Catherine Raven, who has a Ph.D. in biology and degrees in botany and zoology, knows that anyone observing her rendezvous with a red fox outside her isolated Montana cabin would say "anthropomorphizing wild animals was corny and very uncool." In her memoir Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, Raven nevertheless lovingly and poetically recounts the four years of their companionship that led her to introspection and a new direction.
"Pathologically private," Raven was a lifelong loner who fled an abusive home and earned multiple degrees and jobs as a National Park Ranger, then a college professor. Occasionally leaving her remote mountain valley to teach, she was content with wilderness camaraderie: her 300-year-old juniper trees, "Gin" and "Tonic"; the squawking magpie "Tennis Ball." When a yearling fox visits at exactly 4:15 each day, she's intrigued. He settles in next to "his" forget-me-not, she sits nearby; initially she reads aloud from The Little Prince. Eventually, Fox's point of view emerges: Raven is "Hurricane Hands" as she prunes a thicket, as well as "the girl in the blue-roofed house."
Descriptions of the flora, fauna and adventures shared by Raven and her six-pound friend lead to her admission (credible to the reader!) that she's avoiding a "real job," meaning she'd be leaving Fox, then realizing, "I could see that my purpose would be to tell his story." As Helen MacDonald did in H Is for Hawk, Catherine Raven does tell his story, a rare memoir by a scientist-poet of a wild creature leading a human to self-fulfillment. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.