Beasts of the Chase
Foxhunting is a ceremonial sport that dates back to fifteenth century England, with evidence of its practice going even further back to the days of Alexander the Great, around 400 BC. In most parts of the U.K., foxes were considered vermin. Since 2004, when the British Parliament passed the Hunting Act, the sport has been banned in England and Wales.
The game went like this: Huntsmen on horseback, with the aid of foxhounds, searched for the fox. The foxhounds were bred to smell their quarry and follow the scent of foxes. When found, the fox became the target and ran, the hunter and his hounds in hot pursuit. The Master of the Hunt, usually a wealthy man who financed the hunt with private funds, was legally entitled to trespass private lands to search for the fox.
When caught, the foxes were dismembered. The Master of the Hunt presented their tails to the hunting party, and the game was complete.
Once upon a contemporary time, a young woman transformed into a fox.
Human life in the city was too punishing—the rules governing her body were like manacles, telling her what to wear, how to behave, where to move in the city. She was an exotic dancer. Her mannerisms were graceful, but grace was also what kept her head down, eyes shut, voice low and whispering, barely a sound. To her audience, her body at its most graceful was a conduit of apology—she mimicked the stupor of sleep, though she was wide awake. At the #1 Vixens Club where she danced, sometimes she descended the pole and lay still on the floor, her only movement breath, and the whole room did not exhale until she rose again.
So much time in the limelight drained her. She began to err onstage during her performances, scaring her fellow dancers. Shunning everyone, she wandered around the city alone at night, her eyes cloudy as if drugged, until one day she decided to just forgo it all, quit and return to the wild. She’d been toying with the idea for a while. As a vixen, she would be content to live out her days luxuriating in her den, a mound of mineral and ashes, learning how to survive nocturnally, organically, without light.
So she booked a plane ticket to the country where she had been born, found the plot of land that acted as a cemetery five blocks from her ancestral home, and lay down next to the tombs of her distant relatives. Her great-grandmother had been a fox medium who communicated with the fox spirits through spiritual possessions, allowing them to speak through her voice. At her tomb, the young woman found a box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Inside the box, there was a pearl the size of a winter-coat button and a little note, left for her. If she swallowed the pearl, she would return into her vixen self. It was as simple as that.
A year after swallowing the pearl, the vixen had not looked back. She was content in the susurrating grasses, the dens and valleys and springs. The wild beauty of the pastures, the prairies and clover, the canyons, the forests—she roamed the whole continent and had finally seen and lived all that she had yearned for in her primordial bones.
But then one day, the vixen caught a glimpse of a man on horseback galloping in the distance, beyond the fields of heather. It was the season after a drought left fissures on the land, the creeks all dried out. She gasped: Was he a phantom? He looked dashing, with his scarlet waistcoat catching the evening sun’s prisms. The sheen on his horse, silky like almond milk, so healthy, contrasting with her own coarse, knotted fur. Surrounded by brown-eyed dogs with tongues out, tails wagging.
The fox desired, for the first time in a long while, her previous life. A surge of nostalgia, like a death trap hewing the edges of her den, curled her tail, softened her fur. She suddenly recalled desires from her human self, never fulfilled—narratives she’d once imagined that never came true: stumbling like other pretty girls upon fairy castles in the wilderness, upon romance…a gallant man on horseback, reaching his arms out as if to rescue her…she began daydreaming, letting desire steep her in amnesia, of what life really had been, as a human.
The horseman disappeared after she saw him once, but she could not stop thinking about him. The fantasy began to beset her day and night, the prince and his steed running across the field, bringing snow, bringing ice, bringing water, bringing warmth. The steel of his sword formidable in the sun, battling dragons and ogres just to pull her out of her solitude.
George Washington owned a pack of handsome, lean foxhounds. One of his passions was foxhound breeding and fox hunts, the gentleman’s sport. He would conduct the fox hunts at his manor in Mount Vernon, Virginia. In spring, the hounds bayed, the horses leapt and raced over the open fields, and beyond, the Potomac River roared.
