One summer’s day in 2007, I was sitting out on the patio when all of a sudden I looked down and there was an animal standing right next to me. It was a fox!! Latin name “Vulpes vulpes” for anybody who lives in a country where foxes are not known.
I said to him “What do you want?” “Are you hungry?” “Would you like some food?”
He looked back at me and I said, “Just stay there and I’ll go and fetch you something.”
And he stayed there and I went into kitchen, opened the door of the fridge and looked around.
Some milk. No, that’s cats.
Just a piece of apple and some cooked sausages.
That’s it. I’ll take him that. I picked up the apple and went out to feed him.
He was still there. I offered him the apple which he initially sniffed and then gave me a look of such disdain, as if to say,
“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”
I went back to the fridge. I got a sausage and I took it out to him. He sniffed it and I put it on the floor. He picked it up in his mouth and off he went. Back into the beautiful green world of flowers, bushes and trees.
That sausage would be the first of literally thousands, with the occasional lump of beef, pork or chicken to stop him getting bored. I soon became an expert on sausages, their make-up, their price, their value for money. We used to buy them in some quantity. I remember once going through the checkout at Iceland (the frozen food supermarket chain, not the island nation). I was buying the usual six packets and the woman said “Do you like sausages then?” and I replied “Not really, I feed them to a fox”.
And she looked at me with complete disdain as if to say….
“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”
Little did she know, though, and little did I know, that very soon I would value our fox at ten times the value of almost all human beings. Being with him was like being with an extremely wise child who was always steps ahead of you. Somebody who could do amazing things that were as if he knew magic. Somebody who was always on his best behaviour. Who never hurt a fly. Who was a damn sight closer to God than I ever was. Here’s his four stage method to being given a sausage:
Stage 1 Look as if you’re hungry:
Stage 2 Reach for the Food of the Gods: sausage fried with extra fat :
Stage 3 Make that strange gesture with your lower jaw that is a basic part of “Talking Fox” but one which we never managed to understand :
Stage 4 Show the kind humans your lovely brown eyes, and they’ll probably give you more sausages next time :
Sometimes, though, our new friend was nervous and he showed this by cocking his back leg against anything available, and squirting a tiny quantity of fox urine. He only did that when he was not 100% certain of our intentions, because we were human beings and potentially not as well behaved as he was. It gave him his name, though. We called him “Widdle”.
Over the next few weeks, we all grew to love him.
He was a gift from God. A wild creature who let us into his world for a few short years. We fed him morning and evening, day in, day out, and we saved his life several times. When he could not hunt because of injuries we saw to it that he was fed. Thanks to us, he had five lives.
We fed too, all of the minimum of 15 fox cubs that he raised. With a little bit of help from Mrs Widdle, of course.
John Knifton 