YEAR 1

‘Shit and buggeration!’

It was early evening towards the end of March in the late 1980’s and, in the dormitory village of Cheadle on the southern fringes of Greater Manchester, dusk was gradually moving through the gardens of Hillside Drive. The voice, alarmingly intrusive in the tranquil setting, was that of Alexander McBeath, Professor of Geophysics at the University of Manchester. Sheila McBeath was indoors when she heard her husband’s outburst. Peeping out from around the side of a bedroom curtain, she discovered him standing on the back lawn behind the garden shed. He was still cursing to himself but, thankfully, had turned the volume down somewhat. Why did he have to be so coarse? And why, especially, did he choose to do it while positioning himself just about as close as he could possibly be to the Duckworths’ place next door? She found herself praying, as on more than one previous occasion, that Joan and Alfred Duckworth were out of earshot.

They were, but Joan’s elderly mother Louise was not. When the shout startled her she had been in a pensive mood, gazing from the living room onto the darkening scene outside. It was a pretty view, the back gardens without boundaries merging into one another and linked picturesquely by the muddy stream meandering through them. It was like looking down a miniature river valley with a series of rudimentary footbridges joining the civilized bank, nearer the houses, to the other, more unkempt and heavily wooded side. The trees were stately, an opulent mix of mature broadleaf and conifer marching alongside the water in an unruly column stretching to the end of Hillside Drive and beyond. Both banks of the stream were softened with clumps of sedge; later there would be iris pushing up among them. Louise was consciously trying to warm to these surroundings and to feel at home here because she had only recently left her own house to move in with Alfred and Joan. She did not yet know the neighbours and so she called her daughter to the window in some alarm. ‘Joan, there’s a hooligan yelling obscenities in the garden.’

Joan looked out at the short plump figure and smiled. ‘Oh no, it's just the professor. He lives next door.’

‘The professor? I suppose that’s a neighbourhood joke, is it?’

‘No, not at all. He works at the University, in the Geology department.’

‘So that’s how they talk there. I’ve seen Alfred throw people out of the pub for the kind of language he was using.’ Alfred and Joan were publicans, and he was known to be a stickler for good behaviour.

‘Something must have provoked him,’ Joan said. ‘His wife’s nice. I think she’s from the Middle East somewhere. She makes pots from clay - there’s all kilns and stuff like that in their garage.’

‘And does she swear like he does?’

‘No, not in public anyway. Sometimes I think she’s a bit embarrassed about him.’ She opened the window and called out, ‘Is anything the matter Sandy?’

‘Oh, hi Joan.’ He looked cross. ‘Some bloody creature’s been digging up all our shrubs behind the shed. And look at this - the corner of the shed’s been completely undermined.’ He looked more closely. ‘There’s a burrow going under the floor. The little bugger’s probably down there now.’

‘What could it be?’ Joan wondered.

‘I suppose it must be rabbits. There’s that the old across the stream in the Johnson’s place.’ He pointed to his other neighbours’ garden where a rockery had been built over the rabbit warren on the wooded side of the brook, complete with a tiny stone archway outlining the entrance to the warren a few feet above the water level. ‘Perhaps they’re trying to colonize over on this side. But I can’t let them stay here or the shed won’t be safe.’ He pushed some loose soil over the hole with his wellington boot and tamped it down. ‘I’ll have to do it properly this weekend,’ he grumbled, and made a half-hearted attempt to restore the uprooted shrubs. It was quite dark and beginning to rain when he finally stomped away to his back door. They heard him calling, ‘Sheila! Sheila!’ as the door closed behind him.

Under the shed floor the new-born fox cub who would grow to become the Big Daddy of the Cheadle foxes was quite unaware of the human noise and activity. His eyes and ears were not yet open. He was not even aware of his mother’s alarm and agitation. He was aware as usual of her warmth, her milk, her smell, the feel of her wet tongue and the huge rhythmical movements of her breathing. He was dimly aware of his brothers and sisters whose paws were frequently poked into his face and whose mouths he invariably found attached to his mother’s nipples, forcing him to wriggle his way to an alternative site. His search was always successful since the six cubs shared a total of eight nipples.

Such was the cub’s drowsy contented life for the first two days of his existence. But that night he would be treated to his first experience of misery. After only a brief delay his mother left the den, squirming from under the shed floor. Her absence seemed fearfully long. The bitter cold gripped him and he complained in his thin high-pitched whine. The vixen’s warmth was not merely a comfort to him but a necessity of life since he was not yet able to maintain his own body temperature. He was still crying when he felt himself lifted in his mother’s mouth and pushed through the narrow gap into an icy drizzle. He wailed ever louder as he was gripped again by his mother’s teeth. There followed a bruising and terrifying journey across the lawn, over the stream, through bushes and brambles and into the rabbit hole where he was unceremoniously dumped. Numb with cold and damp, scratched and jostled, he waited, whimpering as his siblings tumbled onto him at regular intervals through the tunnel mouth.

He continued to whimper fitfully even when the bliss of his mother’s warmth was finally restored to him. They were huddled in a small chamber several feet underground. He grabbed for a nipple and found one all too easily; there were now only two other mouths competing with his. Two of his siblings had rolled from the tunnel entrance while unattended; of these, one had slipped down the bank into the stream, while the other was carried off by a tawny owl who patrolled the gardens each evening. A third, the weakest of the litter, had died of exposure somewhere along the way.

The cub was soon deserted again, and the world became empty. When his mother left him she ceased to exist. Nothing existed except the earthy space around him, not even the shuddering screams at the tunnel mouth, not even his father, who had just located the new premises and was being greeted more enthusiastically than usual.

Above ground, outside the known world, the vixen took the food her mate had brought and sent him off for more with her piercing appeal, though she must have known that two dead rabbits lay inside the warren - she had killed them herself during the brief one-sided battle. The other rabbits had fled their ancestral home and were now shivering together under a nearby bramble bush. No more of them were killed that night, but over the next few weeks they became a handy food supply for the savages who had evicted them.