Before daybreak, George would eat an early breakfast, then mount his horse in a blue coat, a scarlet waistcoat, buckskin breeches, boots, a velvet cap. He carried a whip. He brought friends, many gentlemen who wanted to participate in a gentleman’s sport. Their main quarry was the red foxes—bushy, spry creatures that teemed in the hills of Virginia.
George loved his horse, a slate-gray steed he named Blueskin. He loved his hounds, whom he bred himself—he gave them names like Truelove, Sweetlips, Countess, Vulcan, Singer, Duchess, Juno, Doxey, Madame Moose. In his diaries, he described his chase one morning after breakfast: “found a Fox just back of Muddy hole Plantation and after a Chase of an hour and a quarter with my Dogs…we put him into a hollow tree, in which we fastened him, and in the Pincushion put up another Fox which, in an hour and 13 minutes was killed—he was a conquered Fox we took the Dogs off, and came home to Dinner.”
The early hours had fallen, the wind dry and frigid, and the fox spent the whole night collecting food—a vole here, a dormouse there. As a fox she had the ability to use the earth’s magnetic fields to calculate the distance and direction of her prey. The rings of shadow on her retinas darkened as she gazed toward magnetic north, and when the shadow aligned with the sounds of her prey, she could find their exact location. Once she detected a shape crawling in the tall grass, she leapt into the air northward, around twenty degrees from magnetic north, landing on the rodent’s throat, and that’s how she caught her biggest trophy, the rat.
Now dawn was fast approaching, and she heard galloping in the distance, the sound as strange as alien landings across ancient craters. She saw the prince had a whip. His dogs were searching for her—their tails were no longer wagging—they snarled, their teeth sought blood. She understood finally, on a primeval level, the danger she was in—that her blood was scented like pungent soil, like pollen or poisonous berries.
She turned her magnetic abilities to her predators. She raced and raced through the grasses, the fields, the fences. She raced and raced and ran out of breath and collapsed in shame. With her hind legs buckled beneath her, she wondered whether she should surrender and give them her life. Vixens like her only knew shame because of their past lives as humans. Her every limb flooded with it—at having been fooled by hope, by romance, at always being the despised, hunted thing.
In the forest, she managed to find a tree with a hollow. It would be her hideout for the day, when she was weary. She climbed inside, tried to rub her fur off with the lichens and jagged bark, tried not to release her scent, but her body was secreting it everywhere: the rocks, the flowers, the dried-out gullies all smelled like her. She had nowhere to escape, so she hid—climbing farther and farther into the tree, until at last she found the deepest pit inside the hollow where blight had chewed through most of the heft. With her breath harried and heaving, she curled into a ball and collapsed. Ants crawled across her languorous body, making their mass migrations.
Soon the lowest branches began rustling with the sound of sniffing dogs, and by nightfall she was running again. She ran through the forest, thickets and twigs snapping beneath her paws, now blistered with sores. Above the clouds, thunder tore through the sky like the moan one makes when mauled by a bear. She was alert to the rain about to pour, hoping it would disorient the hunter and his dogs. She heard the dogs ransack her den, she heard them snarl, maddened by lust. They were getting impatient in their pursuit—they could smell her—they knew she was somewhere close.
She ran through cities, hid in small towns, camouflaged by her ability to shape-shift—the pearl in her throat responded to her distress, cast a light from her body so she could become one with the reeds or the marsh or the pavement. She tried not to excrete too much and fed on insects, flying bugs. Small towns were the most dangerous: fox hunts are considered a rural art born in the endless expanses of countryside, where there were open spaces and perfect views of stars. Nowhere to hide for a fox with a red, bushy tail.
