The paw prints appeared suddenly, as though the fox suddenly decided to move up the trail through the snow. It might have been running, whether from Chris and I, or after another animal, only the icy wind and the snowflakes that drifted by, knew. The clouds shifted across the sky, obscuring the sun. The prints raced ahead of us up the trail, following the path with an uncanny sense of ease. From cairn to cairn, the prints dashed along the trail, deviating only as the fox darted across the boulders with ease, where we huffed and struggled to step over to cross the icy rocks with our big packs. A small step here, a stretch, an angling over and bending to grasp the rock, stepping around and tenderly on a rock slanting down perilously toward the open canyon, over and over again we moved quietly through the morning. The diffused sun warmed the snow, pocking the white landscape with the vivid hematite red of the Coconino sandstone mud. Chris stopped ahead of me to kick his boots against a rock, a clump of mud and snow fell from his boot, and the fox prints kept darting up the trail. We hiked on, until the prints suddenly swerved and as quickly as they were there, vanished.
The idea of a long walk is nothing new. The pilgrimage humans have made through time, walking the long road, stepping away from the habits we accumulate to embark on a journey we hope transformative, if only in some small measure. So it began for Chris and I, four days prior. We dropped off the rim of the Grand Canyon in knee deep snow, descending swiftly through hundreds of millions of years of geologic time in the span of several hours. Four days we had walking, the constancy of rock crunching under boot, of the tense skin that soon bubbled my heels in blisters, of the ever present muscular pain, the sore back, the rest that finally came in a wave each night. The long night of the silent expanse, the jets that continually passed back and forth with only a murmur above the vast darkness. We walked to the bottom of the Canyon with the end always lurking there in the uncertain future, but the present moment crunched away underfoot. I trained my attention on every step as best I could, trying to squeeze out the drops of mindfulness from the chattering that went on and on in my skull.
The prints appeared again. As quickly as they had disappeared, the fox prints materialized and dashed on up the trail. We picked our way down and across another rock fall, the boulders covered by just enough snow to hide the crevices waiting for a sliding foot. Slowly we made our way along the narrow trail, down one arm of a side canyon, up another. The prints dashed out ahead of us, following the trail far more faithfully then we were able. As the trail seemed to be disappearing the prints dashed on ahead with a lightness, an almost playful quality of follow me if you can. We crested a hill and the prints swerved under a tree and up the hill. "The fox went that way," I said to Chris. We walked around the boulder to the right instead of the left, following what we thought was the trail. My eyes trained on Chris as we walked ahead twenty steps, stopping under a huge juniper where the trail vanished. Looking up slope I could see a small break in the low shrubs that poked out of the snow. I walked up to the trail to see the fox prints, racing away up the trail. They danced away except for a small rock that sat right above the juniper, where the fox had darted out, appearing for only a moment to pause and point out our flaw. On up the trail the prints darted. The fox kept on the trail for another twenty feet, then as before, were suddenly gone.
The blisters had begun on the second day, growing quickly from quarters, to Susan B. Anthony's, to the Kennedy fifty-cent piece by the third day. Blister on top of blister in my new untested boots. My attention swung quickly from the immediate anxiety of being in the canyon to the burning that came with every step, renewing attention on every step. Subtle adjustments that came with each step, as we went up and down, then slowly up and up. Along slopes that crossed above steep cliff faces, not so much trail, but instead a six inch wide track that sloped toward the cliff. Then down steep drops of streams deeper into the rock that shelved out twenty feet above the stream bed. Off came the packs, slowly shimmying them down cliff edge to the one below, until they rested at the bottom. Still, the heels burned as the blister patches wore off and shifted with the heat of my boots, opening new frontiers. Still the attention was on the immediate step, the attention paid to a boot shifting on my foot.
The prints reappeared as we picked our way across another difficult section of trail, curving around the final arm of the canyon that led to the head of the canyon that terminated the Redwall limestone. The fox kept on the trail, faithful as always. Growing tired as we trudged ever upward, the fox was leading us on, drawing us nearer and nearer the goal, the end. The question of the goal had never left me since we dropped in four days earlier. The tension between wanting to survive, to get out alive, always tightly competed with the reality of the place. With the Canyon, the question of impermanence, of cliffs falling apart in the darkness and freezing air as the night came on and the temperature dropped, was a constant presence. The only constant was the walk, as each step went deeper and further and yet closer to the end. That dynamic tension was playing out in each little two inch print that led us up and up. Fox assisted ascent, we playfully called it.
The fox left us finally at a point immediately above the Redwall limestone. The fox led us directly to the precipice, directly to the base of what proved to be our true climb. For as the fox prints swerved off one final time, we took the opportunity to pause and eat and drink, to keep our energy strong for what was yet to come. As we started up the hill, the snow grew deeper and deeper, and for the next five hours we struggled to keep not only the trail in sight, but the larger goal. The difficulty of walking straight up a sixty degree incline in hip deep snow is difficult to convey, but exhausting it is. In the crux of our climb, at what proved to be a critical juncture at which we retreated back to where we lost the trail, my anxiety grew too strong to ignore. I was saturated, from sweat on the inside and from snow on the outside. At times my fingers were numb, at others I was shivering and getting progressively worried as the day wore on and the temperature began to drop. One step, another, another, another. We would get out.
The lightness of the fox reminded me of floating, as though it was not real, but instead a figment of my imagination. The reality of my aching legs, of the weight of my backpack, of struggling as I slid deeper into yet another drift, these moments were not the lightness of the fox. These were the unbearable lightness, as Kundera called it, of having momentarily touched the void, of having tapped into the elation that came with simply walking. The fox led us precisely to what we were expected to see, what we were expected to experience. No matter how prepared we were, no matter our physical shape, no matter our gear, or hydration, it was simply a measure of luck that brought us back. After all the time and energy, what happened to us in reality hinged on sheer chance.
