My Dear Michael,

I want to tell you about my first pet: a fox I'd happened across while on a hunt with your grandfather. "Pet" may not be the best term for it because I didn't own it, per se. I wasn't responsible for the creature's care, though there were times that it would pain me to think of its distress. So I would check in on it, sometimes even provide for it from a distance. I recall you having similar feelings for the various whelps and felines you brought into your homes over the years. It seems to me that throughout our lives we all adopt many things - children, creatures, habits, contemporaries, ideas - simply by giving them preference in our hearts and minds. Our charges may not always be aware of their status, but that doesn't change whether we feel for them, does it? So ownership isn't a requisite for feeling responsible - rather, it only takes developing a preference for an outcome. Sometimes, that happens through willful, conscious decision. Sometimes, it simply happens.

The fox was something that simply happened. I think that is why I recall it so vividly. So few things do.

The Hunt

Nothing has been kept from you as far as your family background. The press has driven the facts of your lineage to a summit you couldn't ignore even if you wanted to. And I know you've wanted to so badly. I am aware of how surprised you were to learn that your family name was a minor aristocratic figure for a brief time. Like many examples of wealthy families, our wealth was not due to success in business, but in deft navigation of credit. Our brief glory, if it can be called as such, was founded upon borrowed capital - and your grandfather was somewhat skilled at the political maneuvering necessary to sustain appearances, the household, and his tenuous enterprises while the longer-term investment - otherwise known as his only child - matured and could place his own name and lines of credit toward additional ventures. With careful planning, this would eventually pay dividends as more progeny, properly reared, would yield more potential profit. You might think of this as a grift that spans generations - and you would not be wrong. Things may have worked that way, as they have for many families throughout history, had your grandmother not died during childbirth.

Your grandfather never remarried. His grief gradually smoothed into fatalism, as happens. I was young and didn't understand at the time, but it is clear now that the loss was great enough to create a presence in his life, something that eclipsed any additive his dealings, his property, or his son could offer. Loss isn't always a negative; in fact, it never is. You can, after all, feel an absence, can't you? Sometimes, an absence is more potent than presence ever could be. The shade of what remains outshines the memory of light.

Your grandfather did not cease all of his business functions immediately. He spent well more than a decade as an echo of himself, still conducting his enterprise though with less and less conviction or sense of purpose. Though he was an occasional sportsman, he never seemed to enjoy it. To be fair, he never seemed to derive joy from much. Even leisure, seen in its greater context, can become additional work, another responsibility to shoulder, a role to play with as much spontaneity and pleasure as paying one's taxes.

This was the man that took me on the pheasant hunt: a man that was forever paying a perceived due in life, one that remained in collection while he drew breath.

Our land was wooded, of course, and not unattractive. Great trees whose names I'd had no interest in learning and dense thickets punctuated by gasps of emerald undergrowth. Your grandfather rarely engaged me and the countryside never entertained me, so I was ill-suited for both. I was scarcely big or strong enough to handle the rifle. By this point, your grandfather had released many of the retainers and servants on the property. He had little genuine interest in the sport, so he had no desire for a driven hunt. This venture was solely our own, without benefit of beaters or retrievers. I was never troubled by solitude; in fact, I was more accustomed to it than company. And your grandfather's presence, as rarely as I experienced it, may as well have been a familiar absence.

We drove up guineas, though only two or three at a time, at several points. I followed your grandfather's instruction as well as I could manage, but could never bring the barrel up fast enough. Truth be told, I didn't want to shoot pheasant. My sensitivities were such that causing harm for sport, let alone as an empty gesture to our socially imposed heritage, seemed grotesque. I recall your grandfather's disgust when, after the second set of guineas burst from the bushes, I hesitated.

"Haven't got the stomach?" he asked. I shook my head. I could scarcely meet his eyes on a normal day, but could feel in that hard stare all the resentment he'd cultivated for me since I came into this world and ended his own. He raised his rifle, pivoted with the fluttering guinea, and downed them both. "Ironic," he said and turned to gather them.

We later descended into a brushed depression. The weather had cooled early that year and enough foliage had dropped that we could see well enough through the skeletal fingers of the copse a portion of an ancient stone wall in a distant clearing. I felt that I'd humiliated your grandfather with such a poor showing. A peculiar feeling tugged at me: the tinge of early embarrassment. A very unpleasant warmth that wells inside a cavity children are seldom born with, but are always inevitably given in the course of their young lives.

Your grandfather sat against the rise of the hillside, his back to the clearing. He laced his fingers and rested them on his chest. He watched the endless marble sky above. In the quick glances I would risk, I could see his resignation and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. No answers are guaranteed to prayers or petitions and I do not know if your grandfather made either to heaven. But I know he didn't seem to hear any response.

A movement in the distance drew my eye: the sudden red sash of a fox at the base of the wall. It wasn't unusual to see them in our part of the country, but I was not an adventuring child. So it fascinated me as it unfurled, posed, and paced along the base of the wall. It was never clear to me why the creature seemed equally fascinated in me. It would watch me, pace several feet, then pivot and repeat. Your grandfather didn't seem to notice my interest. He still only watched the endless mass of clouds slough over us.

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I resolved to salvage my rare outing by bagging the fox. I will shoot it, I thought to myself. But I only brought the rifle to my hip. If I miss, I thought, I'm no worse a hunter. In truth, I'd hoped to miss. It was a beautiful creature that had revealed itself to me. I suppose in that moment, I'd thought of it as a pet - as something whose well-being concerned me.

Imagine my surprise when, despite a halfhearted and unskilled hip shot, the fox buckled from the force of the bullet. It rolled backward and against the wall. Your grandfather bolted up and grabbed the gun from me. Then he matched my gaze and together we watched the poor creature raise itself and limp into the brush. He took a moment to recover from the sudden gunfire, then offered the rifle back to me.

