture of elegance in his “tuxedo.” But appearances can be deceiving, because he did not always behave like a gentleman. The two of them went everywhere together, except for the garden club because once Butch ate some tulip bulbs belonging to Mrs. Mundis. Aunt Mimi muttered they weren’t worth squat, but nonetheless to keep the peace she paid Mrs. Mundis, who was well off, and she no longer brought Butch to garden club. Just as well, because the lectures bored him, which is why he ate the tulip bulbs in the first place.

I have written elsewhere, in fictional form, of the fierce competition at the garden shows. Aunt Mimi, famed for her daffodils as well as her beautiful clothing, spiked her daffs with gin. What bright happy daffodils they were. My aunt, a very attractive woman, declared alcohol never touched her lips. We always knew when she had “tested” her daffodil mixture because Butch would refuse to kiss her.

Both Mother and Aunt Mimi suffered from lead foot. Put them behind the wheel of any machine—tractor, car, motor cycle—and you burnt the wind. If Mother wasn’t riding shotgun, Butch was. He loved to go “bye byes,” and the only time Aunt Mimi evidenced any inclination to keep to sensible speeds around corners was when Butch was her passenger, because he’d fall over. I had to sit in the back. The dog came first.

My esteemed aunt’s driving capabilities were so well known in the county that when people spied her coming down the road in the opposite direction they pulled over. Pedestrians moved far off the road. She’d wave, nod, and smile but she rarely slowed down.

One frosty moonlit night, Aunt Mimi was driving Mother, Butch, and me back from some ameliorative function. Those two took part in so many committees, fundraisers, social events, I couldn’t keep track, and this one ran way late. As we reached the town square a young woman, swaddled in a heavy coat and scarf, wearing fashionable high-heeled shoes despite the cold, slowly trawled the sidewalk.

Aunt Mimi sniffed, “Only owls and whores are abroad this time of night.”

“What’s a whore?”

Mother quickly replied, “A whore is a woman who sells her body to men.”

“Julia, don’t tell her that!”

Mother considered this admonition. “Don’t worry about it, kid. Big cities have whores. In the country we do it for free.”

“Juts!” Aunt Mimi peeled around the other side of the square a bit too fast, but we stayed upright.

I hugged Butch. He was accustomed to his human’s behavior.

“Oh, Sis, she has to learn about these things sometime.”

“Why would anyone pay?” My curiosity was getting the better of me.

“This isn’t a proper topic for a child of your tender years.” My aunt hit the know-it-all tone. “Suffice it to say that ladies of quality guard their virtue.”