Faith

“How do the small birds

in the street know

how not to die —

that whatever

they gather, hunger for, is never

enough to keep them

in the road

when our wheels bear down

upon them? They feast on

what I cannot see

then fly away

and sing.”

— Kevin Young

Babka, my neighbor’s rescue pup, needed tending when her owners were called away on a family emergency. Like the Yiddish sweet-braided cake for which she is named, Babka is sweet natured, welcoming and eager for daily walks.

Her charming farmhouse sits off Midway’s River Road about halfway between the Kohler Dairy Farm and Memorial Hill, with a quiet back yard facing east. From there the soft rise of a mid-summer sun welcomed our first “coffee with the dog” morning.

The atmosphere was drenched in rose-petal pink. Acres of open farm fields, still tall with grass, harbored a pair of sandhill cranes feeding on bent, stilt-like legs. We watched as outstretched necks and solid beaks punched dirt for an insect breakfast.

The cackle of hens mingling with a whir of wings from a free-flying hummingbird colored our bucolic dawn. Then we leashed up for an early morning romp of full canine wonder.

Before crossing River Road for a gravel path in dewy open space, we looked carefully north and south for oncoming cars. Like many Wasatch and Summit County  thoroughfares, traffic has increased. And so have drivers’ speeds.

After a second look, a dark form about 30 yards away in the middle of the road caught my gaze. From a distance and in the dimly lit morning, it was hard to identify. Curiosity forced a solo investigation, so Babka was briefly returned to her fenced yard.

River Road was still vacant, missing the early morning rush of cars, trucks and tractor trailers.

The bushy, white-tipped tail gave away the wild animal’s mangled identity. She was a pretty red fox (Vulpes vulpes), North America’s largest, and was alive not long before I found her. Adorned in cinnamon-colored fur, her untimely death was confirmed by the fresh blood trickling from a gaping, wounded mouth. Standing over the lifeless wild canine filled me with shame. My pulse quickened as a lonely emptiness invaded a once perfect morning.

There still were no oncoming cars. When I lifted the dead fox from the hard pavement, drops of red blood stained my shoes. Together we moved off the road toward a ditch of thick, uncut field grass where I laid her limp body to rest, hoping she would not be disgraced further.

Walking back to retrieve Babka, a relative and distant cousin of wild foxes, the sense of loss stayed with me. Because a female fox gives birth in early spring, litters of four to five young kits (pups) are dependent on their mother until fall, when they develop their own hunting skills. I imagined the mother fox trotting in a single track, her back paws neatly placed in her front paw prints as she moved between open meadows on either side of the road.

Solitary and skilled omnivores, these wild canines are mostly active at dawn and dusk.  A den of hungry, yipping kits would be waiting on their mother’s return. For a time, private meadows were refuge from human intrusions and speeding wheels. A safe home for wild foxes.

In the public refuge that is America’s Yellowstone National Park, this continent’s wild, endemic species have a better chance of survival, for lots of reasons — protected species status, ecological diversity, abundant habitat and expert conservation management — than wild birds and mammals trying to survive in the rapidly developing landscapes in northern Utah communities.

This stark reality came to light on a recent road trip to our nation’s first national park.

We arrived early at the north entrance of Yellowstone at Gardiner, Montana, and headed down the south lane of the park’s two-lane road toward West Yellowstone.

Near Madison, Wyoming, where the confluence of the Gibbon and Firehole rivers meet up with the mighty Madison, we encountered a wild buffalo, North America’s native mammal, Bison bison. Known by another name — bizhiki in Ojibwemow — it means respect.

Chris La Tray, Montana’s 2023-25 poet laureate and a citizen of the the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, recalls a night visit from a lone bison. He lay sheltered in a commemorative tipi erected in a Yellowstone meadow for the first time in 150 years. La Tray believes the wild animal came to pay his respect on behalf of America’s indigenous nations. “He was reminding us to be mindful, that we are indeed all connected, living being to living being.”

Behind the stoic, slow-moving beast, a line of traffic two miles long in the opposite lane came to a prolonged halt — a symbol of forced respect. It was heartening to witness the power of a single wild animal stopping the manic rush and speed of modern civilization.

Respecting the bison’s chosen path we waited, too, admiring the commanding dominance of the giant, wooly beast. As he safely walked the road, I remembered the red fox with the white-tipped tail on River Road. Met by speeding wheels and unlike birds and Yellowstone bison, she did not know “how not to die.”

Leslie Miller is the co-editor of “Reimagining A Place for the Wild” and a former, long-time resident of Park City who now lives in Midway.