One day she ran into a thick coppice, thinking she had evaded her captors. She had just gathered enough wild gooseberries for a bright jeweled dinner when she turned around to an awesome sight: a foxhound appearing through the underbrush. He was a handsome hound, spotted with a crown of cedar fur. He was bigger than her. He could overpower her easily. His eyes a scarlet pus that ate away at his pupils; his nose wet, infernal; his fur reeking of a terrible domesticity; his breath smelling like he’d been fed and fattened with raw game. All the wildness had been leached from his being, and now he was a captive. At the sight of her he almost buckled with excitement.
“Oh boy,” he said, circling her. “Oh boy, oh boy, I’ve caught you, my wild one, now my master will reward me and I’ll be the bravest and the best dog in all the land.”
At first she tried to bargain with him. “I’ll give you a better reward than the master ever could,” she declared. She imagined gnawing on the dog’s mangy head, his meat for brains.
“You’re just trying to trick me, vixen.”
“Human life. I’ve been a human before, and you can be, too. Trust me. I’m magic. Aren’t you tired of following them all the time? They are the only species on earth who could control other species like you and me.”
“You’re stalling. My master told me never to trust a fox. I don’t have time for talk. I need your body now.” He sputtered this, drool dripping from his jaw, and lunged at her. She arced backward and instinct made her jump vertically in the air, like when she hunted for prey buried under snow. His teeth missed her by a wide margin, and that miss was his fatality—he left himself open, his pale throat in front of her, and she bit him.
Red trickled on her already red fur. The hound squealed, yelped, whined, and the shriek satisfied her. She clamped down, she did not let go as the dog thrashed and thrashed. Now she knew what she was, what they’d always suspected, what they’d always been afraid of. One hit in, she delivered the coup de grâce. She was a victrix, and a demon.
After so much starvation and running, it was only natural that she would begin biting the skin off her quarry. He was hers now.
A sudden flash reminded her of a time when she was still a teenager in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Since she’d transformed, she had not harbored many memories of her human life, but the image of her school returned to her, fluttering. She was reading at the library a book about the circulatory system, the pages open to a diagram of the heart. For the next week’s science exam, she was memorizing the parts of the heart: right aorta, right ventricle, left aorta, left ventricle, coronary arteries.
A boy from the same class sat down next to her. She forgot what his name was, Matt or Stan or Mick—he had been held back one or two years, and he had a sprinkle of freckles across his nose. His face was hard to read—they had never spoken before, but she knew he wasn’t doing well in the class, always mumbling, always at a loss for an answer whenever Ms. Archer called on him.
He sat down next to her, took out his notebook. He stared at her for an uncomfortably long time until, without warning, he reached over her and tore the page out of her textbook. “I need this,” he said. “I lost my textbook.”
“It’s mine,” she said, reaching toward it.
“I heard you got all As. I’ll give it back if you let me copy you.”
“No. And I don’t get all As.”
“But look at you.” The sneer in his voice was suggestive, almost flirtatious. His voice had croaked recently into an ugly rasp. “No one wants you here. You have nothing better to do than study.”
She ignored him then, shut her book, and slipped it into her backpack.
“Don’t you and your family eat dogs?” he snickered, holding the sheet over her. “Even the history teacher says so. You people eat dogs.”
“My parents are white,” she said, as if her adoption status absolved her of his accusations.
He guffawed, and at this she shuddered involuntarily, because he was right, in a way. The history teacher did mention in class one day, in passing, that in the summer he had visited some provincial town in Asia where the local delicacy was dog meat. Sometimes this teacher, Mr. Brady, brought his own dog, a beautiful German shepherd named Lass, to school, and her classmates would take turns petting it. Shaking his head, he said, “What a shame that a man would butcher and eat his own best friend.”
For the final project that semester, Mr. Brady assigned a research paper about any period in history, as long as it occurred in the nineteenth century. She chose one of the most brutal assassinations in history, the deposing of Empress Myeongseong in Joseon-period Korea.