The dogfox returned several times before morning and received a noisy welcome each time. In this way the vixen lamented the pain of her loss and shared it.

The human neighbours found that night somewhat less traumatic than did the foxes or the rabbits, but were nevertheless quite shaken. In three separate homes the occupants were startled out of their sleep and seriously considered the possibility that human babies were being murdered amongst the trees. With the usual British reluctance to become involved in any trouble, each family was able to find some excuse for not notifying the police. The McBeaths and the Duckworths recalled the excavations under the shed and began to suspect that their mysterious new neighbours were a little more exotic than they had thought.

The Johnsons had a better excuse for discounting infanticide. In the beam of their security lamp two red-brown spectres were clearly visible standing at the mouth of the warren, brilliant-eyed when they turned towards the light.

‘Well bugger me!’ Robbie Johnson said. His wife April was too intrigued by what was going on outside to comment on his invitation. Besides, she usually left the jokes to him. He was generally recognized as the comedian of the area as well as the local tycoon. A compact human dynamo, he had hurled himself out of inner-city Moss Side and into the leafy suburbs twenty years before. He was proud and still rather amused to find himself here; it was a joke he never ceased to enjoy. Many happy hours were spent at the picture window watching the garden wildlife against the backdrop of the new rockery; even further back though, in his mind’s eye, the true backdrop was Moss Side.

Over the next few weeks and months he spent more time than ever at the picture window spying on the new immigrant family.

‘You know April,’ he told his wife, ‘they’re a bit like us - social climbers. They’ve decided to come and install themselves in the suburbs just like we did.’

‘Somehow I don’t think they came from Moss Side,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘I don’t know. I seem to remember some pretty foxy characters round our way.’

Robbie also bullied their twin boys to the window: ‘Come over here and look at something a bit educational for a change.’ Seventeen years old and car-mad though they were, they found themselves drawn under the same spell. As evening darkened, the security beam would often be turned on permanently and they would continue to watch late into the night - ‘Snooping at the neighbours,’ Robbie called it.

                                                    ~

The McBeaths were quite unaware of the alien family under the Johnson’s rockery as the view from their window was too oblique. They saw their first fox more than a week after the night of the screams and were slow to recognize the rust-coloured phantom slinking through the trees. At first it looked like a large cat, but no cat was so large and the gait was all wrong; the tail was too bushy and the ears too pointed. It could only be a fox, but that was so unlikely. They had never seen a fox. They did not expect to see foxes, except perhaps on television, with David Attenbourgh whispering in the bushes somewhere close by. Foxes were not a part of their world and they would have hardly been more surprised to see a puma. A few days later they had a clearer sighting - Sandy McBeath, somewhat pompously, declared it a Close Encounter of the First Kind. Glancing from the window in the early evening, a splendid apparition met his gaze. The dogfox was standing calmly in the centre of the lawn. Hearing Sandy call to his wife, he turned his orange-yellow eyes towards them in cool appraisal, his black ears erect and alert, swivelling back and forth like radar antennae. He wore a rich brick-red winter coat over a Persil-white shirt and cravat. His magnificent arc of a brush had been dipped in white paint. His pointed snout, tipped with a black button, was raised to sniff at the two human watchers. His elegant dancer’s legs were clothed in black leggings, and there was something particularly dainty about the way the front paws were placed neatly together, quite unlike the solid foursquare stance of a dog. There was altogether a lithe gracefulness about him that was quite un-doglike. Trying to formulate this difference in her mind, Sheila McBeath thought it was the distinction between a Barishnikov and a Schwartzeneger. As for her husband, the cold man of science, he felt " his heart go out" to the wild creature returning his gaze so proudly. When the cliché came into his mind he recoiled from it like the squeamish academic that he was. But there was no other way to express the sensation; he literally felt his heart go out. There was a feeling of being somehow honoured by the fox that it should choose to stand in their garden and allow itself to be admired. He told his wife so: ‘He’s doing us an honour by visiting our garden,’ he said, adding pedantically, ‘He or she,’ so as to guard against possible inaccuracy. She snorted impatiently; the comment was typically over the top.

‘He’s a cheeky beggar for visiting our garden,’ she said, and added facetiously, ‘He or she.’

As if their words had broken a spell, the fox turned away, leaped the stream effortlessly and slipped between the bushes.

‘Why is he a cheeky beggar? I’d have thought an artist would appreciate savage beauty like that.’ He said this to wind her up since he knew that craftspeople do not like to be called artists. But she refused to rise to the bait.

‘He’s gorgeous all right, but if we wanted to live in savage surroundings we wouldn’t be in Cheadle. I mean that’s not a squirrel or a little bunny rabbit; it's a ruthless killer. How could we ever put a pram out in the garden?’

‘We don’t have a pram. And I doubt if our kids would take kindly to being put into one.’ Their two sons were grown men and living in distant cities.

‘Very amusing, but you can’t avoid the issue with silliness. What about the grandchildren?’

He did not bother to point out their lack of grandchildren. They were an integral part of her scheme of things and she had dropped hints in the appropriate quarters. In any case he knew he should not sidestep the point she was raising.

‘Suppose we were Indian peasants with tigers roaming around the village,’ he said. ‘Should we just exterminate them for the sake of safety?’ He was trying to defuse the problem by transporting it to the Indian subcontinent, but she would not allow it.

‘We’re not attempting to establish a theorem Professor McBeath. I know you’d like to live in a safari park but you’ve got to face the downside. Aren’t they considered vermin?’

‘I really don’t know. But I’m sure we’ve heard stories about urban foxes.’ He tried to recall long-forgotten news items. ‘Something to do with London or Bristol. We’d have heard if people were being savaged by vulpine man-eaters. Anyway,’ he added, hoping his tone was convincingly reassuring, ‘perhaps this fellow is just passing through. We don’t have any reason to think he’s a permanent resident.’

