It blooms, like any other friendship, from proximity, personality, attention and time. Still, the deftness of her observations erases any suggestion that her connection to Fox is invented or saccharine. At times Raven’s blow-by-blow descriptions of the ecosystem drag (“Keen observers appreciate boring rhythms,” she writes), and her narrations from Fox’s point of view often felt too cute for me. Here she meets Fox, alongside junipers, magpies, mounds of thatch ants and a field of voles and thistle. She camps among the boulders until her cottage is built. “I felt like I did too.”Īfter completing her studies, she delays accepting a job in academia to buy land in a glacier-carved Montana valley, 30 miles from the nearest grocery store. “It seemed like every living thing wore a leash or a collar or sat in a cage,” Raven writes.
in biology from Montana State University, where she feels suffocated by Bozeman’s man-made environment. When her students in a field class in Yellowstone National Park notice the different way she speaks about Fox, Raven diagrams the kinship to reassure herself of its “logical and inevitable” path, and to prove to students that her relationship with Fox “had followed a natural course of events and that nothing happening between us was bending the immutable laws of science.” Yet “Fox & I” ultimately sidesteps this fear of being misunderstood, suggesting we belong among animals more deeply than we think.īelonging does not come easily to Raven, who describes her parents as “violent,” wanting her “to disappear.” Having determined that “when your own parents don’t want you, no one else will,” Raven leaves home at 15, throwing herself into college and seasonal backcountry work for the National Park Service. As a scientist, Raven knows she’s not supposed to assign human characteristics to wild animals. So begins “Fox & I,” the smart and tender memoir of an unexpected bond between a biologist and a fox. And every day, she reads “The Little Prince” to him. the small red fox trots up to Catherine Raven’s cottage in a remote valley in Montana. FOX & I AN UNCOMMON FRIENDSHIP BY CATHERINE RAVENĮvery day at 4:15 p.m.
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