She spat out his blood—soon, when she’d had enough of the chewy, awful meat, she had to retch it out as well. She collapsed against the bloody loam. She was groggy, bone-tired. The meat of the dog enervated her. But she could not just stop. Now that the corpse lay before her, she was afraid. One of the master’s own prized foxhounds was missing. They could smell the hound’s blood—it was out in the open. They would have no mercy now if they caught her. She remembered the prince had a gun. A rifle that could fire multiple rounds.
One of the most chilling things about composure and civility, she realized, was the murderousness hidden beneath manners. One can be dignified while tearing something into obliteration.
And then she had an idea. She would shape-shift even better with a costume. She tore at the hound’s fur until she carved a new skin. Inch by inch, claw by claw, she entered the hound, made a coat out of her hunter. This new skin—this new identity—would be her hideout, for now.
The assassination plot against the last Queen of Korea, Empress Myeongseong, was called Operation Fox Hunt. History calls the execution of this plot the Eulmi Incident. The forty-three-year-old Empress opposed the Japanese occupation. At the end of the Joseon Dynasty, she collaborated with Russia and other foreign governments to retain Korean national identity.
Operation Fox Hunt was orchestrated by the Japanese viscount Miura Gorō, along with up to fifty other men. On October 8, 1895, a team of male assassins stormed the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, infiltrating the courtyard where the Queen’s wing was, north of the Hyangwonjeong Pavilion. They were dressed in strange gowns and armed with sabers. None of these men could recognize her or knew who she was. They forced the Empress’s consorts out, stripping them and raping them, demanding information about the Queen. They killed at least three women whom they mistook for the Empress. According to historical accounts, the assassins found her, carried her through the hallways past her gardens, raped her, beat her, sliced her open, dismembered her, threw her onto firewood, doused her in kerosene, and set her on fire. They cremated her in front of a live audience. This was the price of disobedience.
Ever since she socked Matt or Stan or Mick across the face with her textbook, knocking him to the ground and bestowing a yellow-green bruise on his temple, she had been suspended and shunned by her classmates. Even before the “incident” she didn’t have many friends, but now even the other outcasts avoided her during lunch or after classes. Even her own foster mother, who had adopted her when she was two years old, became distant. “You can’t get angry like that,” her adoptive mother said. “I know that boy was out of line, but, darling, you have to take the high road sometimes.”
Many years later, her mother would offer this same advice to her when her boss at a chain restaurant put his hand on her ass as she was counting the cash in the register at the end of a long night and played dumb when she shouted at him, spilling all the bills on the floor at his feet, running and raging all the way home.
She stalked the streets in the skin of the hound. This kind of camouflage was consuming: she became the dog, the hunter. The sensation disturbed her—his body didn’t just envelop hers, it was supplanting, usurping hers. She was adapting his senses into her perception as well. The keen potency of smell, the pricks on her nose opening a floodgate, overpowering all her other senses. It disoriented her walk, made her vision foggy, turned the world black-and-white. Smells of white pines, mud, the beating organs of other animals in the forest, even the fearful sweat of skulking men. Their hunt forestalled, waylaid by the missing hound. She heard them call for SweetTooth. They had named their dog SweetTooth.
What call would she answer to? Where could she go from there? When she was hunted, she felt alive with the constant threat of defilement. When she was no longer hunted, who was she, even? Invisible, at peace. In her human life, she had weathered chaos of a different order. She wondered whether she should gargle it up, the fox pearl, spit it out, give it back.
Recently, a history professor, Jeong Sang-su, discovered a classified German diplomatic document stating that the Empress survived her assassination plot and was alive four months after the Eulmi Incident. It was a decrypted text that the German ambassador to Russia had sent to the chancellor, which stated that the Russia consul to Seoul had received a top-secret request asking if the Queen could flee to Russia.
Another document, from Britain, discovered at the National Archives in the United Kingdom, stated that the Empress had escaped during the incident. The evidence was compelling that Empress Myeongseong had fled Korea in disguise. She had done this before in the midst of other assassination attempts: covered her body and passed as a child, fleeing their thirsty swords.