‘Oh yes, of course. I imagine he’s missed his train to Bristol and he’s just waiting for the next one.’

The tunnel under their shed was a clear indication of the fox’s intentions, but neither of them recalled it until a fortnight later when the animal-immigration issue was raised again in the McBeath household. Coming home from work, Sandy McBeath found Sheila ‘throwing’ at the potters’ wheel. From his animated expression she suspected he was about to launch into a lecture, so she made her request hurriedly before he began. ‘Can you just wedge up some clay for me, Sandy.’ She pointed to a heavy wooden worktable and to a bag of clay beside it. He was used to this manner of greeting and so, donning an apron and rolling up his sleeves, he began to knead a lump of clay using a technique known to potters as wedging. As he worked and the sweat dripped from his balding scalp he told Sheila his news.

‘I’ve just been talking to the Johnson twins about foxes. Apparently there’s a family of them living in their rabbit warren. Just imagine - they must have been under our shed. And then, when I disturbed them, they displaced the rabbits and took over the warren.’

‘Hmm,’ Sheila said. ‘ "Displaced" sounds like a euphemism for a bloody massacre.’

‘Well anyway,’ he continued, ‘the twins were telling me this is the cubbing season, so there must be cubs inside though they’ve not seen any yet. It seems they don’t appear above ground till they’re four to six weeks old - which could be quite soon. You know, I’m very impressed; those lads seem to know quite a lot about foxes.’

‘Really? I never even knew foxes had internal combustion engines. Are they petrol or diesel?’

He laughed. ‘They’ve obviously been doing a bit of reading. Apparently the dogfox stays around and brings food to the earth. The Johnsons have been watching all this from their back window. Oh, and they also insist that urban foxes have never been known to harm people, which is quite surprising when you think about it. I guess that means we don’t have to lock up the grandchildren in the house anymore.’

After this Sandy would spend ten minutes each evening standing in the space between his and the Johnsons’ house watching the mouth of the den. Within a week he was rewarded by glimpses of three tiny triangular faces squinting out at the bright light and jostling for space under the little stone archway.

To the fox cub the bright light was an object of fascination; while it shone his eyes could see nothing else. But he was often aware of voices behind the light, meaningless warblings that conveyed no information. Sometimes the voices came close and then, peering short-sightedly from the opening, he could see the human faces peering back and could smell their insipid scent.

At six weeks old the cub had lost the limp, black, rat-like appearance of his infancy. His chocolate-brown woolly coat was reddening in patches. His ears were upright. His isosceles triangle of a face had turned fully red and already showed the characteristic dark streaks like tear stains down each side of the muzzle. The end of his muzzle was white and his nose black.

He already had a full complement of milk teeth, which he tested on his two sisters as they growled and fought in the darkness of their cave. Driven out by their clamour, his mother now slept above ground, returning only to suckle and to clean them. His thin whine had matured into a rhythmic yelping yah-yah-yah, his demand for attention. There were also other ways to communicate; when he chewed at the corner of his mother’s mouth she would regurgitate her own meals for him, marinated in digestive juices - his first solid food.

                                                        ~

His development over the next few weeks was a study in boldness and timidity. He ventured boldly from the safety of the den, but only to scuttle timidly for the nearest cover, a bush or a tuft of sedge-grass from which he listened and looked and sniffed for the repercussions of his foolish temerity. A pause to chew some grass, which felt pleasantly rough as he swallowed it, then a quick dash to another haven. If his mother was in the mood, she called with a soft warbling growl and he came out of hiding and trotted alongside her with his sisters. He was allowed to suckle standing up under the trees but not as much as he wanted to; when he bit down too sharply he found himself pushed aside or even kicked. More often, the cub was presented with the remains of small rodents, which he chomped exaggeratedly in his small jaws.

These morsels were usually brought to the den by the dogfox, grunting his arrival with a low rhythmic food-call before depositing a huge mouthful of furry corpses that were already stiff when the cub tasted them. Occasionally however, he was treated to a demonstration in hunting technique when one of his parents detected the faint rustling of a vole burrowing through the undergrowth. He watched intently to see the way it should be done: the head cocked from side to side and the ears swivelled to pinpoint the source of the signal, and then the spring and the pounce stamping the quarry under the forepaws. For a perfect finish, the snout of the hunter should stab down between his forepaws just as they hit the ground. On these occasions the prey was warm and soft and altogether more juicy. He imagined performing this feat himself and the thought electrified him. He practised with diligence, hiding behind a bush until a suitable quarry - one of his sisters - walked by. Then he pounced in a high arc, landing on her back and burying his sharp little canine teeth in her fur. Other times he was the prey. Though he usually knew when he was about to be ambushed, he took no avoiding action because that would spoil the game; the predator was allowed to enjoy the thrill of a surprise attack before the battle was joined. He once practised his technique on a hedgehog, but only once. Henceforth they were permitted to shuffle past unmolested.

                                                        ~

At ten weeks of age he was sleek of coat and long of snout. In the warmth of early June he no longer entered the cubbing earth unless the rain was heavy. Instead he lay up with the adults and his sisters under a thick holly tree at the back of the McBeath property. Beyond the belt of trees, large lawns stretching away to the exclusive homes of the adjoining avenue became a nocturnal playground, and were also the scene of his earliest hunting successes. On damp nights multitudes of slugs and earthworms appeared on the grass. To catch them he exercised a degree of style and dexterity that was not strictly necessary, turning his hindquarters around and around to examine the prey from every angle before stepping back far enough to endow the final pounce with a maximum of dramatic effect. The slugs had an unpleasant taste but the earthworms were palatable and remained a vital part of his diet throughout his life. Even less demanding as prey were the many species of beetle that ambled through the neighbourhood. Through them he achieved an important insight which comes to every young predator: that by releasing the prey one can enjoy the pleasure of capturing it many times over. Nudging the tiny victim with his paw or snout, he could encourage it to make a futile dash for liberty so that he might spring upon it once again.

