I first saw Fox Magic one long summer twilight. I was thirteen, staying with my father's partner's wife, Annette Castle. Annete was an unusually sensitive, very artistic person, an important part of my childhood. Annette possessed Fox Magic, and showed me that it was real.

What is Fox Magic? Fox Magic is what Uncialle calls the ability to call wild animals. Annette Castle had the magic. Uncialle has a small shine of it. I'll tell you what I know.

Annette and her husband spent the summers logging or prospecting for gold in the Sawtooth Forest of central Idaho. They would haul their small, rounded trailer-cabin on frightening roads, and live up some remote canyon for five or six months a year--until the snow drove them down. Annette would cook for the work crews. I loved staying there to help with the chores . . . because Annette had the magic.

The first time I saw Fox Magic was up Kinnickinnick Creek canyon, in a late-June twilight, after we had finished the supper chores. Annette said, "It's nearly time for the fox. Take that scrap meat and come out." I obeyed, mystified. We sat together on the trailer steps in the gathering blue gloom. "Come on, come on," she called softly. I knew better than to move about.

Suddenly a fox was there at the edge of the pines, sniffing the wind. "She's wary because you are here tonight," Annette whispered, "but it will be all right. She will come."

She came, a beautiful silver fox with sooty coat and silver guard hairs, immaculate white chest and tail tip, and wondrous golden eyes. You could tell she was nursing a litter of puppies. Delicately, the silver fox came toward us. She stopped a few feet fromt he steps where we sat, staring at me. After a moment of indecision, she stepped forward with confidence and took the meat scraps from Annette's hand. She watched a little more, very near us now, then bounded into the shadows and vanished. I couldn't believe she had been so close. "Last winter was hard," Annette explained. "The snow lasted longer than usual, and the vixen is having trouble feeding her puppies." The silver fox came every night. After a few days, a red fox vixen came as well.

For many years after that,I stayed with Annette whenever I could. One of the greatest pleasures was the daily after-breakfast ritual of feeding the uneaten pancakes, toast, and other breakfast leftovers to the "Brownies." After breakfast was over and the workmen gone to the work site, Annette would prop open the trailer door and call, "Here, Brownie, here, Brownie."

Immediately a motley troop of assorted small animals would hop up the steps into the trailer's tiny kitchen--chipmunks, golden-mantled ground squirrels, red squirrels, jumping mice, varying hares (snowshoe rabbits), cottontails,--and one summer a pair of pine martens with three kits who came every day! Annette would dole out the food. At the beginning of the summer, the small creatures would snatch their prizes and bolt for the door. After a week or two, all but the most timid would calmly sit up on the linoleum floor and munch their bits down, hopeful of more.

It was not just the food that brought them. I have seen Annette call birds from the sky or streamside during many of our hikes, including the usually rather shy Steller's jays, and Western tanagers, mergansers and other ducks, quail, curlews, sandpipers, phalaropes, various owls--had them come to her feet or land on her hands or shoulders--with no food to lure them. I've seen her call a mule deer doe, casually encountered on a wilderness trout-fishing afternoon in a canyon we had not visited before. Annette removed several ticks from the doe's face. The doe then flicked her tail and splashed away through the stream. Annette never put out food to make the animals dependent upon her. She never attempted to catch and keep them. She once told me she needed wild animals in her life. I understand this, because I also need them.

How does Fox Magic work? Some part of the working is unknown to me, uncharted territory. It may be an extra ability, paranormal, as yet undiscovered. I don't understand all of it, even though I possess a small measure of the magic. It may have to do with personal scent. Certainly at least part of the magic is behavior and body language. Most people who wish an animal to come closer keep stock-still and stare fixedly at the animal, thinking, "Come here, come here." This is what a predator does. If the animal does come close, it will probably startle and run when you do reach out to it. You must not hold stock-still, but act as if you and the animal are there together as casual companions--free in the world, in the same place at the same time, as equals. You may speak, move, reach--but you must not stare, grab, or even think that you are trying to force the animal to obey you. This kind of thinking will subtly affect your body language and perhaps even your scent. Move parallel to the animal, not toward it. Lie or sit on the ground and casually move your head, arms, and legs, small movements. Speak softly. Glance at the creature periodically--do not stare. Think of the neighbor's cat, who will not allow herself to be grabbed by the visiting child who is intent on forcing the cat to be petted, but who comes gracefully and sits on the lap of the person who is ignoring her.

I remember Annette best one fiery October evening. The sun was sinking in the west through a stack of thin purple clouds barred and edged with gold. The aspens behind her fluttered like the essence of flame. Wearing old jeans and a red plaid shirt, Annette stood with her arms outstretched to the sky. Around her fluttered a flock of Steller's jays, their jewelled black-and-indigo colors intensified by the slanting sunlight. One jay perched on her hair. Chewing on her shoe was a tiny baby porcupine. Rest well, Annette. I will always miss you. But Fox Magic is yet alive in the world.

by Uncialle, copyright 2002

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