"A fox, eh?" he said. "Better than nothing. Go finish it, then."

Of course, I couldn't. I was devastated. I'd never killed anything, never even set out to harm anything, let alone something so beautiful. Whether an animal is wild or domestic, children often see them as their wards. We depend on the poor creatures even for our early grasp of language, associating an animal's picture with its name and the sound it makes. Disrupting their innate behaviors is our early foray into violence, and that often without reason. We silence their voices. We exert our will onto the natural world and, by virtue of our dominance, we destroy an early illusion of harmony. Literally and figuratively, bloody pelts line the halls of our maturation.

My humiliation grew and my eyes brimmed. Your grandfather cradled the rifle, sighed, and bid me keep pace with him as we returned to the house. "Let it suffer, then," he said. The end is all the same, even if getting there is less than pleasant.

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The Storm

In my shame, I agreed with this course of action and wept in my bed. As night fell, storms arose. The image of the fox crowded my mind. The scarlet ampersand curve of its back and tail. The black marble eyes. The feline paws. How it seemed fascinated in me and must have wondered at what sort of animal I was. The sudden jerk of the body. How its stomach must be rising and falling still, panicked breaths gaining pace as the drying nose sensed the approaching rain long before the first peal of thunder.

I left my room and walked to the main stairwell landing. A great window on the south-facing wall gave view of the countryside we had hunted. The pale blue of the grass and plunging blackness of clustered trees and brush looked similar enough in the muffled lightning.

Grief, however long it lasts, generates a host of accompanying emotions. For me, in that moment, I felt responsibility. The poor creature I had hurt deserved some finality, a coda that by any other force's hand would be unjust, unfair, and unkind. A child's reservoir for self-loathing is rather shallow, and one evening of remorse was enough for me to embrace further cosmic condemnation. My pet needed me.

Still in my night clothes, I crept to the boot room, gathered a torch, a towel, and a spade. The spade would have to make do for the act of mercy and burial. Your grandfather's guns were kept deeper inside the house and I dared not wake him. I doubted that I could even recall how to load and handle a gun since I'd banished the day's cruel lessons from my mind, save for the one which I set off into the storm to enact.

The night seemed to stretch into eternity as I stumbled through the storm in search of the ancient wall where I last saw the fox. Of course, I lost my bearing almost immediately. The rain was far too heavy for the light of the torch to reach much further than my outstretched arm. Our grounds transformed in the night into an alien world where depth was only perceptible by degrees of darkness. Sections of the countryside would shudder into and out of view under blue bolts crawling across the clouds. My ears grew deaf to anything but the incessant, driving rain. In my idiocy, I thought the towel would help me against the rain, but it only became a burden I'd abandoned to a tangle of thorns. And I felt it fitting to abandon what it represented. The self-condemned find comfort to be a cruelty, after all.

Even so, the anguish of shivering and slipping throughout that nightmare rose a panic in me that I might never find my way back home, let alone my wounded charge. I had actually given up any hope of redemption and was in search of a way back when I saw the edge of the ancient wall flutter out of the darkness. It seemed to my mind the entrance of an overgrown tomb, much larger and more imposing than it had been at a distance. The endless darkness behind it seemed deeper than the night itself. In that altered landscape, I used the spade as a support and made my way through grasping bristle and swallowing mud. I felt along the rough stone to keep myself upright and swept the torch back and forth as I entered another thicket at the base of the structure.

Only a few meters into the brush, a portion of the wall had broken loose and formed a shallow covering. I turned the torch inward and through the mass of branch, thorn, and rain I saw the fox. It lied on its side, motionless. I called to it, hoping that human voices might startle it. That it might only be sleeping and would retreat into the dark, only frightened and feigning. The view was too obscured to tell whether the poor thing was breathing.

I pushed through the branches and into the cavity. The overhang and brush blocked some of the rain and I could finally see what I already knew in my heart had come to pass. I remember its eyes most of all. Entirely black, caked at the edges, and bottomless. I stroked the length of its red coat, as one might a cat. I suppose I thought that this would still give it comfort. It shocked me how the corpse moved as a cold and wet solid against the motion and I withdrew my hand.

I am not ashamed to admit that I spent some time apologizing to it. By this point, I was exhausted and couldn't cry any more. I could only speak to the poor thing. I told it what little there is for a child to tell about himself. I told it not to worry about the storm. I took some comfort in the idea of comforting.

Then, in a quiet lull in the storm outside the overhang, I sensed an awareness about myself and the larger world. Something connected for me, much like two magnets must experience when they snap together. I didn't have the language to for it at the time, so try as I might have for years afterward, I could not fully process or understand what I experienced. I feel that I'm closer to a full understanding now, however.

It occurred to me that the fox should not be dead. So I brought it back. Its limbs twitched for a moment before the eyes closed and opened again. Here the crimson coat rising and falling. Here the mudded philtrum above its mouth pulsating to taste the damp air the leaves the dirt the stones I hung in the air above it the light from my torch my hands my eyes my mouth the breath I pushed into it my own.

Thinking of the moment still moves me.

It was indeed alive, but it did not stir. It remained on its side and stared at me. When I returned to my senses, I could only spend a few moments staring back at it. My disbelief subsided with the rise and fall of its belly. And in its dark, blinking eyes I could see my face reflected.

The sense of responsibility I felt for the creature's demise was dwarfed for what I felt for its survival. I refused to name it, of course. What right would I have to name it? To name a thing is to own it, even in only in your own mind, Michael. After a few more moments with it, I instead asked it to name me. I wanted it to give me a name so that I would know when it was calling for me.

I then left the overhang shortly thereafter and sullied my bedding before sunrise. I was a child, after all, and did not deign to bathe unless instructed.