The titbits his own hunting skill provided were insignificant when set against his voracious appetite, and it was the duty of his parents to make up the difference. Mice and rats, which love to make their homes close to humanity, were frequently a part of the menu initially but the local populations were soon depleted. Luckily voles were abundant that year; the adult foxes might bring home as many as a hundred baby nestlings in one night’s hunting. Even for infantile jaws these were easy to crush and to swallow whole. Chewing played no part in the process; a fox’s jaws have very little lateral movement and its molar teeth are not built for grinding but rather for crushing and shearing.

More challenging to deal with than the voles, and consequently more entertaining, were the rabbits. These were often caught in the neighbourhood of the den, and so finally made it back to their former home, at least in the flesh. On his own the cub was quite unable to chew through the fur of a rabbit, though of course he had tried many times. He now understood that the rabbit must first be a plaything, to be tugged back and forth by the three of them. Eventually it would be torn apart into manageable pieces from which mouthfuls could be scissored by means of his razor-sharp, overlapping back teeth. The bones were crushed and swallowed together with the meat, as was the skin - a valuable source of vitamin D. The disposal of a rabbit carcass, from tug-of-war to the swallowing of the last morsel, could take two nights and two days including rest periods. And at the end the head and the feet remained as permanent additions to the toy chest.

At this period of his life the cub learned about the caching game, which all foxes love. Whenever his appetite was satisfied while he still had uneaten food, he imagined himself wanting it later and the picture came into his mind of hiding the food. So he would dig a shallow hole by scraping back with his forepaws (he found he could do this at a flashing pace and was impressed with his own skill). Then he put the item inside and covered it with soil and turf using his snout as a shovel. When he had admired his handiwork sufficiently, he would go away to rest or to fight or to play with beetles, thinking all the while of his buried treasure. Sometimes the thought was unbearable and he would return almost immediately to eat it. Other times, having forgotten one of his caches, he came by chance upon the faint smell of rotting flesh or the scent of his own paw marks and recalled with delight having made this deposit several nights earlier. In this way he discovered how the taste of flesh can improve with storage. Often, a loud smell still lingered after the food was consumed, and he found himself wasting a lot of effort in fruitless digging when he stumbled upon it at some later date. In time he became aware that he knew, and somehow had always known, a wonderfully simple way to obliterate those misleading smells - with a squirt of urine!

                                                            ~

While the young fox was developing a healthy body he was also acquiring an active and subtle mind. And his thoughts were much occupied with the members of his family; they were, after all, more important than anything else in his world. He became acutely aware of their individualities. Exploring the neighbourhood he would come upon a shrub marked with urine or a footprint carrying its trace of sweat, and the image of that individual would flood his mind complete in all its details. And sound was perhaps a more important component of that image than vision, colour-blind and short-sighted as he was. He knew the calm unhurried footfall of the dogfox even from afar; and he knew his gruff voice, which was used so sparingly. The vixen spoke constantly, calling, warning, advising, cajoling, grumbling. Her quick pitter patter always sounded urgent and purposeful. When she and the dogfox greeted, he flattened his ears and flagged his tail to one side in a perfunctory manner while she was effusively affectionate and submissive, lowering her body to the ground, her brush flailing from side to side, her gaping mouth cackling with joy. The strength of her emotion was sometimes so great that she squirted him with urine, marking him as her property.

The cub imagined himself to be built in the same mould as the dogfox; the smells of his own excretions told him so. And the dogfox was an object of admiration and respect, large and proud with a thick mane that felt bulky and tough when the cub tried to bite his neck in play. The response to such advances, as to any juvenile greeting, was tolerant but reserved.

As to his sisters, the thought of them made him bubble inwardly with exuberant and contradictory emotions. When they play-fought, wrestling on the ground or standing on their hindlegs and pushing against each other, he felt a savage affection for them. But if he was eating and thought they might take his food, he growled and spat at them, wanting to tear out their throats. In fact his sisters never took a single morsel from him, whereas he claimed the right to steal from them whenever he fancied it. His place at the top of their hierarchy was firmly established as a result of a terrible ritual enacted in the dark during the few days just before their first emergence from the den: a brief and vicious struggle for dominance had been fought out within the tiny chamber. Henceforth, his leading position in the pecking order could never be challenged in all their time together. Strangely, following that short burst of horrific violence, their fighting was now almost entirely good-natured, a form of play, with only the occasional hint of malice. At night the three of them loitered around as a jaunty gang, and during the day they slept together in a ragged heap.

                                                            ~

On a notable day in July the cub was snoozing with his sisters within the band of trees, ears alert for danger signals. Although the air reverberated with vehicle noise from the adjoining main road, he was awakened by tiny muffled scratchings a few feet from his head. He knew the sound well and was instantly ready for action. What followed was a well-practised manoeuvre, which had always ended in failure. Undeterred, he swivelled his ears and cocked his head, pinpointing the exact position of the target under a carpet of pine needles. He leapt, and when his forepaws hit the ground a mass of fur and flesh was squirming beneath them. The vole exploded through the surface and hurled its fat blunt-nosed little body away from him. He pounced again unstylishly, relying this time on his eyesight, which was sharp at close range. One paw caught the stubby tail but he felt it slipping away. He struck forward, snapping his teeth shut on the space between his paws, and the wriggling squeaking prey was clamped tightly behind his canines. In spite of the clumsiness of the performance it was an ecstatic moment full of proud self-awareness. Crushing his victim, he felt its twitching life spill into his mouth and trickle warmly down his throat. It was the most delicious sensation imaginable. The memory of this, his first experience of it, returned to him throughout his life whenever he hunted. He ate his meal with relish; it was flavoured with joy and seasoned with pride.

