In the bowels of the coast of Maine, still miles from anything a person might identify as “ocean” I drove down imbedded winding roads which followed the island’s peninsulas like veins in fingers. The roads were lined with lobstering families’ trailers and trucks, sheds without doors sheltering blue plastic barrels full of icy dead fish who are used as bait for the cash crop. Wooden warfs float there atop crumbling sytrofoam, The piers are littered with discarded crab legs and rubber banded lobsters who died before being bought. Gas pumps rock there with the tide, seeming strangely out of place, looped with strained, knotted ropes that fasten floating baskets full of unlucky lobsters. I found you there, lying among the roadside ferns and gravel curled under a street sign as though this were an afternoon nap. No wounds were visible, but there was no denying your expiration: you lay too still while cars zoomed by, so close to your resting place that they ruffled your downy red hair. You were still a child, really, I’d seen you and your siblings running off in the woods, or coming into the road to snatch a piece of dead raccoon. You were naïve to think you could contend with the danger of manmade speed. Someone else would notice your death and retrieve you to sell for your fur. But how did you get curled into that cozy little ball, like a small housecat at the foot of a bed? Did some guilt striken driver lovingly shape you into fetal position, tears streaming down his face as he repeated “I just couldn’t brake in time” ? Did you get hit while you were already on the gravel shoulder of the road, some hostile former pet owner whose rabbit had disappeared perhaps suddenly swerved out of her way to knock you down? Or did you drag yourself from the road, weak and alone, running out of energy just at the road’s edge? An unhappy grave for a wild cub like you. I was unwilling to disturb you because of fear: your gaping wound would appear, maggot covered and stinking, an image that would haunt me, a smell that would gag me as it lingered in my nostils, a contamination I would struggle vigorously to wash away. I left you there, without an ally. You and your striking fur coat deserted amongst roadside litter. You haunted my dream, Little Fox, I lifted you into the air over my head, your fresh blood skipping down my face as I carried you ceremoniously back into the woods I gave to you all the respect and worship my skeptical agnosticism could muster I recurled your body against the low branches of a pine tree your pointed snout covered gently by your shimmering tail. There you would be eaten by other starving scavengers, your soul finally released.