You know you’re not the most popular kid at camp when your bunkmates slam you into your black footlocker and lock you inside. With your counselor looking on. (Camp Wyanoke on Lake Winnipesaukee no longer exists.)  

It was my first experience inside the box. I heard footsteps going away. I took a mental snapshot of my new world, black and cornerless. My cherished copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables was inside the trunk with me, its spine poking into mine. It was too dark to read. I passed out.

I came to with the box unlocked. I exulted in the icy-sharp air, but this was the last straw. I decided to break out of camp, make a mad dash (2.5 miles) to Wolfeboro, and call my parents (collect) from the phone booth just outside the hardware store with the cool Jitterbug fishing lures.  

Outside Wyanoke’s stone gate, on the crest of the hill, a red fox trotted across the road not twenty feet from me. He stopped, turned his head, and eyed me for twenty seconds. He stared so intently I was sure he was about to speak: “And just where do you think you’re going?”  

Decades later, I was on an Amtrak train passing through snow country in March when I met him again. Through the window I saw tracks heading toward a barbed-wire fence near the top of a hill. My eyes followed until I saw the fox slip up to the barrier. He was too dignified to dig his way underneath. Too lordly to leap over it. He walked directly through the fence like a sorcerer. He turned to look at me over his shoulder. 

“That’s how it’s done,” he said.