What does the fox say?
Anyone who has tried to spend a silent day in nature knows it’s impossible. ‘Quiet’ is a relative adjective. A blender is quiet when compared to a jet engine. On a peaceful walk down to the river where the only comparative noise is the sound of your own breathing, every footfall crashes like a thunderclap in your ears, and the tiniest breeze howls through the trees like a hurricane.
On a walk down to the river near Sólheimar last week, I found some animal tracks in the snow. These tracks belonged to the arctic fox– the only land mammal native to Iceland. Spotting an arctic fox, for me, would be like spotting a leprechaun, and, imagining myself a primal hunter, I stalked my prey step-for-step, crisscrossing, backtracking, and closely following its trail. I was a child again, plowing through snow and scrambling across the landscape searching for a prize more rare than a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I came across a few places where the fox had obviously stopped to spray some urine in the snow to mark his territory. These scent-markings encouraged me further in my pursuit, and after a half an hour of tracking I discovered an especially acrid spritzing of piss¬– and a few sheep bones buried in the snow!
By this time, I had realized that no matter how long I followed the tracks I would probably never find the fox’s den, but by some miracle I found one of the fox’s caches. Discovering an intimate part of the fox’s life made me feel a connection to him. We were both animals on this planet, surviving (although my definition of “surviving” is much more affluent than his). A food cache was not the pot of gold I set off to find, but it was, to me, as beautiful as a rainbow.
Satisfied, I left the cache alone and again headed toward the river. When I had first taken off in pursuit of the fox, I was slipping and sliding all over the place. Traversing across Iceland in the wintertime is not easy. Frost upheaval turns the ground into a lumpy, ankle-wrenching minefield, and I progressed across them particularly ungracefully. On my way back towards the river, I looked again to the fox tracks and noted how the fox traveled: he carefully following ridges; he only hopped down into specific ravines; he preferred hard packed snow to slippery ice. There was no evidence of him slipping or sliding, and when I followed his path exactly, I never slipped or slid.
I imagined him quietly stalking his prey around the landscape, observing not only the signs of his quarry, but also the subtle language of the world around him. The fox never interacted with the landscape awkwardly, as I did. He moved with graceful intention, in silence.
Eventually I got to the river and sat down to enjoy the view. A distant raven called down to me from the top of a mountain, and I listened quietly with the silent intelligence of a fox. I listened to the raven, and the wind, and the water, and I remembered the sounds of the unnatural world: tires on pavement, pots and pans, and the low buzz of an electric current.
There I sat, as if some great wave of understanding would rise up from the river and break upon my body, washing away my domestication. I thought I was closer than ever before to understanding the mechanics of life, on the verge of some sort of fantastic psychic orgasm, listening to the dialogue of the landscape, hoping to hear the unnamable answer to a question I never knew I was asking.
Of course, the answer didn’t come. After a while, I got up and started walking back home, thinking about the fox, thinking about the silence in nature, and the connection between the two.
It began to snow, which was especially curious because the sun was still shining through a hole in the clouds. I looked over my shoulder at the river one last time. The sunlight cast a rainbow through the snowflakes.
-Nathan Tutchton
