The last red fox I spent any meaningful time with was a resident of Limerick. I spent an afternoon with him in such close proximity that I could assure myself of his gender, among other things. He was staring off into the distance, but given the sturdy appearance of his foxhood he may have been indulging in daydreams of an erotic nature undreamt-of even by those of us who relish the slippery machinations of our own hormonal soup, as do I, a man with a willing wife and, as day follows night, three children. They are very fine children and my wife is a lovely woman of Belgian extraction. She paints.
It was a chance encounter, the fox and me. I was shambling in the hills, a refugee from a family outing to Waterford, in the midst of a family tour through Ireland, from whence came my father's people, the Doyles (Dudghail in Gaelic, dark strangers), and ditto my mother's folk, Clanceys and McCluskeys and Salmons and Sherrys, one of whom ran a ferry from Dun Laoghaire (then called Kingstown) in Ireland to Holyhead in Wales. That one, Alice Sherry, claimed that she was born at sea and that she was a citizen of the high seas, born in and beholden to no country. This bristliness runs along the Clancey line like thorns on a berry bush; my grandmother cursed in Gaelic like a Blasket sailor and my mother, who would have been a senator if not for bearing six children, berates lazy workmen and cops and in general conducts herself like a general despite the fact that she lost most of her interior plumbing and could easily lie about amid billows of pillows and take her ease and whiskey. But she does not. She paints, too.
Ordinarily I suppose the fox would have heard or smelled my advance but this day the fat wind was in my face and my footsteps were muffled by thick grass. He was sitting, unconcerned, just under a frond of furze. He was a rich brown red, the color of cranberry juice. He was a lot more brown than red. Most of him was tail. His body was no bigger than a long cat's and he looked a bit frail, as carnivores go, but later when he yawned I saw rows of razor teeth, sharp and small as tacks. His face narrowed to the knife of his nose. His eyes were black. I had stepped quietly up to the bush and moved one frond aside to see what I might see and upon seeing the fox I froze, and so held that frond for nearly an hour. I felt like I was holding hands with a bush.
It was a pleasant hour. The mist dried off and the sun slid in and out. We were on the Plantine Hill near Kilfinnane and it was summer. The furze was in flower. In the next field over was a bull. In our field there were bees until suddenly, after some time, there was a female pheasant, a slice of brown against the loud green grass. At her appearance the fox unfolded himself silently and stood up. The pheasant eased along the bushes on the other side of the field. We watched. When she came to the corner of the field she cut the corner and angled out into the field just a bit, foolish woman, and the fox shot out of the furze like a greyhound, hunched and terrible. The pheasant screamed -- she did not squawk or screech, she screamed like a bleeding child -- and she popped back into the bush like a bullet, and an instant later went the fox through the same invisible hole, like a bullet into the same bullet-hole in yet another bad novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a really terrible novelist, and her screams quickly receded into the distance and I let go the furze frond, which waved for a bit.
I sat down. A moment later a male pheasant emerged from the bushes across the field and walked hurriedly toward me and away from the drama. Like the fox he did not see me; unlike the fox he did not sit alongside me but scurried past in a terrific hurry. He passed by not six feet from where I sat, and he vanished without a sound into yet another hole in the rank of bushes. I suppose it might be said that bushes are made more of holes than they are of bush.
I spent a good deal of time on the rest of that trip thinking about holes and I have not stopped since. There are holes and holes -- the one through which the male pheasant vanished, the one through which my grandmother vanished, robbed of her voice in her last months, unable even to curse the darkness. When we went to see her in those last days I could not bring myself to go into her room and so sat outside in the bushes, hiding in a hole.
Some years ago a doctor tore a hole in my wife and lifted our first daughter out, bloody and startled. Recently another doctor sliced another hole in my wife and pulled out two boys who were hiding in a hole for nearly a year. Into a hole shot a fox, I will tell them eventually, as they lie next to me on the bed, their souls full of voices. And that story will lead to another story, perhaps about a woman born at sea, or the hundred Doyles who lie in holes in a field in Wicklow, or about their mother, a fierce lovely woman who paints. So stories lead to stories and we are made and saved by stories, and as we vanish into holes we are telling stories all the way.
