A Fox In The Grass.

I’m thinking of adopting a fox. Not like the animals you can adopt at a zoo. At the zoo they say to the kids: come on, adopt a hippo or a penguin or a lion, but they don’t mean it really. Instead, what they mean is that you essentially pay for the food bill and in return, once in a while, some hefty-hipped, lank haired, second year zoology student will write you a post card on behalf of whatever animal you’ve adopted telling you what a great time they’re having in a zoo that isn’t even on the same continent. This seems tantamount to fraud, but then there has always been something quite fraudulent about zoos anyway, if you know what I mean. But who would want to adopt a fox? All they get these days is bad press – rummaging through bins, shitting on golf courses, walking past bus stops in an eerie manner at night, fucking in bushes, rummaging through more bins, making weird noises when you’re trying to sleep, bothering hens, jumping through windows and eating babies, taunting fox hounds, and even more rummaging through bins. Bloody foxes. They’re such a nuisance. They’re worse than pigeons. No, they’re worse than rats. No, they’re worse than great white sharks. No, they’re worse than Japanese knotweed. They’re probably even worse than Peter Sutcliffe, not that you’d find him rummaging through your bins, because he’s dead. I think. I must back up a second, before I veer too far from my point.

Not that I want any old fox; I already have one in mind. Which is odd, because when I come to think of it I’m pretty certain this is the only time in my life I have ever not wanted to not have a fox. It’s all very confusing. From the back window I noticed it a couple of weeks ago. It was busy doing nothing at all, curled up and comfy, benignly milking the merits of ‘No Mow May’. ‘No Mow May’ is a sudden fad that has gripped less energetic gardeners across Britain. The point is to keep our grass growing so that wild flowers will flourish, which in turn will attract randy insects, which in turn will create more insects, which in turn will attract animals that eat insects and subsequently the animals that eat the animals that eat insects, and before you know it every back garden will start look like some kind of Farthing Wood eco-orgy and all of a sudden we’ll think we’ve managed to reverse all the terrible things we’ve done to the planet. That’s the theory at least, a sort of horticultural version of Miss Havisham’s dining table, but you could equally argue that ‘No Mow May’ is just an excuse to let things go and put all our gardeners out of business. I suppose I shouldn’t be so cynical, it’s not as if I have a garden anymore. Instead I have a communal garden, but we all know that a communal garden is just another name for a garden that nobody uses unless they’ve locked themselves out. Either way my communal garden hasn’t seen the undercarriage of a Flymo for a good couple of months and it was really starting to get on my nerves, to the point that I even considered borrowing a lawnmower and doing it myself. And then the fox turned up.

Sadly, my fox does not seem to be in great shape. It looks a bit too lean, a bit too patchy, it’s eyes not quite so bright and it’s tail not even remotely bushy. As a fox (as opposed to a cheese grater or a fridge magnet) it looks a bit like Wile E Coyote just after he’s blown himself up, if that helps. At first I thought it was male, though I don’t know why. Perhaps I’ve always automatically assumed that a fox must be male, which sounds stupid, because it is stupid. It may have been because it seemed so lazy, bunched up in the long grass, shy yet somehow brazen in broad daylight; hidden from ground level, the top predator of yore and now seeing out his mortal dusk by staying low and keeping out of trouble. The first time I spotted it I popped out to take a photo but managed to scare it off instead, which was also stupid, and I wondered if I would ever see it again. So you can imagine my relief when it turned up again on Saturday and spent the whole afternoon scratching and yawning and moving round the lawn, following the sun. This time I just watched from my lofty vantage point and was surprised at how grateful I was to have it back. It was then I decided it was kind of my fox now, and I also decided it was actually more likely to be female. I have no educated justification for this assumption, just a feeling. My guess now is that she is the last of her family. That her cubs are all gone or dead and that she has retired to mourn in whatever peaceful sanctuary she can find; why would an old fox risk walking past a bus stop in an eerie manner at night or bothering a hen or shitting on a golf course when it has its own garden to do nothing in all day?

My fox (Edward if I’m wrong and it’s a boy, Samantha if it’s a girl) is, to my significant and continuing delight, out there today, keeping up appearances. If a car gets too close or someone walks out on the path it will sit up and canter off into the bushes for safety, and then when the coast is clear it will slope out again and find a new spot to unwind. So far it has been the opposite of a nuisance (no fucking in the undergrowth, no screeching in the dead of night, no rummaging through bloody rubbish) and it makes me profoundly sad to think that one day it won’t come back at all, either because someone will have cut the grass and ruined her cover or because it will be dead, because that’s what happens to foxes when they stop being alive. Rather selfishly I hope that when she does go to foxy lady heaven she will do it with her customary quiet charm and preferably somewhere else, so I don’t have to manoeuvre her limp carcass into a plastic bag and dump her in a wheelie bin. I’d much rather I remember her as the fox that came to visit the garden before the end of ‘No Mow May’ and then just vanished. I sort of wish I could warn her that the game is nearly up, but as no-one warned me about ‘No Mow May’ to start with there doesn’t seem a lot of point in dabbling with uncertainty. But I do now see the point of letting things go a bit in the garden, and one day I hope my communal space will become a refuge for battered foxes, traumatised hedgehogs, unemployed squirrels and all kinds of other strays, if only so that at least something is using it (but strictly provided they don’t start getting all nuisance-y). And rather than treat them like the enemy we should offer the fox (or at least this fox) a little more respect: if there’s one thing you can tell from a beat-up old fox, resting in the tall grass, slower than it used to be but always with one ear open, it’s that it’s a survivor. And I hope it comes back once ‘Mow The Fuck Out Of Everything June’ has been and gone. I’d be very happy if it did.

G B Burton. 29.05.2023.