Split Tooth

Content Warning: This section discusses sexual abuse and assault, anti-Indigenous racism, and colonialism.

The motif of the fox recurs several times in Split Tooth. The image of a fox’s head appears on the book’s front cover and final page. The novel frames foxes as inherently liminal and difficult to categorize. The narrator feels that “If a wolf and a lynx mated, perhaps their love child would be Fox, who seems to embody the uncanny agility and size of a cat coupled with the strength and durability of a canine” (69). The fox’s ambiguity is central to its place in the narrative, as it is both an ordinary animal and a resident of the spirit world. This tension of opposites grounds the relationship between the narrator and Fox (the archetypal fox that represents both individual animals and a spiritual presence). In the same way that she is attracted to the spiritual world, the narrator is drawn to foxes, often approaching and communicating with them though some of them may be rabid. At the same time, both she and her father kill them to protect them.

The relationship between the narrator and Fox is notable for its erotic component.