                                                                ~

Hillside Drive opens onto College Rise, a busy main road connecting the A34 trunk road to Cheadle village. Tucked into the corner formed by College Rise and the A34 there is a public park, which at that time covered an area half a mile square. It was partly wooded and partly natural meadow, an ideal habitat for every kind of small herbivore. This was the principal hunting ground of the adult foxes. (I use the past tense here because even the inhabitants of such a quiet Cheshire suburb are allowed to enjoy the benefits of progress. Much of the parkland is now usefully under tarmac and concrete. There is parking for three thousand cars on land that was previously unproductive meadow - so in a way, English being such a flexible language, it can still be called a park.) Towards the end of July the family moved its headquarters from Hillside Drive into the park, crossing College Rise late at night, an alarming experience for the young fox even though he had watched the traffic many times through gaps in the fence bordering the road. He stuck close to the adults, avoiding the glare of the monstrous eyes bearing down on him. The traffic was not heavy at this time of night but one of his sisters hesitated and then, choosing precisely the wrong moment to regain her courage, never reached the far side.

It was some time before the people of Hillside Drive realized their fox neighbours had moved house. The sightings had already become fleeting and unpredictable - the entrance of the den was no longer a focus of activity once the cubs had taken to camping out. But, though the sightings had been few, each of the Hillside residents had some story to tell from that period, some reminder of the savage new element in their tame neighbourhood. One morning in June Alfred Duckworth was at his window admiring their pleasant vista, which was bathed in unusually warm sunshine. As a publican working long hours he had little opportunity for such idle pleasures. The squirrels were picking up titbits his mother-in-law had scattered for them. One of them had taken time off to sunbathe, spread-eagled face down on the grass. He called Louise to the window knowing how much she loved them, and just as she arrived so also did the dogfox, already airborne in a perfect parabolic arc. As he flew, his front legs were bent at the elbow, the paws cradling his snout; a ballistic missile with a deadly payload. He seemed to defy gravity for an instant at the apex of his trajectory before thudding down on the target. The unfortunate sunworshipper was still in a soporific stupor when death came to him. Then the garden was empty. But Alfred and Louise continued to stare out for a long minute in stunned silence. In retrospect, what shook them most was their own reaction to that masterly display of savagery. Each of them had felt quite distinctly a thrill of exultation, while their sympathy for the poor victim was a bit late in presenting itself, like a guilty afterthought.

Sandy McBeath had an altogether more pleasant shock one evening when he happened to be standing quite still among the trees on the wooded side of the stream, caught in a daydream about thermal convection in the Earth’s mantle. He was startled out his reverie by the sight of an adult fox walking calmly towards him. It appeared to be looking in his direction but was obviously quite unaware of his presence. All of a sudden the undergrowth seemed to be full of fox cubs trotting straight at his feet. The spell was broken abruptly by a slight movement of his head. The vixen stopped short just six feet from him and gave a single warning cough, which deflected the cubs aside like bullets ricocheting from his legs. In an instant every trace of fox had melted away.

While Sandy McBeath recalled this encounter with a smile of pleasure, the Johnson family recalled one of theirs with a belly laugh. It happened on a July evening when their ageing black terrier Smokey had been released from the house for her last pee of the day. She always went out via the front door, which was left open for her return, but usually wandered round the back mainly because of a natural, though slightly suspect interest in the foxes. On this occasion Robbie Johnson was at the back window; he saw her sneak over the bridge and disappear into the shrubbery. Within a minute she retraced her steps at a frantic gallop, the vixen snapping at her hindquarters. As they both vanished down the side of the house Robbie moved across the living room to a point from which he could see the front door. The houses were of open-plan type giving unobstructed views in all directions within them. And so it was that every member of the Johnson family, occupied in various ways about the house, saw Smokey hurl herself through the door with the vixen still at her heels. Only Robbie had had any previous warning of this intrusion, so when the fox became aware of her surroundings she found herself staring into several gaping mouths. Luckily she was able to find the door before panic froze her limbs.

Robbie said, ‘Guess what she’s going to have nightmares about.’

And April, comforting their traumatized pet said, ‘I think our Smokey and her are going to be sharing the same nightmare.’

When it was clear that the foxes had moved house, most of their former neighbours felt the loss keenly. The alien presence had spiced up their humdrum lives like a dash of pepper sprinkled onto bland food. Whether they provoked shudders or smiles or laughter, there was a strong sense that the foxes were quite unlike the other wildlife in their gardens. Somehow they carried with them a whiff of the jungle. But people, like foxes, are not all the same. There was one householder who was able to pinpoint the fox family’s departure to the very day, and did not regret it one bit. She was Hillside Drive’s one passionate gardener, who had seen her plants uprooted with infuriating regularity. Her thoughts on the foxes were mainly fantasies of the final-solution type. Like most inter-racial conflicts, her problems were based largely on a misunderstanding, in this case about the precise nature of bone meal fertilizer.

                                                            ~

As summer stretched into autumn the human people of Hillside Drive went about their human business while memories of the fox invasion rippled their consciousness less and less. For those who drove at night a ghostly apparition would sometimes cross their headlight beam, turning towards them its own glaring headlights. And through a bedroom curtain some light sleeper might see security lights apparently triggered by an empty garden. Most believed that the birth of the cubs in their street had been a random piece of good luck, which would not be repeated. But the Johnson twins told Sandy McBeath in their assertive, you-can-take-my-word-for-it manner, ‘They’ll be back next year in the same den. No doubt about it. You wait and see.’ Whatever the subject under discussion, they always gave the impression that they had inside information.

Certainly the foxes would not all be back. One morning in December those residents whose route took them down College Rise towards the village saw an incongruously beautiful orange and white corpse draped over the curb. It was not like seeing the usual squashed bodies that decorate our roads; this was the corpse of an acquaintance and it disturbed them to leave it lying there. They each looked out for it on their evening journey home, but it had already been removed to some municipal rubbish tip.

