The Fox Is A Winter Sleeper

There is an eventuality as respects mankind and the beast...as the one dies, so the other... so that the one [has] no superiority over the other, both are destined to the same end. – Ecclesiastes 3:19, 20 I A fox in the snow, frozen. At most a few days. Still beautiful as when he felt his small body falling under his gait, his world of winter fields, walls and woods pulling away, a gray mist turning dark rushing to fill his eyes. The pelt still held its sheen and vibrancy, the small eyes still open in a dead stare, the pointed snout in snow on impact, as if searching for a scent to satisfy a constant hunger, suggesting his fall was natural, sudden, not expected. The mouth slightly opened, revealing long lips pulled away from black gums, rows of small, sharp teeth exposed framed in a strange snarling smile; the tongue slack, dry, curled at the edges, the forelegs bent under the chest where his heart once beat. The tail still holding its bush with a dusting of wind-blown snow. I looked in vain for foul play – teeth or claw marks, torn skin, a bullet hole. Only a beautiful fox dead in snow. Yet something vital in him let go, broke his stride, brought him down. Whatever it was, he could not outrun his own mortality, could no more escape his shadow than the inner law that rules every breathing thing without pity or mercy. II And then the words came to me: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life...” How easy that must have been for Him. I had the will and desire but not the power. I was helpless to bring the fox back to life, a second chance, to see him leap and run across snow-covered fields again, and seek the shelter of familiar woods again, as though released from a cage. I took comfort in the fact that Death, at its worse, is a wakeless sleep, no more; a door that opens to no interior. A tedious story told and retold, always with the same ending, the same hopeless disappointment. III The snow would keep him a little longer, then, in that slow descent into decay, the earth would reclaim him for her own. I walked away, the hard snow cracking under my boots, breaking the silence that had settled over the morning. Somewhere in the distance impatient cawing crows waiting with hunger, they had picked up the fox’s scent.