The totem animal of my Westphalian people is the white horse, a symbol of the white steed that the Saxon Widukind rode when he finally cast aside his paganism for the Christian faith of Charlemagne.
But my personal totem is far closer than some symbolism of the conversion of some long-dead Saxon warlord. My totem is a creature whose eyes have stared back at mine and stopped me silent at my approach.
This creature is the gray fox, a species with a drab, banal name, one that makes you pass it by when you read about it in some field guide or tome of natural history. Gray foxes are almost always mentioned with the much better-known and far more studied red fox, an animal that also plays an important role in European cultures and thus provides a deep tradition in literature and art in Western Civilization.
But the truth is the gray fox is a truly uniquely American thing. Their ancestors diverged from the rest of the dog family 8-12 million years ago, and the entire evolutionary history of their lineage is in North America.
There is no Old World equivalent of gray fox. It is wholly of this hemisphere.
Poor for the sport of foxhunting with hounds than the red fox, the gray fox always got second billing among the indigenous canids of this continent. Less cunning, more remote and distant, and its existence in American culture has always been downplayed.
Yet they roam the wild ridges here. The thickets are their home. They course cottontails on old logging roads, jump deer mice among the oak leaves, and eat the corn scattered down from deer feeders.
They live without our understanding but without our dominance, and in this land that man has abandoned to grow back to woods, the gray fox has found refuge to stretch its legs and sweep its tail and dig its claws into the tree bark.
We killed the big predators that would hunt the gray fox. The red fox, the migrant from Canada, gets hunted and trapped harder, and what’s more, it doesn’t thrive without some open land in which it can go a-mousing.
The gray dog likes the brush thickets of November, where the thorny brush sticks out like concertina wire along the forest floor and the approach of man, dogs, or coyotes would soon be announced in the mere traversing of such ground.
It loves the strong oaks where it can seek refuge when danger comes, but the oaks also provide it a place to bask in the sallow winter sun of January and warm its platinum silver pelt when the chill winds die down. These same oaks hold the gray squirrels, which provide some sporting good coursing and a little bit of meat should the bushy-tail mess up its escape.
In this abandoned world, the gray fox is given a piece of paradise, a place where it can exist in all its ancient foxiness. There is no domination, only prey and predation, to set the course of day into night.
I see in this animal my ideal for myself. I imagine myself as remote and distant and free as a gray fox, but I know these ideals are flights of fancy. I am the species I am, and I have its privileges and responsibilities and anxieties and pleasures.
But a big hole in me wishes that I could be as my totem in the gray November woods. I wish to be in that existence, to live that sort of life in which the natural history of my line and my life were not so severely severed.
So this is my totem, the long ignored little gray dog with the long, sweeping tail and the sharp claws to grip the oak bark.
Wild beast, let me be. Let me be like you.
