Thinking about it later, I wouldn't remember how I came to be here, emerging from a wood, suddenly surrounded by green, striding through shin-high grasses under a flaxen sky. It had something to do with an urge for health-- a pursuit of clean air for my lungs and for the dark musty corners of a brain reluctantly coming to from hibernation after a persistent winter. However it had come about, here among the insects springing and darting, chirping and buzzing about me with blades of grass whipping my legs as I propelled myself forward across the meadow, it felt suddenly as though I had removed an iron shell from my back. Where I had been weighted down somewhere back there behind me, on the other side of that forest, with the concerns of daily business, here I found myself unburdened, recreated.
I paused midway across the clearing and surveyed the terrain before me. Which way to go? The insect thrum was punctuated by the calls of crows to the right of me. To the left was a sun just along a course of setting. I proceeded north tentatively - the direction I was already heading - when I thought I caught glimpse of a flash of tawny red parting grass as it bounded away from me. I felt my heart skip a beat. It stopped me where I was. The creature seemed to stop as well. Was it a fox? Still preoccupied with my quandary about a direction, I looked away, but something about the red-- I found myself looking back in spite of myself for another sip. Failing to see it right away, I absently made another few steps in its direction and suddenly there it was again-- a vivid, earthy red peeking above the grass. It bounded forward. I stopped again to watch for a better look and again it stopped. This was going nowhere. I turned toward the northwest and took another step. It seemed to alter its path in the same direction. Before I was aware of it, I was changing my course to match its course, and heading again North, now finding myself in spite of myself in pursuit of it.
I was on the other side of the meadow, tracking the shadows of forest again when I realized it. There was definitely something about the red-- I needed to verify what it was about the color that motivated me. As I became conscious of it, I marveled at the growing certainty that something had taken possession of my will and that that something was the fact of the red of the fox. I found myself trying to reconstruct the moment when it took hold of me. I recalled the instant just moments before as I came midway across the meadow again in my mind-- the slice of time that the exquisite tawniness pierced the barriers of my perception and seeped into my brain, compelling me before I was conscious of what was happening. But why recall when the fox was before me darting in and out of the dappled sunshine that pierced the canopy of forest and splashed the earth? Where was that fox again? A sudden bark told me. I scanned the landscape before me trying to connect up once again with the possessor of that magnificent coat, but my search was in vain. The only trace of the fox now was the skittering and scraping of its mane and the disturbance of ferns as it tunneled through the underbrush a score of yards in front of me. It was like a hunger. Or was it hunger?
As I came around a cluster of young fir, the unmistakable red of its coat bounded into view above the brush ahead of me. Was it something bigger-- with the same red hair? How could that be? I struggled to understand what I'd seen when suddenly I came to a small clearing around a stump with a clean flat top. Someone had hewn a tree in this wood. Atop the stump were 3 brightly colored mushroom caps that looked freshly torn from their stems. In my hunger they looked delicious. I glanced ahead, and saw the undergrowth rustling where my quarry was advancing. I picked up a cap, studied it briefly. I took it to my mouth and gave it an exploratory tap with my tongue. Perhaps I was paranoid-- I felt my head encircled by stars. A barklike call brought me back to attention. I quickly set the mushroom back from where I'd taken it and proceeded in pursuit of the red. I picked up my pace, but the distance only seemed to grow between us. And yet I got enough of a view now through the brush to see that somehow the red that I was pursuing was on a different form. Not the fox but on a very-fox like creature.
Could it be? It appeared to be running on two legs. At times it seemed to stop and look at me as if to assure itself that I was still on the trail. It waited for me to catch up just enough to gain some hope of closing the distance between us, and then turned and bounded away. There came the bark again. I was close enough to see for certain that my leader was no longer a fox, and not quite a human, but a kind of fox human. With fox ears and what looked like a white tipped bush of a tail still trailing behind it. Still wearing a mane of luscious red. Was I the hunter or the prey? I seemed incapable of surrendering to failure at the task of achieving an intimate encounter with the beast. And just when my endurance seemed most eager to yield the chase altogether, there on the path lay a long flat object. A ribbon. I stooped to collect it and continued on my way, unable to tell by its condition how long it had been lying in the elements. The question was soon answered by inference, as it now seemed that along the path every fifty yards or so were purposefully strewn an array of objects-- a dead sparrow, an handful of berries, a marbled stone, a hickory nut, a crudely fashioned nosegay of wildflowers, another collection of mushrooms.
These last and the berries, I again paused at, the hunger I had experienced having grown only more acute. I consumed the berries. The mushrooms tempted me; but again, I had only to dab my tongue on the cap of one to invoke the sensation of my head detached from my body and suspended amid the comets and satellites of space. I scanned the forest ahead of me for a sign of the creature.
