Such dichotomies do not suit those whose prescriptive propaganda presents the fox as all good or bad. So I have come to regard the fox with antinomies in my head, held together like the negative and positive terminals on a battery. He also witnessed chased foxes double back on their tracks, enter a house and roll in farmyard manure to fool the hounds. My grandfather, a fox-hunting tenant farmer, once watched a fox escape the pack by walking 20 yards along the top of a newly flailed hedge, putting each paw carefully on upright stubs of hazel and hawthorn. I am still flabbergasted by the fox that managed to turn off the electric fence around the chickens by pawing the wires of the tractor battery that powered it.īut everyone who has lived around foxes has a true tale to tell about their unnerving intelligence, including the Russian documentary maker who, in 1961, captured a fox feigning death to lure a hapless crow within its reach. It was a little revenge on the creature that comes calling in the night.ĭespite vigilance and electric fencing, we have had poultry taken four times in the past 20 years. Once, I sneaked up on a fox digging by the brook on a blowy day, and got so close that I could touch his tail and say: 'Boo!' I have watched foxes on our Herefordshire farm stalking snowy fields by starshine, and been thrilled by their grace and beauty as they sped after rabbits in the meadow or sat and played with cubs. The farmhand gave me a wink and I gave him one back. 'Poor bugger,' said the farmhand, revving into the lane just in time to block the hounds with the trailer full of cow muck.Įven above the diesel din of the engine, we could hear the hunt cursing and banging on the trailer with whip handles. Later, aged 12, I was clinging to the side of a tractor cab when the farmhand and I saw a fox foam-flecked around the mouth from the exertion of fleeing the hounds. When I was seven, a fox stole my pet bantam. That night of the fox was only the latest of my encounters with our largest land carnivore. The one time in the year I was late shutting in the fowl, she was there, killed five and took away four. The fox was merely doing what foxes do: kill when the opportunity presents. I should have put down the phone earlier, been less concerned to satisfy some human insistence, done my job as poultry keeper.
My fault, of course, the death of our chickens and duck. It is never believable and for a mad moment I probed the torch beam around the orchard, in case the four Henriettas - as we call our Light Sussex hens - had roosted in an apple tree. There is always a terrible, echoing emptiness when the fox comes to visit - or, less euphemistically, slaughter. Naturalist John-Lewis Stempel recalls how what was meant to be a brief phone call ended up being 20 minutes and by then, it was already too late for his chickens
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