Days of calling, searching and alerting neighbors turned up nothing. Sadly, at the end of his first outdoor summer, Sandy disappeared. When, in 2015, our permanent move to Mill Brook House enabled the cats to go outside, Sandy proved himself a fearsome hunter while Rocky fell in love with wild turkeys and domestic chickens. Where Sandy never saw a lap he didn’t like, Rocky never passed up a box or a bag if he could possibly get in it. About that time we adopted three-month-old Rocky, mischief-maker and comedian-in-chief. A few months of hearty eating transformed him into a sandy-haired beauty, extraordinarily gentle and extremely fond of cuddling and schmoozing. Sandy was a year old when he came to us in 2013 as a scrawny stray with one misshapen eyelid. Please enable JavaScript if you would like to comment on this blog. Her ability to move past his death and pull together the fragmented strands of her life should give us hope and, perhaps, suggest a way forward. Why, she asks, is mankind so detached from the natural world? Why do we push it away, relegating it to “scientific scrutiny” (and too often wanton destruction) instead of viewing and nurturing it with the totality of our humanity? A question ever more relevant as we stand on the brink of losing so much of this world… Raven’s helplessness in the face of a wildfire from which she cannot save Fox seems emblematic of our present struggles.
Trained as a biologist, she rambles through an eclectic sampling of natural history and her own observations while attaching them to carefully chosen if idiosyncratic selections from literature: Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Lafcadio Hearn, and, especially, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Little Prince she reads aloud to the fox (!). Raven is a survivor, a hardy soul from a dysfunctional family, highly intelligent, acutely sensitive, and brutally honest. This is a searingly beautiful account of Catherine Raven’s journey from alienation to healing through the ministrations of an unusual wild fox.
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