When the young fox had come upon his mother in the early hours, he had known she was dead. No longer a cub, he had passed through adolescence into young adulthood and had learned a lot. He knew about death. When he crushed a small animal in his jaws he felt the life go out of it, and even thrilled at the sensation. From a living creature it became a piece of meat. Now his mother had become meat. He nudged her with his snout and she was cold and stiff. He tried to conjure up an image of her rising to her feet and becoming alive once again - but he knew it was fantasy. When he killed a rabbit he could hide it somewhere and it would stay; there was no more running around when life was gone.

He even knew what thing it was had killed his mother because, in learning to deal with the road over the past months, he had himself been struck more than once. It was important not to stare into the headlights; one must crouch in the shadows at the side of the road until the howling noises had receded far into the distance. But that was not his mother’s way. It was easy to imagine her predicament, confused by the glaring lights and the glaring sounds, too impatient to wait for the opportune moment.

The next morning, sleeping in a wooded area of the park, he dreamed that he died. A great shiny car-beast took him in its jaws and crushed his life out. Waking with a start, he understood it was not real. The cars were not living creatures. On the suburban streets at night he had sniffed around them as they stood silent and empty, and they were no more alive than bricks or stones. When they moved there were people inside them. He knew it because he had seen the people entering and leaving. Although they were dangerous he understood that the vehicles were not trying to catch him. They were just travelling fast, so one had to move cautiously while on their territory. His mother was always too hurried, too impetuous. Thinking about her he drifted back into sleep, his tail draped like a blanket over his feet and muzzle.

It was dusk when he woke stretching and yawning. His first thought was for his mother. Putting his head down he called to her with the mournful rhythmical cough of the dogfox. He called a few more times as he began his nightly patrol, but then hunger turned his thoughts to food just as though the world had not come to an end.

He had become a confident and accomplished hunter, and needed to be so since the prey had grown scarce with the coming of winter. When he had first crossed the main road into the park the hunting was easy but he was incompetent. He had been forced to learn quickly because the adults had withdrawn their support almost immediately, forcing him and his one remaining sister to fend for themselves. In the early days he guzzled huge quantities of earthworms from the trim lawns close by the manor house. They poked through the surface in their hundreds on warm wet nights and he learned to pull them gently from the earth so as not to snap them short. And during daylight hours he found it was just possible to catch fledgling birds on the ground before they became expert flyers. But as his skill improved, it was the voles that drew his attention more and more. The meadows and woods teemed with them throughout the summer; there seemed to be a nest under every pile of dead leaves, in every patch of matted grass. The knack was to distinguish the twitching sounds of the infants against a background of other rustling movements all around him, and to pinpoint their hiding place with precision. Then he had only to poke his snout through the cover to snatch up four or five helpless furry balls. Once he had learned to find the nestling voles the urge to bite their shivering squeaking bodies consumed him, excluding every other appetite almost.

But not quite. There was a rabbit warren within the park, and by watching his parents he had discovered there were nestlings to be found here too. They were hidden in underground nest chambers separate from the main living quarters and had to be dug out laboriously, working back from the entrance. It was hard work but glorious, his excitement rising to fever pitch as the tunnel shortened.

With the arrival of autumn the nestlings became scarce but other interesting possibilities emerged. There were blackberry bushes thickly massed in unfrequented corners of the park, and he tried them, copying the style of the adult foxes. To reach high up they leaned their forelegs against the brambly foliage and took the fruit delicately in their mouths. The taste was sharp and he ate little on the first occasion. But the next night, when he thought about the berries, saliva drooled from his lips and drove him back for a larger helping. In the gardens of the people he found bigger fruit lying under the trees. They were sweet and soft and riddled with worms. After eating the windfalls his muzzle would be sticky with juice; he always took the time to wipe it on the grass, first one side and then the other. And on wet nights the same lawns provided a feast of cranefly, which dropped from the sky and settled like dew on the grass to lay their eggs. He licked them off the ground by the score, relishing their crunchy texture.

On that December evening, waking for the first time into a motherless world, he found some solace in letting his thoughts dwell briefly on the carefree nights of summer and autumn. But then, making his way towards the rabbit warren, he concentrated his mind on the prey and how he would take it. He must approach from downwind so as to smell and hear better without being detected himself. Despite his focus, he was constantly alert to other possibilities, his ears ever attuned to the sounds of small rodents. Even his feet were listening - those sensitive pads to which he owed his sure-footed agility could detect the tiniest movement below the surface.

Approaching the warren he lowered his body to the ground while still out of sight and crawled on his stomach. He halted in cover and watched, ears pricked forward. Two rabbits were grazing some distance from their bolt-holes but he knew this was not the moment to attack. Trying it out in his head, he was able to picture the resulting sequence of events quite clearly: launching himself at the nearest target; the distance between them decreasing rapidly; the prey sensing his approach and sprinting for one of the tunnels, thumping its feet hard on the ground as a warning to the others. He would fail; it was quite certain. So he waited for the situation to improve. If it did not do so within a reasonable time he would make one fruitless attempt and then seek other prey. One of the rabbits did eventually hop to within a few paces of his position. He lunged, and it sprang away at almost the same instant. He could easily have followed its twists and turns, swinging his useful tail from side to side, but he was clever enough not to because he saw which hole it was aiming for. He caught it by clamping his canines into the flesh of its abdomen. Then, pinning down the struggling body with his front paws, he closed his jaws on its neck, the long canines overlapping like prison bars under its chin. As always, he paused to savour the moment before crushing its spine in his jagged molars. Blood pumped into his mouth, warm and salty, washing away a little of his melancholy. He tore off the head and ate his way into the carcass via the neck.

When he met his father and sister later in the night he greeted and kissed them more fervently than usual, and they returned his warmth. Even the stern dogfox was affectionate. For the next few days, breaking their usual habit, all three lay up together during the daylight hours.

