![]() There were coyotes in these woods, I knew, and a young coyote in December can have a step length and print-size that overlap that of the smaller fox. Repeated thousands of times on a winter prowl, this small savings in energy can mean the difference between surviving or not.ĭeer mouse tracks - with no sign of a fox in pursuit. The impression of each hind foot landed entirely within the outline of each front foot on the same side, a process trackers call “direct registration.” Foxes and other wild hunters do this as an economy, the front foot prepacking the snow for the hind. For two miles and a couple of thousand feet in elevation gain I followed the perfect line of prints, the placement of which was as measured as a sewing machine’s stitches. Here was a good-sized red fox, traditionally wise to the value of energy conservation, frittering away precious calories in the perfectly pointless act, even in practical human terms, of climbing a mountain. They were so fresh that the crystals of snow around their rim were still sharp and could easily be disturbed with a puff of breath. The temperature was in the teens and had been below zero in the valley only a couple of hours earlier when the tracks had been laid down. It was early on the coldest morning yet of the young winter. So, in imitation of Thoreau, I aligned myself with the fox’s trail so that I might align myself with its wisdom, if wisdom it expressed. For a fox does little for no reason, and one of the adjectives that well describes its winter behavior is “efficient.” Unless engaged in the pan-species foolishness of courting rituals, the fox’s movements are winnowed down to the necessary alone. With enough careful observation, I suspected, Thoreau himself might have discovered the reason for the hiccup in the fox’s trail that he observed one winter morning across Walden Pond. ![]() Since the animal and I were climbing the same mountain by the same route, I was able to examine its trail at length and learn what I could from the record of its behavior in the snow.īack in those days, I was still testing the idea that an animal leaves behind a diary from which we might – with some practice – read intention or accident, success or tragedy, even wisdom perhaps. I’m as susceptible as the next person to the intellectual charms of revisionism, and I had this theory in mind one winter a few years back when I came upon the trail of a red fox as I started up the Champney Brook trail on Mount Chocorua in northern New Hampshire. ![]() ![]() The revisionists suggest that the fox, at least, does so largely to the exclusion of an intelligent brain. There is an old saying, variously directed at wolves, coyotes, and foxes, that they live by their feet. This theory insists that the fox, far from being wise to the ways of the forest, simply puts in a lot of aimless miles until it accidentally cuts the path of some potential prey, which it then captures thanks to quick reflexes. A revisionist theory about the fox has been circulating for a while that challenges the animal’s legendary cunning, suggesting instead that the Reynard of fable doesn’t actually rely on wiliness to catch its prey but more often stumbles on its dinners by accident.
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