On a beautiful spring day in the Berkshires, I headed up the mountain on a much needed solitary hike to check in with myself and become grounded. The woods were a flurry of activity- robins and woodpeckers, squirrels chattering. As I headed up the trail, I was surprised to suddenly see a fox off to my right, walking quite leisurely toward me. I stood still and was even more surprised when he continued and crossed the trail in front of me, no more than 20 feet away. Perhaps I was downwind, perhaps he was lost in thought about the juicy squirrel he'd consumed earlier, or thinking about some foxy fox he'd met at the creek, but he was completely oblivious to my presence. Amused, I watched him trot to a fallen tree right next to me and begin to dig out a little hollow in the shade. Then, very much like a house-dog, he circled his little spot several times before plopping down. Still completely clueless to me standing extremely close by, he began licking his paw lazily. After several minutes of quietly watching him, I realized he wasn't going to notice me, and decided to move on. When I moved and the leaves rustled, he finally spotted me right under his nose. Totally startled, he lept about 5 feet in the air and took off straight up the side of the mountain. Grinning at his foolishness, I walked on. Then I heard the repeated call of a
Barred Owl, which I recognized thanks to the the talented naturalist Rene over at
Bartholomew's Cobble, who can imitate the Barred Owl and sometimes prompt a call back. On my walk back down the mountain later, the owl (or another one) swooped down low through the trees to alight on another branch.
Foxes, along with hedgehogs and owls, have always represented a vague sense of "special" animal guides for me. When I was in France, I wrote about foxes. A few days after I arrived there, walking in the woods, I saw one, and wrote that evening, "In the woods, a red fox leaps across my path, its tail as a proud streaming flag behind it. It is an omen to tell me I will find my way here, that I am going to be OK"... And owls have been special to me since childhood, when my mother took me from my bed at around 4 years old and into the yard with a flashlight to show me the owl hooting in the tree. "There's your owl," she said, and I took it literally. For years after that, whenever I heard an owl, I said in childish language, "Mijne uil"- "Mine own owl", because I believed it was the same owl following me, talking to me directly. While that childish naivite has gone, the vague feeling remains that the owls are there for me, they are always, in a way, "mijne uil".
So the walk with both a fox and an owl encounter felt magical. The unusual moment with the fox felt very intimate, as though I had gotten a secret glimpse into a world that people generally are excluded from in the wild animal kingdom, by way of being top predator. And the owl felt like a familiar friend, always lurking in the shadows, following me through my life in glimpses to remind me that I am on the right path and I am not alone. I was smiling as I emerged from the woods at the bottom of the mountain, oddly secure in the belief that I hadn't just stumbled upon these creatures; I had been visited.
