I sat out by the pole barn yesterday in the sun, a camera on one side, a rifle on the other. My friend the fox has been showing up on the ridge above the farm regularly to watch out for the hens he nearly ate Saturday. He and I have been having a conversation.

Hey fox, I said. How curious, I told him, a city boy like me to be on a farm upstate, torn between two powerful instincts: photograph you or shoot you. Maybe both. And sad. I do not like animals in my care to be hunted and killed. And I do not relish killing a wild and beautiful thing.  So we are in this old dance, you and I, this ancient story. The fox and the chickens are one of the oldest of stories, and if you live on a farm and they are your chickens, it is usually the same story. The fox comes and kills and keeps coming until and if the farmer can kill him. Real farmers do not worry about the fox and they do not minister to wounded chickens, either.  If you stay up on that hill, I said, I will pick up the camera. If you come down towards the barn, I will kill you if I can, and not think one thing about it.

I suppose I am somewhere in the middle, I told the fox. I am not looking for trouble with you. I am not a real farmer, I am a writer on a farm, and so I see the story differently than city people or farmers. They would not understand, mostly. You are not something to be saved at all costs, or something to be killed without thought. You are a beautiful thing and every farmer I know tells me how smart you are, the smartest of all the predators, the most determined. I know you are just being a fox and animals do not know right or wrong or make moral decisions. As with a dog, there is no such thing for me as a good fox or a bad fox. You are just a fox. I know how brave you are, you took on three donkeys, four dogs, and a Husky in the road before reluctantly retreating, leaving feathers and bitemarks everywhere. But I knew you had not gone far, I have read about you.  Perhaps you can Google things yourself, clever as  you are supposed to be. I respect you. I have heard plenty of stories up here, of the coops you get into, the enclosures you sneak through, the cats and rabbits and chickens you kill. I knew you would come back and here you are, every morning, every afternoon, trying to figure out how to get your hen, get into the barn, past the donkeys, away from the barking dogs.

Are you aware of me, fox, the human with the camera and the rifle? I think so, you would be, you miss nothing. Do you see me? Do you read my mind? Wondering what I have with me?  If I were you, I would keep coming back, until one day, the donkeys are in the back pasture, the people are doing their people things, the dogs are inside the house, a hen or two is pecking around the hay feeder. Or perhaps wait until night, when you have found a hole in the barn we didn’t see and can make your way to the ground floor, over the wall, through the wire and up to the roost.

If the real farmers heard us talking, they would shake their heads and roar and get some traps and a shotgun and wait. Talk to a fox? Put ointment on a chicken? This is what happens when outlanders get their hands on farms. And there are those, of course, who would find  me brutal or ruthless for killing you, when all I have to do is build a maximum security chicken coop or trap and re-home you to the mountains. So simple.  It’s so easy for people to know what other people ought to do. That’s how humans are. Perhaps why they are so afraid.  You know better than that, I suspect, how it works, you know the story.

I do know this.  You will not forget about me and my farm, or my chickens or cats. You will not move on. You are in my head, as my hens are in yours. This is why I will try and shoot you if I get a chance, if you come down that hill. Unless, maybe the sun is right, and I get a rare and clean photo shoot at a red fox back-lit by the setting sun. That would be hard to pass up for me. If I can get a shot like that, I will be savvy and determined like you. I might just pick up the camera, take my shot. Like a fox.