The Foxes

Quick Facts

• Role: Wild neighbors and silent protagonists whose lives frame Renkl’s ethical and ecological reflections
• Setting: Suburban Nashville—yards, driveways, roadsides, and the thin woods between houses
• First appearance: “How to Catch a Fox”
• Species: Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes)
• Key relationships: Margaret Renkl, an unnamed wildlife expert, and the broader backyard food web (mice, moles, raccoons, opossums)

Who They Are

At once ordinary and luminous, the foxes embody the daily negotiation between wildness and suburbia. Renkl sees in them both the beauty of a self-willed life and the damage inflicted by human convenience. Their presence bridges the intimate and the ecological, making them central to the book’s exploration of The Human-Nature Connection and the bitter braid of Grief, Hope, and Environmental Change. As Renkl watches, intervenes, and grieves, the foxes also mirror the caretaking anxieties and temporal limits of Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time.

Their bodies tell the story: one fox is “a blur of falling leaves, red and gold,” a portrait of wild vitality; another is hollowed by mange—eyes “swollen into slits,” leg torn by an “open wound.” The contrast makes visible the invisible systems—the poison in the food chain, the fragmentation of habitat—that govern whether a creature lives or fails.

Personality & Traits

The foxes are defined by a tension between cunning and precarity. When healthy, they are swift, wary, and almost supernatural in their speed; when sick, they become diurnal, desperate, and exposed. Renkl’s encounters trace how intelligence helps them persist in a human-dominated world—and how vulnerability enters through the very backdoors we’ve left open.

• Adaptable and resilient
  • Evidence: They hunt “in manicured lawns,” navigate driveways and mailboxes, and a trapped healthy fox later avoids the trap entirely—learning in real time.
• Vulnerable to human systems
  • Evidence: “A hungry fox who eats a poisoned mouse or a poisoned mole is vulnerable to the mites that cause mange.” Sickness drives a fox to dig beside a mailbox at “two thirty in the afternoon,” a survival behavior turned into a risk.
• Intelligent and wary
  • Evidence: After one healthy fox is trapped and released with medication, it’s “never caught again.” Renkl also finds dirt scraped away by an “accomplice,” hinting at social awareness and problem-solving.
• Elusive and wild
  • Evidence: The release becomes a vision: “a phantom rush of wildness… a mirage of a miracle,” the animal both seen and not seen, underscoring how wildness resists possession.
• Visually arresting contrasts
  • Evidence: Healthy: “slender legs,” “swift, small feet,” “bushy tail,” “magnificent coat,” “pointed ears.” Sick: “eyes… swollen into slits,” an “open wound,” the body reduced to symptoms of an injured ecosystem.

Character Journey

The foxes don’t arc like a single protagonist, but Renkl’s stance toward them changes. She begins as a watcher, shaken by the sight of a fox with mange moving openly in daylight. That shock propels her into action: she consults a wildlife expert, sets a humane trap, and tries to thread the needle between compassion and intrusion. Her plan misfires—she catches a healthy fox instead—and in the gap between intention and outcome, she glimpses both the resilience of the wild and the limits of human control. She medicates and releases the healthy fox, who vanishes as though it were never there, leaving her with awe rather than triumph. Later, a neighbor’s story of a fox screaming at a cat collapses enchantment back into raw survival. The journey is less “saving” the wild than learning to live honestly with its otherness—and with our complicity in its suffering.

Key Relationships

• Margaret Renkl
  • Renkl’s bond with the foxes blends tenderness with responsibility. She feels compelled to help the sick fox yet is chastened by the healthy fox’s refusal to be handled, recognizing that true aid must account for the animal’s autonomy as well as its need.
• The Wildlife Expert
  • The unnamed expert represents pragmatic conservation: tools, protocols, and triage. He mediates between Renkl’s personal grief and the dispassionate systems designed to mitigate harm, reminding the narrative that care is both knowledge and labor.
• Other Wildlife (and the suburban food web)
  • The foxes sit atop a fragile chain that runs through mice and moles, up into poison, and back into mange. Their story touches raccoons and opossums—animals that might trigger the trap—and reveals how one intervention ricochets across species and time.

Defining Moments

Renkl’s encounters crystallize the foxes’ dual reality—radiant and imperiled—and clarify her evolving ethics.

• The Sick Fox Sighting
  • In “How to Catch a Fox” (first mention of chapter: How to Catch a Fox), Renkl sees a mangy fox digging beside a mailbox in midafternoon. Why it matters: The daylight behavior signals crisis, converting abstract concern into action and anchoring the book’s moral stakes in a single suffering body.
• Catching the Healthy Fox
  • Renkl’s flashlight finds a fox in the trap—healthy, not the target. Why it matters: The miscapture exposes the limits of control and illuminates fox intelligence (the scraped dirt from an “accomplice”), shifting the narrative from rescue fantasy to respect for wild agency.
• The Release
  • After administering preventive medication, Renkl opens the trap and the fox disappears in an instant. Why it matters: The near-mystical vanishing affirms that wildness is not a problem to be solved but a presence to be honored—and that help should not collapse into possession.
• The Screaming Fox
  • A neighbor recounts a driveway standoff in “Praise Song for the Red Fox, Screaming in the Driveway.” Why it matters: The “unearthly scream” reintroduces fear and otherness, reminding readers that coexistence includes violence, surprise, and sounds that unsettle the human ear.

Essential Quotes

The fox is sick. No question the fox is sick. At two thirty in the afternoon on an eye-squinting winter day with no leaves left on the trees to break the glare, the fox is digging next to a neighbor’s mailbox, right beside the road.

This opening diagnosis compresses symptom, setting, and alarm into one image. Daylight behavior undercuts the fox’s usual secrecy, while the stark winter light makes suffering impossible to ignore—turning a neighborhood into a stage for ecological crisis.

A hungry fox who eats a poisoned mouse or a poisoned mole is vulnerable to the mites that cause mange.

The sentence exposes how human convenience (rodent poison) infiltrates wild bodies through the food chain. It reframes “disease” as a byproduct of policy and habit, not fate—a moral accounting rather than a merely biological one.

I think, “That fox blinked at me.” I think, “That fox’s tail is fully furred.” I think, “That fox is not sick.”

The staccato internal monologue models field observation turning into hope. Each detail—blink, tail, health—builds toward relief, showing how careful attention can be an antidote to despair and a practice of respect.

It is not a fox. It is a blur of falling leaves, red and gold. A phantom rush of wildness. A mirage of a miracle, pungent and swift. I saw it. I did not see it. I will never see it again.

Renkl shifts from identification to metaphor, surrendering taxonomic certainty for wonder. The paradox—seeing and not seeing—captures how the wild resists capture by language and how true encounters are both presence and disappearance.

Every time the fox opens his mouth, an unearthly scream erupts. Scream after scream after scream. If you heard this sound at night, never having heard a fox scream before, you would swear a woman was being murdered in the woods.

The simile is deliberately unsettling, insisting that cohabiting with wild neighbors is not always lyrical. It complicates pastoral narratives, asserting that coexistence includes fear, misunderstanding, and the rawness of animal life pressing against human senses.