Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship
By Catherine Raven
Spiegel and Grau, 2021

A fox with fur the color of fire, swiftly paces around in your backyard, looking for food or maybe just a place to sit. What do you do? Do you scare it off, or call animal control? Now what if that fox were come back to your yard every day, at the exact same time?

This unique situation serves as a catalyst for Catherine Raven’s memoir Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship in which she tells the story of her short lived but impactful friendship with a wild fox that visits her home in the largely uninhabited Montana wild. Raven, a biologist and former Park Ranger, builds herself a cabin as far outside of society as one can reasonable get, presumably to escape people. Indeed, besides the people she meets during the field tours she leads in Yellow Stone National Park and the students in her online classes she teaches to sustain herself, she does not seem to have any meaningful relationships. Socially awkward and on her own since the age of fifteen, she has become content with living a life of solitude. That is, until the fox, whom she calls Fox, shows up, and starts to change her life.

As with any friendship, Fox and Raven’s is cultivated by sharing in each other’s interests. Raven hunts, lounges, and plays hide-and-seek with Fox. He leads her around the area, and at one point kills a mouse and gives it to her as a gift after he realizes she is not nearly agile enough to catch one herself. All these scenes work in the narrative to build a sense camaraderie between Raven and Fox; collectively, they stand as a testament for the meaning and beauty in the small and seemingly insignificant moments in life. By treating Fox as a friend instead of reducing “him to data points,” Raven gets to know him as an individual creature. She writes: “The more I watched him, the more I understood him and appreciated his ease of living; insight become empathy. And empathy, I am convinced, is the gateway to friendship.” Raven’s prose is at its best in moments like this, where she pauses to reflect and extrapolates her experience into a general sentiment. They always feel earned and are always written in a lush, elegant style.

On a structural level, Raven splits her story into three interwoven parts. The first recounts her friendship with Fox, from her perspective. The second details her life leading up to Fox. The third and most daring of the three, is a third person limited point of view that follows Fox around, pushing the “I” of the narrative to the periphery of the story. These sections are skillfully done—they are given in frequent, short bursts throughout, never stretching on longer than necessary and persistently written in methodical and often insightful prose. One example sees Fox leading Raven in the moonlight, hoping to teach her the value of groups:

Working the full moon to his advantage, he slowed when clouds covered it, ran when the moon busted loose. All the while his mantra played: Time is on no one’s side. After jumping on a boulder to avoid brushing against a sticky-leafed currant bush, he worked his way around one last nuisance of the day, mounds of sleeping deer. They were dumb animals, but not dumb enough to live alone.

Wonderful passages like the one above are frequent. Occasionally, they can become a bit plodding, but overall, they succeed. Whether you think that these sections are earned or not will vary depending on how far you are willing to extend your imagination with Raven, who goes so far as to include brief exclamations from Fox’s point of view, such as “Off plan!” and “Uphill? As if.” These instances are few and don’t take away from Fox’s sections—indeed, you may even find them charming— but feel out of place in a book that is taking seriously the idea that wild animals have emotions and desires similar to humans and therefore shouldn’t be treated as either hostile enemies to be killed or stupid creatures to be pitied. Raven is trying to be cute—a tone that never once encroaches on the rest of the narrative, which showcases real communication and friendship between different species.

Right up to tragic yet hopeful ending, this book is irresistible reading. Lovers of nature will appreciate Raven’s thoughtful writing about the place of humans in the natural world; Lovers of stories will be entranced by the rendering of friendship, and its strange power to change lives. Poignant and thought-provoking, Fox and I will have you re-evaluating your relationship to your local environment and the non-human animals that share it with you.

Connor Carrns is a writer and bookseller living in Stoneham, Ma.