Pilgrimage

When I do these late night hikes I always quarter off through the neighbor's wooded patch and then out through my sister-in-law's driveway. The trick is to avoid walking on concrete as much as possible. I always feel slightly "sneaky" and, well, sinister when I do it. I wouldn't want some female to peek out her back yard and think, "Who is that man in my yard?" That's why I jumped a little bit when the neighbor on the other side of my sister-in-law's house turned on her back yard light to let her dog out. I just assumed it was a female neighbor and so I sagged my shoulders somewhat and averted my gaze in a posture I hoped sent out the message that I was too affable to be a rapist.

Then I noticed that there was no neighbor and that was no dog. A fox had set off the motion detector light which threw the backyard into a soft glaze of lighting. The house had actually been empty for nearly a year, there was no neighbor, and this fox had come out of the woods to work efficiently through the grass, quartering and sniffing until he had investigated the entire yard for possible prey. The nature of the lighting - or perhaps the nature of the fox itself - kept the animal in shade so that I couldn't see whether it was a red fox or silver fox, though I could see everything else in the yard. Everywhere he went he brought his own shadowy cloak with him.

He was clearly a fox though - there was no missing that fluid motion, that serpentine neck supporting a sleek, almost cat-like head. He was no cat though, you cannot confuse a canine's body and motion for a feline. The shadow he moved in caused his profile to stand out in sharp relief so you couldn't miss the ears and the brush tail. I had stumbled across foxes before and this was the perfect fox shape, except without detail, like a fox-shape cut out of the night and animated.

It worked over the entire back yard and then it was gone in three minutes or less. In a few seconds the backyard light went off too . . .