Imagine this was real, and the Empress slipped out of the pandemonium of that bloody and cloudless day incognito, escaping into the Russian legation, where she lived out the rest of her days as an exiled widow of her nation. Eternally indoors, she raised houseplants and wrote anonymous poems. A stranger, exiled not just from her palace, from her beloved and besieged country, but from the realm of the living. A living ghost.
If British and German intelligence were reporting the facts, then Empress Myeongseong had outfoxed the hunters. The brilliant Queen Min survived Operation Fox Hunt. Who wouldn’t want to believe this story, that the woman who attempted to guard her country’s sovereignty would live through her own brutal assassination—who wouldn’t want it to be true?
Mr. Brady circled this section of her history paper and marked in red, Questionable source and statement. The assignment is a research paper based on real history and fact, not conspiracy theories. He gave it a C+.
Despite the ugly episode with Mick or Stan or Matt, she loved libraries. During her suspension, she had endless time to herself. She read poetry, she read about animals, especially foxes. She learned foxes were contradictory figures, both solitary and communal, primordial and contemporary. That foxes harnessed the magnetic poles to locate prey. That foxes could live in every ecosystem, from the lushest to the most barren—the city, the jungle, the arctic tundra. For thousands of years, they made homes out of every continent on earth except Antarctica. That when foxes screamed, it sounded terrifyingly human: at night, in neighborhoods at the edges of brambles, their shrieks sounded like women screaming bloody murder. That foxes screamed to communicate, to stake territory, to attract mates. Female foxes screamed while they were mating.
She wrote, too. Poem fragments at first, then entire paragraphs and stories. It was known that for epochs, fox spirits retreated into the mountains to write and read, just as she did, and they wrote long lyrical epics. It was known that once her great-grandmother had done the same, before she came down the mountain and married a human.
The first sentence she ever typed on a computer was, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. That one sentence contained every letter of the alphabet. In typing the sentence over and over again, she recognized writing as a sort of utopia where the beasts of the chase may evade the hunters. The quarry prevailing. Moved, she typed and typed and practiced until all the words were meaningless.
William Faulkner wrote a short story, “Fox Hunt,” published in Harper’s in September 1931. In the story, the rich protagonist, Harrison Blair, buys back his childhood family estate in South Carolina to go on fox hunts. For three years he tries to catch a fox, to no avail. One day, with his wife and three servants as his witnesses, Blair runs ahead of his hunting party, and eventually his hounds, and discovers the fox in a briar patch.
He gets off his steed and wrestles with the fox, trampling it to death with his boots. The violent death of the fox occurs simultaneously with his wife leaving him for another man. In his descriptions, Faulkner conflates the wife with the fox as Blair’s quarry, uncontrollable and wild, but Blair himself is not a sympathetic character, always looking for a new game to play.
After seventy-two hours as a hound, she began to recognize she would rather tear herself up, rip herself out of this protection, than remain hiding in this skin. The brooks had lost their color. She’d drunk from the dirty river, spat out foul water. She could no longer hunt like she used to hunt. Her celerity, her nimble senses, gone. She’d even lost her magnetic compass, which had been her only comfort besides the beautiful den she’d lost. What was this life for, other than solitary suffering? Other than a fruitless fight to survive? She began to molt. Shed the senses, the fur and teeth and blood. The handsome, shiny short-hair coat. The wet, vital nose that smelled everything near and far.
When she was twenty-two, she became a dancer to pay off her tuition at Columbia, where she was studying literature and poetry. By night, she performed at clubs, dinners, dance halls, receptions. She cited the careers of prominent dancers like Jadin Wong, who danced at clubs like the Forbidden City in San Francisco, as her inspiration. By day, she wrote poems. She read novels by Kathy Acker and Clarice Lispector, poetry by Lucille Clifton and Mary Ruefle. Her verses were getting better. She was getting accepted to small magazines and readings.
