I stood at the fence separating Government Hill Park from the road leading down to the Anchorage port. The road was closed a few months after Sept. 11, 2002 for security purposes. The port director said he had received a threatening call, but did not provide details about the call. A year later, port authorities again used the mysterious call as their motive to keep the shipyard closed.

     On this cold January day, I was looking for fox tracks in the new fallen snow and I found them. There must be at least a dozen who use this vacant corridor during the year. Once, I saw a fox watching my dog and I from behind the fence on the other side of the port drive. Two fences separated us. She was safe, watching us for at least 15 minutes, full of curiosity. She was so camouflaged in the yellow field grass that, when I left my gaze on her, it took me some time to seek her out again.

     I followed the course of the trails, my eyes pondering the secret trails of the silent fox, when I heard a booming noise coming from the military base. "EXERCISE. EXERCISE. EXERCISE.”  It was a woman's voice, electronically modified so that it sounded like a mixture of static and a bored aunt on a long distance phone call. Earlier, I had heard sirens wailing from the base. Then, overhead, warplanes, F-15 fighter jets, ripped the sky with the exaggerated noise of tearing tin foil.

     "We have the most secure base in America," a veteran reminded me as our dogs gently sniffed noses on a colder day earlier in the winter.

     I studied the fox tracks. How silent these animals are. Stealthy. They penetrate—easily—the military base and the port, slipping under fences like the trickle of ice melt. Once I saw one slip by in the night as I stood talking with my neighbor. The fox stood motionless for a moment, then skirted by us, a yard and a half away, aware of us, of course, but steadfast in its discreetness, like the unnoticed man moving importantly through a crowd at an airport.

     Another time, we watched a fox move through a field late at night. We rolled along slowly in the car, pacing the animal before it vanished into the woods. And although we observed it for a full 20 seconds, it only felt like we had spotted a fox for a split second. It was always moving out of gaze.

     Within the aura of the pounding noise of mechanized voice and jet roar, I thought about how easily these fox fool the clumsy defenses of our industrial society. Neither our war machines, nor our over-reactive security apparatus, are designed to handle creatures that are quiet and used to being invisible.

     This, I realize, is a reason we will never "win" a "war on terrorism." We will never “win” in Iraq. The United States may brutally massacre a land, but it will never conquer a people.

     Those citizens of Mesopotamia, those people for whom the cry of planes and thunder of helicopter mean not only angry noise, but also death, won't meet our bulky corporate engines of war with fast, loud technology of their own.

     They will move like the fox, leaving less than an instant, soft footpads in the melting snow.