IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to get to the western outskirts of town and onto the road that led to my grandparents’ farm. We’d pass the two grain elevators, shoulders sloped, beside the railroad tracks; the John Deere dealership with its gleaming green machines that looked like giant mutant insects; the horse plant where Dad had worked one winter (I didn’t want to know what daily happened there); the stockyard with its nostril-burning stench, and finally, a long wooden shed fallen in on one side. It looked like a barn for pigs—I’d seen them in other places—but Dad said it had been a fox farm.
A farm for foxes! I imagined dozens of them like Grandpa’s cows lying peaceful in a pasture, walking in single file towards the water trough, or stretching and yawning like barn cats as they woke from a nap. I thought they must have been pets like Tiny, who resembled a fox with her pointed nose, perky upright ears and long red coat. No, Dad said, they were raised for their hides. To make coats and hats for fancy ladies.
I didn’t like to think of their fur being ripped from their flesh to make something else look sleek and plush and shiny. I was glad the shed that housed the animals had collapsed. Dad said that the owner, when he knew he couldn’t save his business, opened the pens and let the remaining foxes go. They’d been bred for beauty: he’d raised not only red but silver foxes and grey and blue and black ones. Farmers who owned land close by, Dad said, still talked of seeing them. Though they worried about their chickens, they were often startled into wonder by a slurry of blue against the bluer sky or a spill of silver rippling through the tall grasses. In the car, I closed my eyes and saw dusk-coloured foxes slip through the twilight, then disappear like smoke into the place of dreams I fell into every night. Even there, where they could settle softly inside my sleep, there was nothing I could do to keep them safe.
ONCE WINTER arrived, the backyard’s tall yellow grasses my father never scythed caught the snow and held it. On mornings when the flakes in their falling grew as big as the paper ones we stuck to classroom windows, the neighbourhood kids tumbled from doorways. One behind the other, we tromped a circle in the snow with our boots, turning the yard into a white meadow for geese to run in, flapping their blunt wings, a fox in hot pursuit.
The most important word in the game was home. Home was the centre of the circle, and when you landed there, after whipping down one of several spokes, you were safe. The fox couldn’t touch you. The problem was you were free from harm for only a moment: another goose fleeing for its life could force you out, back onto the dangerous circumference pocked with our tracks like the face of the moon.
Racing through the cold, parkas undone, faces flushed, my friends and I would have thrown off our scarves by now. They’d be scattered outside the circle like the skins of long improbable snakes, yellow, blue, green, white with wide red stripes. The spots where our mouths had soaked the wool hardened into disks of ice as the sun slid lower in the sky.
As we skittered and slipped and darted to the centre, we lost who we were, lost our names and the names of our mothers who had sent us out to play. We were legs and lungs and big hearts pumping. We were geese; one of us, a fox. No one in the game broke the rules. We never called “Time out!” We never stepped from the circle to catch our breath. How essential was that form we had drawn with our boots, how perfect and invariable, how charged with frenzy and delicious dread.
As geese, we shrieked with panic and joy and ran and ran—for our lives, we thought. But that wasn’t it. The fox mustn’t catch you not because he’ll eat you up but because he wants to change places. He wants to touch you, to lose his fur and teeth, to grow feathers, to flee with the others, the hot musty breath of the new fox beating on the back of his neck. And suddenly—sure-footed on your paws—that is you. Cunning and radiant against the snow, you feel a different blood burning bright inside you as you leap to catch a wing.