Hearing Animals: Thoreau between Fable and Elegy

Animal fables are old. Aesop's are the ones most of us know about, going back to the sixth century BCE,¹ but they are not the only ones. As Sanskrit scholars have pointed out, these Greek fables bear an uncanny resemblance to Indian ones equally ancient, especially the Panchatantra, a collection of animal stories nested within a wisdom-dispensing frame, initially in Sanskrit but eventually spreading into more than fifty languages and two hundred versions, translated into English in 1775 as The Fables of Pilpay.² Together, these two made up a textual field extending across three continents, one of the earliest and largest literary databases known to humans.

Thoreau, impressively, knew about both traditions, the Indian and the Greek, and from very early on. In an undated entry in his commonplace book (what he kept before he started his journals), he begins by paying tribute to both Pilpay and Aesop but then proceeds to tell an animal story in his own way, taking on one of their favorite animals, the fox:

Yesterday I skated after a fox over the ice. Occasionally he sat on his haunches and barked at me like a young wolf . . . All brutes seem to have a genius for mystery, an Oriental aptitude for symbols and the language of signs; and this is the origin of Pilpay and Aesop . . . While I skated directly after him, he cantered at the top of his speed; but when I stood still, though his fear was not abated, some strange but inflexible law of his nature caused him to stop also, and sit again on his haunches. While I still stood motionless, he would go slowly a rod to one side, then sit and bark, then a rod to the other side, and sit and bark again, but did not retreat, as if spellbound.³

Pilpay and Aesop are mentioned here by name, but there is in fact very little resemblance between this vignette and their kind of conventional and easily recognizable fable. Their animals typically talk, and typically come with morals that are clearly stated. Thoreau's fox does not. Rather than fitting comfortably into a frame story, this animal is out there running wild in more senses than one, moving according to a logic of his own, and not one that readily makes sense to humans. He is not the bearer of anything edifying, for he is himself a sealed book, an unyielding mystery. And yet the disturbance that he is producing in the auditory field is such that there does seem something that is crying out to be deciphered. Without language, but in some sense not dependent on it, this fox seems to gesture toward a signifying universe that proceeds by instincts and reflexes, a "language of signs" older than civilization and older than human language itself.

Sound is crucial. For even though the fox is not saying anything intelligible to humans, the auditory field here is in fact more electrifying than it would have had he been capable of speech. For Thoreau seems to go out of his way to create a sonic anomaly: this fox does not sound like a fox at all; his bark is like that of a young wolf. And he barks only when he is sitting on his haunches, while he is playing out an extended lockstep sequence with Thoreau himself. The man and the fox move strangely in tandem, two halves of the same pattern of speeding, stopping, and starting again, a dance of pursuit and flight, making humans and nonhumans part of the same rhythmic fabric.

And yet, this rhythmic fabric notwithstanding, the man and the fox are in fact not one, separated not only by the steadily maintained physical distance between them but also by a gulf still more intractable. "The fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village," Thoreau says, an order of things that is "in few senses contemporary with" socialized and domesticated humans.⁴ All that Thoreau can say about a creature so alien is that his bark is more wolf-like than...