                                                            ~

But as the December weather grew colder, so too it seemed did the affection of his companions towards him. Increasingly there was a scarcity of game and he found himself excluded from the best feeding areas. His greetings were spurned, his friendly cackles met by warning barks.

A restlessness took hold of him, an urge to explore areas outside the home range. Might he not meet other foxes who would speak kindly and greet him warmly? He knew they were there because he came across their scents at many points along his boundaries, and just a few times he had glimpsed some interloper sneaking through their domain. He made several excursions into foreign territory but his friendly approaches were treated as threats. The gentle conversation he offered was answered harshly with explosive yelps; upper lips were drawn back to expose sharp canine teeth. When he came home from these forays he was always hungry and sometimes wounded.

But he was an alien even in his own home. The other two often kept company these nights with much nuzzling and sniffing between them, and he no longer tried to make friendly overtures. One night just before the new year he caught a rat in one of the gardens. As he tore into the flesh he became aware that the other foxes were approaching. So as to avoid unpleasantness he took the carcass in his mouth and slunk away. But the dogfox sprinted in pursuit. As he drew level he hurled his rear end around, clubbing his son to the ground. He demanded the prey, his body language aggressive. The young fox refused to yield it and his father lunged at him with an open-mouthed combative shout. Tormented by hunger the youngster accepted the challenge. Father and son reared up on their hind legs and pushed against each other wrestler-fashion. They shouted harsh magpie cries, face to face, lips drawn back and ears flat. It was an unequal struggle and ended inevitably with the young fox retreating from the field of battle, the imprint of his father’s teeth on his shoulder. When he reached the boundary of their territory he did not stop or even hesitate. From the top of College Rise he turned left onto the A34 and made his way south at a steady loping canter along the overgrown pavement.

He passed Cheadle Royal Hospital and continued through the silent, sleeping village of Heald Green. There was farmland to his left but the smell of foxes kept him moving on; these were foxes who had rejected him on previous occasions. When he came to Handforth he turned westward, avoiding the centre of the village. Along a hedgerow bordering a residential street he killed a rat for the second time that night, and ate every scrap, skin, flesh, bones and head, under the canopy of a rhododendron. Dawn was breaking so he slept where he had eaten, a fitful sleep owing to the unaccustomed human activity all around him. He would have liked to remain hidden until late at night but was forced to move at dusk when the local foxes discovered him. Adjoining the village there were farms, which he scouted for food, managing to find only beetles and earthworms before being moved on again.

In this way he was pushed bit by bit into the picturesque village of Styal, with its rows of Victorian workers’ cottages and cute Norcliffe Chapel, and beyond it, past the massive, water-driven Quarry Bank Mill. The New Year found him in Styal Country Park where the river Bollin curls through ancient woods and tangled slopes. The scent of foxes was strong but he resolved not to leave this delectable spot.

                                                            ~

He planned his behaviour carefully, picturing to himself the stealthy movements, the alert senses that would keep him out of trouble. He must be more cunning than the others and more skilful in the hunt. Such is the hard lonely life of the itinerant yearling foxes whose ranks he had joined. They are the street-urchins of the fox world, without territories of their own, usually hungry, unable to sleep in peace, tormented by the animosity of those whose friendship they most covet.

The foxes of the area were very vocal; they spoke to each other with loud voices and loud smells of matters he only half-understood. It was the mating season, and he himself was moved by inexplicable yearnings whenever he came upon deposits of female urine with its fascinating new ingredients, or heard the shrieking howl of a vixen in heat. He never answered the calls, neither did he leave his urine to be smelled by others; he pissed in the river so his scent would be carried away. Whenever he smelled the eloquent traces scattered along the forest trails, his mind was beset by images of foxes sniffing at his own treacherous spoor - his sweaty footprints or the low branches that brushed against his fur. And so, each time he encountered the urine or the faeces of the local residents, he trod in it and rolled in it so as to disguise his identity.

Besides the foxes, there were other predators in the area who were also competing with him. Most impressive among these were the badgers, whom he had never met before. They were evidently animals of great physical power, but too slow-moving to intimidate him. At first he sniffed around them when the opportunity arose, to learn more about their nature, but it was made clear to him that his attentions were resented. Soon they became familiar to him and he ignored them. Though they were in competition for much of their diet, they tolerated him, and he them, in a way that would not be possible between animals of the same species. When torrential rain prevented him, for a few days, from using his customary daytime couches, he availed himself of one chamber in a large badger set with the tacit permission of the owner-occupier. If the other foxes had only treated him with the same degree of indifference as did these alien creatures, he would have been spared much anguish. But irony was not something that ever troubled his mind; he knew the way things were and acted accordingly.

                                                        ~

As he learned the ways of his new life he began to eat better, polishing his hunting techniques and acquiring additional ones. When he chased game through long grass, he discovered that by leaping into the air he could improve his view, both visually and aurally, and so locate his quarry more accurately. His pounce became acrobatic and deadly; once launched he hit the target with absolute precision, swinging his tail in mid-flight to make small course corrections. Twilight was his favourite time because he could use his eyes to greater effect than at night. At short range his vision was so sharp that he was able to sprint through a mass of thick bushes and low branches without snapping a twig or rustling a leaf. The sensitive whiskers on his face and on his legs fine-tuned the flow of his body through the foliage, and his delicate footpads told him every detail of the surface texture and every tiny animal movement under the ground.

At ten months old he was self-reliant, strong and healthy. Snow covered the ground but his winter coat was thick and impervious to the January cold.

                                                            ~

Paradoxically, it was his one and only amicable encounter with a local fox that ultimately drove him from Styal Woods. He was seduced in broad daylight by a vixen who stumbled upon him as he slept in thick scrub. The liaison was furtive and hurried, his body acting with an involuntary urgency as though under someone else’s control. Even as he dismounted she was already sprinting away, leaving him startled at what he had done. Only in retrospect was he aware that her fur had carried the disconcerting smell of another dogfox.

