Last night. In the distance, there was a soft cry. The sound could not be described as a screech or a scream.  More like a keening, it was the sound of unreserved despair, as if all hope had been cast off and horror was at hand.

Somewhere out in that dark wooded valley, a creature was singing its death song. This was not a cry for help. This clear, sharp, high-pitched wavering note was a pronouncement.   “I am done for,” the cry seemed to say, “save yourselves.”

My dad crowded into my memory as I remembered him making that exact quavering note.  Silhouetted against a moonlit night, framed by a corpse of cedars, I saw him blowing on his horn, staccato notes making frantic cries across the landscape.  I knew that sound.  It was a rabbit calling at death’s door.

My dad and I occupied a lot of my childhood enjoying a sport he called “fox calling.” The only hunting instruments we carried were his fox horn and a flashlight – no guns.  His fox horn was handcrafted from the last four inches of a cow horn, boiled, scraped, cleaned into a translucent instrument, and fitted with a reed.  This skill he learned from his father and so on, back into history. How old was that knowledge – thousands of years?

He taught me well. I learned the “far away” call, the “middle call” and the “near call”, each with its own syncopation and inflection. At the last, in the throes of the “near call” I learned to rattle the horn in my teeth, imitating the sound of the rabbit’s paws scrabbling on the rocky soil. It was like playing music – a song of wretched woe.

Those nights, we would drive out into the Hill Country and walk out into the shadowy woods. We would find a good place to hide and settled down. After about a half hour of silence, Dad would commence the music.

Soft at first, he made a few small notes adagio … signaling to any predator nearby – “here am I, the hopeless creature.” Pause, then repeat, shorter pause, then increased the volume with a quiver and waver. “Oh immeasurable sorrow, here am I.”

The second movement began in earnest, as Dad then called con brilo to the denizens of the darkness. I could image their heads jerking up and their ears focusing on the fortississimo notes. Sometimes we could hear the foxes bark or coyotes call in chorus.  Then, the forest just seemed to become much quieter.

A long wait – maybe five minutes – and my dad would introduce the third movement – the doloroso a diminuendo. This was the breath of death. “I am done.” This final movement would compel any predator to charge.

At the moment any movement was spotted, I turned the flashlight on and we had found our fox or coyote or other prowler. Sometimes we were more surprised than the predator. Sometimes …

Dad and I finally abandoned the practice of standing out in the woods to do our fox calling. The invasion of rabies into the fox and coyote populations in the hills had created a bona fide peril. From that time on, we sat in the car and called our foxes out the open window. It was the same routine, but not nearly so adventuresome, somehow.

However, when that fox banged into the side of the car in full flight, crazed and slobbering with the madness, its face all fangs and foam as it tried to get at us – that was too much. No fun there, just fear. I would light up the fox with the flashlight beam, but it just rushed on, crashing into the car. Sure, I knew that it could never get to us, but …. This was before power windows.

One night, we called up a cougar. I am not sure if it was rabid but it sure looked impressive crouching and hissing at the old Ford.  Just like it happens in all the horror movies, Dad flooded the engine and there we sat with a very aggressive mountain lion growling and coughing from the shadows of night.

The fox calling was done from the porch after that, just a step away from the door.

Now, when I hear those cries in the night, I promise myself I will find Dad’s old fox horn and have some fun. I just do not know where it is anymore.

Joseph Luther Ph.D.

By Joseph Luther Ph.D.

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