I made the university wait until after I had bought this land. Not just because I was dodging icicles when entering the shower, but because riding the postdoc train was the next logical step for a biologist.

When a university offered me a one-year research position, you might think I would have jumped at the chance to leave. That was what I could afford with the money I’d earned guiding backcountry hikers and teaching field classes part-time. Until then I had been living up valley, renting a cabin that the owner had “winterized,” in the sense that if I wore a down parka and mukluks to bed, I wouldn’t succumb to frostbite overnight.

I had purchased this land three years earlier. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Living in this remote spot left me without access to reasonable employment. My street was unnamed, so I didn’t have an address. Two miles up a gravel road in an isolated mountain valley and sixty miles from the nearest city, the cottage was not an appropriate arrangement for a girl on her own. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. On the thirteenth day, at around three thirty and no later than four o’clock, I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Someone may have been watching us-a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa-but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves. Nothing but two meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. For twelve consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage.

Cathy raven book