Wild Visitors: Gray Fox

The teetering moment between night and dawn, fog wetting the air and circling the teepee of green polebeans which twists up like a wizard's cap on the soggy earth, a point among rumpled kale leaves, and then! And then! A gray fox, lighter than the fog itself, with a smoky tail trailing behind, steps through my field of vision and I rise and move swiftly to the door to see, but the fox has gone. I look in the tangled forsythia and behind the shed and at the edge of a small patch of woods, but nothing, only cool air in the blue morning.