Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship
(Spiegel & Grau, $28)
Catherine Raven’s new book about a wild fox she came to know is not a typical tale of animal-human bonding, said Annabel Gutterman in Time.com. “Yes,
Fox does give Raven a sense of purpose. More crucially, he shows her that there is no fixed definition of friendship.” But as you might guess from the simple name she gave him, she never tamed the runty yearling who began appearing outside her isolated cottage in Montana every afternoon. She didn’t even feed him. Instead, she watched him, and spoke to him, and when he didn’t reply, started reading The Little Prince to him, several pages at a sitting. Raven, a biologist and former National Park ranger, was initially reluctant to tell anyone about her new friend. “For someone like me,” she writes, “anthropomorphizing wild animals was very uncool.”
As a memoirist, “Raven is sometimes reticent to a fault,” said Danny Heitman in
The Wall Street Journal. A lifelong loner, she does mention leaving her parents at 15 but doesn’t make clear exactly when she first encountered Fox and watched him mature. She also, when attempting to transcribe what Fox might have been thinking at various moments, does so with “a certitude that feels unearned.” But this “magical and mystical” book prefers to dwell in a world where friendship is possible between a human and a fox and offers readers “an abiding invitation to do the same.”
Raven doesn’t actually like all animals, and seems to dislike lots of scientists as well, said Barbara King in NPR.org. Her suggestion that animal-behavior scientists all resist acknowledging animal emotion ignores the work of Jane Goodall, Franz de Waal, and many others. But her friendship with Fox does seem real, built upon her appreciation of the complexity of his individuality. “The very antithesis of a fox-taming tale, Fox & I tells us that, nearly wherever we live, we are surrounded by wild animals who make thoughtful decisions and experience joys and sorrows on their own terms.” Above all, it “takes us out of a relentless focus on the human-built world in ways that invite compassion for nature.”