A Campfire Story

This week I thought I'd let you read another story I wrote many years ago. This one is quite different from the first one in that this story was written to be told at campfires for Boy Scouts and their parents. It is told in Indian style and usually I would be dressed in a costume that added to this illusion. The local Boy Scout lodge where I lived when this was written used a black fox as a totem. The places described in the story do exist. Stories were the native americans way of teaching life lessons to children and thus I have incorporated that into the narrative you are about to read.

Enjoy

THE BLACK FOX

The Birth of the Fox


This is a small part of the legend of The Black Fox, my brothers.  I will give it to you as it was given to me, whispered by the winds in the trees, murmured by unseen voices of the prairie.
It is a story from yesterday ... tomorrow ... today.  It is a story about life and death, joy and sorrow, winning and losing, for they are, each of them, a part of the same whole.

It begins with a vixen fox as she makes her way along the shore of the river the Indians called Amaquonsippi, the River of the Clams, near the place known as the Hollow of the Pigeons which is near to the Red Clay Hill and the buffalo ford of the River of the Clams.  It is the time of the Moon of the Cherry Blossoms and yet winter has not yet released its hold upon the land and the vixen is struggling desperately to reach her pre-chosen place to deliver her soon to be born young.  

The season has been a long and hard one as yet another blizzard unleashes itself upon the River of the Clams. 

The vixen realizes she cannot make it to her den through the ever deepening snows.  She takes refuge in the only shelter she can find, a small crevice in the shale cliffs along the banks of the frozen river.  She burrows herself as far back into the soft, loose stone as she can to keep herself warm as she waits out the storm and the birth of her young.

Her wait is not a long one.  As darkness falls, she delivers three small, wet, furry little bundles into this troubling, wonderful, difficult world.  They scarcely resemble foxes at all.  Each is quite different from the others, one being almost flame red in color, the second being such a fuzzy yellow as to resemble a baby duckling, and the third, the smallest, a bright glossy black.

Now none of this is really unusual, for foxes have been born in threes and in these various colors, yet something seems very special about this birth, in this place, at this time.

Because of the great stress of labor and the extremely long and hard winter, it is almost four weeks before the vixen is able to leave the den again.  Only extreme hunger overrides her instincts to stay near her young.  However she must find food and soon or neither she nor her kits will survive.  So she goes out in search of food.  Spring is certainly not far off as bright patches of new growth can be seen in sheltered spots of sunshine.  An eerie, icy fog rises thickly off the still frozen river marking the passage of winter to spring.

The vixen has been gone only a short time when one of the most feared predators of the prairies and rivers comes down the trail following the course of the River of the Clams.  The young kit's eyes have only been open a few days, but they cannot mistake the movements of the wolverine as he moves steadily toward their hiding place in the cliffs of shale at the river's edge.  Hunger too drives a creature such as the wolverine, one of nature's most dangerous and powerful predators.  His path takes him directly to the entrance of the cave, and he cannot mistake the scent left by the vixen's recent departure.  Though the kits themselves do not reveal their presence in any way, it is only a matter of moments before the wolverine discovers them.  As he peers into the darkness of the crevice, the two yellowish red kits are unmistakable at the back of the shallow cave.  As he shoulders into the opening for what appears to be a easy meal, he moves right past the
young black kit who is pressed into a narrow crack at the mouth of the cave.

It is times such a these, that occur in all of our lives, where we each make choices based on those inborn characteristics that make us who and what we are.  Though the black fox is only a month old, weighs just a few ounces, and has no real knowledge of the world outside of his small cave, he seems to realize that unless he acts, his brother and sister will perish.  So he does the only thing that he can do and leaps onto the back of the wolverine. With all his tiny might he bites him. 
The wolverine is taken by surprise more than hurt, but those tiny milk teeth are sharp and the attack is so unexpected that the wolverine backs quickly out of the cave to turn on his unseen attacker, snarling and screaming and spinning wildly to find the source of the pain to his backside.

The snarling screams of the wolverine attracts the attention of the vixen who is not far away.  She returns, carrying a small hare to her young, bounding and scrambling over the snow and ice to the trail at the edge of the River of Clams, up the Hollow of the Pigeons to protect her family.  As she moves along the narrow trail and comes around the rocks that mark the edge of the cliff where she has her den, she comes face to face with the wolverine who is still screaming, snarling and whirling about madly trying to get at his unseen attacker.  The vixen's reactions are instinctive and immediate as she attacks headlong into the wolverine.  Her momentum and the ferocity of her attack knocks her black kit clear as the vixen and the wolverine plunge off the cliff, down the steep embankment and into the icy water below.

The cold icy water, the darkly swirling current, two hereditary combatants locked in a struggle as old as the river itself: this is a fight that no one can win.

The black kit sits at the edge of the shale cliff watching intently the darkly swirling waters of the Amaquonsippi.  His eyes gleam brightly, with a quiet intelligence which seems only to accent his age and size rather than diminish it.  He emits a soft plaintive whine then turns to the carcass of the rabbit, dropped near the den by his mother when she attacked the Wolverine, grabs it by one of its oversized hind legs and tries to pull it closer to the entrance of the den.

Quickly exhausted by his efforts, he tears off a bit of flesh from the rabbit with a vigorous shaking of his whole being and retreats into the back of the small cleft in the shale ledge and lays down with his brother and sister.  Soon sleep overtakes him as his two siblings growl and tear at the remaining pieces of flesh.  

Tomorrow the real challenge will begin, to survive in a large hostile world.