"Hey!" someone called. It was a woman's voice. There beyond the scrub that I was wading through, on the other side of a thicket, amid a stand of pine she stood, a possessor of the same red hair that had set me on this detour from my solitary walk. Was that a smile on her lips? Was she speaking to me? Before I could satisfy myself with an answer, she turned and ran, in the same prevailing direction that I had been going. There was no sign of a fox, nor of a fox human, just the lovely figure of a woman, hair ablaze in the late afternoon sunlight, hurrying through the pine before me. What was the harm in thinking it was me she had addressed with her "Hey!"
Before long I was in the same endless stand of pine, running after her on a carpet of needles. The items I encountered on the path left were fewer and so far between and of such a random nature-- a large brass button, a scrap of colored paper, an apple--that I could not tell if I was imagining that they had been left there purposefully for me. Still, the mere act of pausing to collect, study and ponder them slowed me down to such an extent-- and the descending twilight was a factor-- that my guide through this wood had reached a lead beyond my line of vision. I could only hear the occasional commotion of her progress through the woods, punctuated every so often by bursts of sweet sounding laughter, and what could have been another "Hey!" or two seeming to let me know that I was going in the right direction. By now my hunger had grown, as had my trepidation about the looming darkness. Did I know where I was and how I would make my way back? It seemed prudent to forge ahead in hopes that my red-haired companion would lead me to a settlement or a road by which I could find my bearings and make my way home. The hunger was becoming unbearable.
I was no longer running, but walking as fast as my aching legs would carry me. There she seemed to be yards ahead of me in the darkening wood. At length, I heard what sounded like steps landing on wooden boards. The rushing sound of water confirmed she had reached a footbridge. I emerged from the wood to the edge of a much sparser clearing. Across the bridge, she seemed to be waiting for me at the door of a well lit cottage. How could this be in this forest that I thought I knew from years of childhood exploration and adult refuge? I hurried to the bridge which spanned in an arch over a splashing creek, and crossed it. As I approached the house, I raised my arm in a wave. She returned the gesture, turned away and entered the cottage, leaving open the door. The closer I got, the stronger became the scent of something cooking. A smell I'd never smelled before. It was sweet, rich, earthy. A nutty smell; almost a liqueur. As I stepped up her front stoop, I saw her through the crack in the door, more lovely in this proximate approach than I had imagined as I made my way toward her in the diminishing sun of late afternoon. I entered, removing my hat. I wanted to thank her for her hospitality, to ask her her name, to see if she could tell me where we were so that I could begin to plan my way back. I opened my mouth to speak but before a word came out, she gestured at a pot steaming on the stove, the locus of those incredible smells. She was so insistent and I was so famished that I knew I could not rest until I had tasted the contents of that aromatic pot. "Please" she said. I nodded my thanks. As I made my way to the stove, she turned and disappeared through a doorway and up a stairwell behind her. Did she want me to follow her? It was clear the answer could wait.
A small bowl and a spoon lay on the counter next to the stove. Into it I scooped ladles of a rich earth-colored mash of some kind. A sweeter concoction I could not bring to mind. I sat down with it at her table. As I raised a spoonful of it to my mouth, I could sense that it had been cooling a while. Inhaling the aroma, I took the sweet smelling paste into my mouth. I savored it and swallowed, its substance blazing a path of delight from my tongue to my throat. I eagerly took another mouthful. As I did so, it suddenly seemed as though the world spun fast around me, sweeping me up into a bed of clouds and hastening me over acres of land and across miles and miles of sea to new shores on the other side of the world. In its savoriness, I tasted the birth of civilizations. Carts rolling, pulled by beasts of burden over mountain paths, their beds laden with the riches of the earth. The sun, not just a star in the sky but a god, a provider. The source and inspiration of every wondrous crop and the teller of tales of how to use them sacredly. Letting the concoction wash over my tongue, I felt myself rising to the snow-capped peak of a mountaintop, set down at the foot of a path to the temple of the gods. Casting my eyes upward, I rose, ascended, ever higher to the gleaming auburn coat of She who walks in Light.
The next thing I was conscious of was myself lying leaned against an oak, under a canopy of stars on a moonless night, at the edge of a field I knew well was the very place where I first saw the red coat of the fox. Amid the dewy grasses, I thought, How had I come to be here? If I didn't die, I couldn't say whether I would be able to make my way home. Unsure if I was breathing my last, I distracted my mind from the pain that enrobed me by peering passively into the vast ocean of stars. I contemplated the night and thought of her, wondering if somewhere out there amid the wisps of cloud had seeped the memories I sought in vain of how my time was spent with her. Had I at last for even a moment been the possessor of that red?
