Everything Connected, Everything Broken

RACHEL TOLIVER has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Mid- American Review, West Branch, TriQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, American Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the New Republic, and Brevity. A winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project, she is an MFA student in nonfiction at Ohio State University.

I COULD TELL YOU about the island fox: how, in the end, it was saved; how interventions were made; how mistakes were corrected. I could tell you how the problem was diagnosed, how redemption was enacted by caring professionals. The foxes, the smallest in North America, were nearly extinct, and then—through radio collars, captive breeding, and the elimination of predators—they were no longer endangered. Success was measureable. In the year 2000, there were seventy foxes on Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands. By 2015, their number had increased to 1,750.

These foxes—the ones down in the campground at least—are not shy. The first time I arrived on Santa Cruz Island, in the summer of 2010, a ranger stood on the dock, folded his arms, and told us we weren’t allowed to sneak foxes off the island. I nudged my husband. Sneak foxes? What was he talking about? Under his green hat, the ranger wasn’t laughing.

Thousands of years ago, island foxes were domesticated, traveling with Native Americans as pets. One morning, I woke up, looked through the mesh of my tent, and saw a fox kit staring back at me. It sat, legs akimbo, on dewy grass. It had kohl-lined eyes, a white ruff at its throat. I watched the wind dimple its pelt. Some sources say the island fox rafted over from California’s mainland. Rafted! As if the fox could be more adorable.

I’ve seen an island fox running, its feet a flipbook blur, its tail flaring like a tiny sparkler. I have seen an island fox at dusk, pivoting with one foot raised, serene, as if it’s posing for a gift-shop calendar. It is not dead; its cousins are not dead; its kits are not dead; its mother is not dead. The fox thrives, bright-eyed in its generations. Only the