Red Fox by Charles G. D. Roberts

First published: 1905; illustrated

Type of work: Moral tale

Themes: Animals and nature

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Ringwaak, a fictional representation of the forest and farmland of eastern New Brunswick, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Red Fox, a handsome, intelligent fox; a skilled hunter able to outsmart his enemies, both animal and human
• His Mate, a slim, playful vixen, especially wise in the ways of men
• The Black and White Mongrel, Jabe Smith’s dog, killer of Red Fox’s father and Red Fox’s most respected animal enemy
• Jabe Smith, a farmer, also a skilled woodsman, hunter, and trapper, outmaneuvered only by Red Fox, whom he both curses and grudgingly admires
• The Boy, peaceable, and curious about the wilderness world; the only human whom Red Fox trusts not to harm him

The Story

This richly illustrated book sets out in nineteen chapters many episodes in what the author refers to as the “career” of Red Fox. Born into a snug den on a wooded Ringwaak hillside, Red Fox and his siblings soon lose their loyal father to Jabe Smith and his dogs. Distinguished at birth by his superior size, strength, handsomeness, and intelligence, Red Fox must early develop his resourcefulness. He soon displays a superior ability to hunt, sort out enemy from ally, and show independence, shrewdness, and wariness. The killings of two of his siblings by a goshawk and a lynx respectively teach him respect for other predatory animals and an abiding dread of sudden catastrophe; precocious maturity saves him from the fate of his headstrong brother, hunted down by the dogs and Jabe Smith after he plunders Smith’s chicken house.

In his first summer, Red Fox sharpens his hunting skills and outsmarts the Boy in a direct encounter; in the fall, he meets his lively mate, and they establish a den and a harmonious partnership. Among her many skills is the vixen’s understanding of how to detect and avoid man’s terrible traps, laid out in the winter forest under cover of the snow. After she relays this knowledge to Red Fox, his education seems complete.

With the advent of spring, Red Fox establishes his supremacy over his human and canine pursuers when he causes the drowning death of the eager black-and-white mongrel, his most implacable animal enemy. The birth of his own litter of four confirms the necessity of keeping his hunting skills honed and his sense of danger always keen. In his encounters, some comic and some deadly serious, with every type of natural foe, Red Fox triumphs.

High summer, however, brings the most terrifying threat to the survival of Red Fox and his family: fire. Stricken by drought, the Ringwaak area is tinder-dry; a careless woodsman’s fire brings catastrophe. A stampede away from the fiery holocaust ends in the center of the shrinking beaver pond, where those animals best able to survive, including Red Fox and his remaining family, wait out the rampage of the flames. The fire episode, entitled “The Red Scourge of the Forest,” forms the vivid, harrowing climax of Red Fox’s experience so far; once again, man has been the cause of the peril.

Autumn brings the culmination of Red Fox’s ongoing conflict with Jabe Smith, now determined to catch his wily opponent. Yet, at the urging of the sympathetic Boy, Jabe finally decides that the plan of capture must address Red Fox’s wits, not his body; the two humans devise a successful nonlethal trap for the fox in Jabe’s chicken house. A month of imprisonment at the Boy’s home, albeit humane, does nothing to tame Red Fox; he is implacably wild. Reluctantly, a trusting Boy sells him to an unscrupulous man posing as a zoo agent. A terrifying train journey carries Red Fox forever from Ringwaak to an unspecified southeastern United States locale, where he is to be fresh prey for a fox-hunting club. After his initial disorientation and an easy outmaneuvering of hunters and hounds, Red Fox makes his way to an unfamiliar but enticing wilderness. A new dawn finds him contentedly surveying this new domain.

Context

The animal story has a long literary history, through myth, fable, bestiary, and pastoral to a linked relationship with nature writing. Roberts wrote prolifically in the animal genre, producing almost thirty books of animal “sketches,” longer stories, and “one magnificent book-length animal biography, Red Fox.” An enthusiastic rover of New Brunswick’s forests as a boy and young man, Roberts was not a naturalist, as was Ernest Thompson Seton, his contemporary and rival in the animal story genre. Roberts was instead a keen “casual observer” with evocative descriptive powers best evident in his sonnets celebrating New Brunswick’s Tantramar region and its humble people. Whereas popular Victorian children’s animal story writers such as naturalist Catherine Parr Traill (Cot and Cradle Stories, 1895) and Anna Sewell (Black Beauty, 1877) could moralize about or sentimentalize the plight of animals, domestic or wild, Roberts manages to maintain a mostly even-toned, objective view of Red Fox’s life, though in later stories his animals tended to be too “human” or unnaturally heroic (a charge that could also be made of Jack London’s classic The Call of the Wild, 1903). Nevertheless, Roberts made a significant early contribution to the best of twentieth century writing that followed in the animal story genre popular with young readers, such as Grey Owl’s The Adventures of Sajo and the Beaver People (1935), Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey (1961), and much of Farley Mowat and Gerald Durrell’s fiction and nonfiction.

Red Fox still stands as a valid, highly readable example of the animal biography. Young readers can appreciate a fast-paced, absorbing story while at the same time learn something of the life and nature of the wild red fox, not the fox in human clothing found in literature as diverse as the ancient Aesop’s fables and the more modern tales of Thornton W. Burgess. Young readers will not be subjected to the sentimentality that has pervaded the animal story since the advent of film, particularly Disney’s. While Bambi (1942), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and The Fox and the Hound (1981) entertain with graphic, appealingly “human” animal protagonists, Roberts’ Red Fox is offered in a well-written book as a wild animal whose true nature can be appreciated in its natural setting.