#footsteps

Beachcombers

Oregon Coast

Until it’s really over ^^

He told me, once, that he likes foxes.

Not in the way children like animals they have only seen in picture books, softened into harmless things with oversized eyes and predictable tempers.

He likes them as they are.

He likes foxes, and that told me more about him than he intended. Because foxes are not easy creatures to love.

They are beautiful in a way that keeps its distance. Their coats look too immaculate for the lives they lead, as though elegance and survival were never meant to coexist, and yet in them they do. Their fur wasn't made for us to touch, they aren't dogs. They move like they are apologizing to no one. Quietly. Deliberately. As if every step has already considered the consequences. They are careful.

But foxes have to kill in order to live.

And somehow, they remain gentle to look at. There is something deeply honest about that.

A fox does not pretend to be harmless. It does not flatten itself into something easier to approach. Some will let your hand come close. Some will bare their teeth before you touch them. Some bite. Some only watch from the edge of the trees, deciding whether your presence deserves their curiosity. They are prudent.

To love a fox is to accept uncertainty as part of its nature.

It means understanding that beauty does not guarantee softness, and that caution is not rejection. It means recognizing that affection can exist inside an animal that still belongs, irrevocably, to the wild.

And I think that is why he loves them.

Because he understands that tenderness is not the absence of instinct.

That something can be wary and still worthy of devotion.

That moods shift.

That silence does not always mean distance.

That a creature can flinch, hiss, retreat, and still choose to return.

He does not ask the fox to be less itself.

He simply waits until it comes closer on its own. He gives it time.

And perhaps that is what I love most about him.

Not that he likes foxes.

But that he knows how to stand beside something untamed without needing to tame it.

How to admire what could hurt him and call it beautiful anyway.

How to offer his hand without insisting it be taken.

If I were a fox, I would be one haunting his footsteps.

Suspicious. Restless. Half-hidden.

And eventually, despite every instinct telling me to keep my distance, I would lie down beside him.

Because some people do not mistake caution for cruelty.

Some people understand that wild things love differently.

And he likes foxes.