The Dead Fox.

Driving to Bagley is often strange. In the winter it is like driving in space. Carless expanse of highway. Lonely and cold. In the summer you are on the lookout for deer, eager to leap in front of your car for fun and excitement. For the past several months, there was always a fox on the way home. Patrolling the ditches. Maybe looking for road kill. Maybe looking for me. I had almost stopped a week ago. Was just going to pull over and try talking to the fox. I knew it would not talk back [I am not crazy] but that is not to say that it would not have listened. I thought maybe they were the foxes that had dwelled in the family field. Perhaps the cows scared them away. It seemed like a messenger. Cynics would have you believe the fox was an opportunist. Looking for road kill to devour. A spiritual person knows better.

On the way home last night I saw a pair of flashing eyes in the ditch before headlights illuminated a dead fox on the highway. There was a brief conversation between myself and Ruth. I didn’t want to be called crazy or careless, but I could not brook the poor animal being left in the road. Ground into the tar until what was once beautiful and alive became unrecognizable trash. After a cremation was turned down [I want to free the spirit, but the ghost cat should have taught me better] we turned around and went back in order to remove it from the road. I wanted to know what the flashing eyes in the ditch were.

It was just past the turn for Leonard when the headlights washed over the accident. Indeed, there was a living fox in the ditch. They were looking at their dead friend (child? mother?). Ruth mentioned the video of the dog pulling the wounded dog off of the busy highway. Later I would be hit with the link and watch it. I don’t think humanity has the market cornered on humanity anymore. In fact, looking at how we treat on another, I would rather throw my lot in with nature and know that, if I were murdered, I would at least be consumed. I picked up the dead fox, broken in a million pieces. It couldn’t have suffered. I carried it away and lobbed it into the ditch. Once a companion that let me know I was nearly home, now lifeless, broken and cold in the ditch.

I did it for the friend to mourn. To come to terms with the terrible finality of it all. To be able to commune with the dead without the constant fear of the headlights. The roar of trucks on the highway. A cynic would lead you to believe he was waiting around to eat the slain friend. A spiritual person knows better. A spiritual person knows that the fox is cunning because nature didn’t give them camouflage or size. Just some brains. And a family. It will return to nature, by and by. Become crow and grass. I wish I could have done more for the creature. I hope that they will forgive our trespass. I hope that when they meet with the Great Spirit that the fox speaks well of me.