Four months into her dancing, she noticed a face in the crowd, that of her childhood bully, whose name she found out was neither Mick nor Stan nor Matt—it was actually Terry. He had become an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. The venue was a newly opened club called Den of Shadows, styled like an old Shanghai opium den, on Mott Street. It smelled like smoke, flowers, and brandy. The clientele was the kind she most detested: a certain type of young professional man, interchangeable, who wore button-downs and heavy jackets in Manhattan’s mossy summer heat. Terry was in a group of such men. They hooted at her, whistled, made gestures, licked their lips. Although he made no such noises himself, she sensed something invasive in the way he looked at her. When their eyes met, the vacant, calculating lust she saw on his face was devoid of recognition.
She let him buy her a drink, to confirm this. “Do you remember me?” she asked. As he handed her drink to her, he slid his hand on her waist.
“Trust me, if we’d met before, I would have remembered. Your performance was incredible. I memorized every detail.” His fingers circled her back. She stiffened.
“I’m sorry, it’s not like that.” She pulled his arm off.
“Hey, hey. Not implying anything.” His voice grew softer. “Come out with us after this. I’ll make sure you have a good time.”
“Even if I was interested, I couldn’t. I have another act in forty minutes.” She leaned in close as if to kiss him, and he closed his eyes. “Maybe you blocked it out of your memory. I don’t blame you. I socked you in the face at our high school library in Allentown, remember?” she whispered, and she felt his neck stiffen, the hairs on his face standing up.
“And now you want to fuck me. What a world we live in!” She gave him a conciliatory pat on the shoulder, then walked away with her whiskey Coke.
When the Master of the Hunt discovered her hideaway, every hair on her body stood and she scrambled into the brambles. A seismic panic button. A quake. The words she heard: Tally ho. He took out his whip. The sky fast dusking, turning dark, ink spreading across a bolt of cotton.
The master’s face glowed white as phosphorus. There was nothing gentle or genteel about this gentleman and his rifle. From a distance, one could view the scene as fateful, even sexy—at the edge of the forest, the fox and her hunter. Living on her last lifeline, she finally confronted him, the subject of her fear. The perfect conquest. He would relish punishing her. There would be a scuffle, branches rustling, the sound of gunfire. And finally she’d emerge as the prize, the trophy.
When the master leaned downward for his kill, he was startled by a movement—the fox, in her last stance, had departed the earth—she was jumping up, toward the magnetic north, shooting toward the sun to catch the prey that remained unseen, burrowed underground, and she screamed her fox scream, the shrieking of a woman, the trilling of the dead—
In Finnish mythology, it was the fox that was responsible for the northern lights. The name for aurora borealis is “revontulet,” literally translated as “fox fires.” According to the beast fable, a magical fox swept its tail across the snow, spraying snowflakes to the sky. Thus, the green fire blazed in the star-studded night. You could say that the moment that Whoop! was delivered, the fox ascended into that heavenly fire.
In the story where Empress Myeongseong was caught, the one in all the history books, she was laid to rest in a tomb in Namyangju, Gyeonggi, in 1897, two years after her death. Her husband, King Gojong, arranged a mourning procession with scrolls, giant wooden horses, and four thousand lanterns honoring her memory and legacy. Korea had fallen under Japanese colonial rule, which remained in place until 1945.
In the story where Empress Myeongseong got away, the one we want to believe, she lost everything that meant something to her: her country, her husband, her identity. At first her displacement and subterfuge would disorient her and unbury far-distant memories of childhood—transport her back to when she was eight and orphaned, and the outside world smelled rotten with garbage, and that was all she thought was possible. Little did she know how sweet it could be: lilies opening in the winter gardens in February, the smell of braised octopus and winter radishes. In the world she left behind, the people mourned her, they mourned their sovereign country. In the frozen waters of her exile, the secret might bring her a little pleasure—neither her assassins nor her subjects knew: that just beyond the floe, her heart was still beating.