In the days following this brief adultery there grew within him a restlessness, which he only understood when his dreams explained it to him. He dreamed recurringly that he was roaming over a landscape that was strange to him and yet he knew it to be his own territory. Without the ever-present threat of confrontation, his mind was at peace and he was able to wander calmly through the imaginary domain, urinating wherever he pleased, treading his spoor deliberately onto the ground. His own scent was strong whichever way he turned, but another scent drew him more strongly. It was the musky odour of a January vixen like the one who had seduced him. But this one would not have the smell of another dogfox clinging to her; she was waiting somewhere just for him, friendly, welcoming, but he always woke before they met.

This vision so enticed him that he left the Country Park, travelling further west into the farmland between Altrincham and Wilmslow. Though he was not so timid as when he had left Cheadle, he maintained his cautious routine because he was not looking for trouble; he was searching for his dream. And so he kept on the move, criss-crossing a large region of gently rolling Cheshire countryside.

At the beginning of February, a few miles from the village of Nether Broomhall, he came upon a territory that seemed to suit his purpose. There was a strong female scent, with only a faint trace of male. No dogfox had been here for several days. He advanced tentatively, moving downwind from the boundary so the vixen could smell and hear his approach and decide how to receive him. When he saw her she was standing alert and wary, looking in his direction. He offered her his most reassuring smile - smiling with his whole body, fox fashion: crouched low, tail flapping sideways, ears flattened, mouth agape. His cackle was fluent and he poured into it all his yearning for companionship. She responded warily but it was response enough to delight him after two months of loneliness. He was permitted to nuzzle her whiskers and sniff around her body as she stood stiffly to attention. Eventually she spoke, and her voice seemed melodious to him, and gentle.

They played a game: she ran and he chased her, keeping her perfume strong in his nostrils. In this way, through the night, she showed him their home range. It was mostly grazing land, but with some woodland and a few plowed fields. Portions of several small farms were contained within its invisible boundaries, and as they passed the farmhouses, dogs caught their intrusive smell and barked. There were field voles in the long grass and bank voles in the hedgerows, and he saw rabbits everywhere. At daybreak they lay up together in a place she showed him deep within a spinney.

                                                            ~

His attentions accelerated the biological clock in her body, bringing her on heat within a few days. She became more receptive, more affectionate, more alluring, and her smell made him dizzy with love. During this time he shadowed her every move, staying within range of the heady aroma, his tail high with excitement. He left her side only to hunt. Then he brought gifts, announcing as he approached, Food Food Food Food, in a low rhythmic grunt. And she made a pretence of begging for the food using the growling whine of a cub.

When he first tried to couple with her she played at rejecting him, turning and snapping at his face. But quite soon she allowed herself to be nuzzled and pawed. And then he mounted her, embracing her flanks with his front legs, and experienced again the disconcerting impression that his body was not under his control. His muscles were jerked into resonance with some natural rhythmic force. The rhythm became a flow and he felt his love pumping from him into his mate. Dismounting on weak legs, it seemed for a moment that the two of them floated in a bubble of emptiness. His mind was blank and his body numb.

They coupled several times each night. He found himself biting her neck at the height of their passion as though she were his prey. Or was it to prevent her from escaping, just as on many occasions she did not release him when he tried to dismount, holding him inside her? He was forced then to lift one hind leg over her body and down, so they were left facing opposite directions, tied together at the rear, until she let him disengage.

In all, their delirium lasted four nights.

                                                            ~

After the honeymoon his life was not so closely entwined with that of his mate. Often they slept apart and met up during the night after wailing and coughing to each other across the fields. When they met they crouched to touch noses, swishing their tails and cackling in greeting. If he rolled on his back, tempting her to romp, she generally declined. She was less boisterous than before, more sedate after their time of passion. There was a serenity about her that discouraged rough behaviour. Much of their time together was spent in mutual grooming, which might occupy them for an hour at a stretch. Combing her long silky coat with his teeth was a uniquely sensual activity, inducing an almost hypnotic euphoria. Beneath the outer guard hairs there was a layer of underfur so soft that it felt no more substantial than a breath of warm air.

In the meantime he came to know every inch of his domain, by smell, by sight, by sound and by the feel of the ground under his paws. Following one of his habitual patrol routes, he would run a sequence of images through his mind, which was his memory of the route. Then the minutest discrepancy pulled him up short: a menacing shape, a suspicious change in the texture of the ground, an unusual sound or perhaps the movement of some prey. And he laid claim to the territory by sprinkling his name along its boundaries and rubbing his anal gland against tree trunks or fence posts. His faeces were carefully conserved - they were reserved for sites of special interest. He even laid claim to himself by urinating on the grass and then rolling on it so that his fur carried his signature; if he then rubbed against a bush or squeezed through a hedge his mark would remain there.

From time to time he met vagabond foxes such as he had been himself. His nature was not aggressive but recent experiences had left him wary of relationships, and his happiness was too newly acquired to risk any change in the status quo. These specimens were usually so demoralized that a warning shout and a menacing glare were enough to intimidate them. After each confrontation, imagining that the intruder might dare to return, he sprayed urine over the site. The message would be clear: It was I who sent you packing from here.

                                                        ~

Over the many weeks leading up to the birth of his cubs he was woken twice from his bed by the North Cheshire Hunt. At their first encounter he was disturbed but not particularly alarmed by their commotion. Like most predatory mammals he did not frighten easily - rather, he felt it was his job to frighten others. He must merely get out of the path of this noisy procession so they could pass by and attend to their own business. But, irritatingly, he found it extremely difficult to avoid them; whichever way he turned they seemed to follow. He escaped them eventually by entering a small grove and jumping onto a low branch that he knew. It led via a second tree to a comfortable hideaway among the foliage, which was one of his more unusual daytime couches. Here he curled up and slept without any inkling of the puzzlement in his wake.

When they pursued him a second time, it dawned on him that he must be their quarry. The baying hounds triggered a dim ancestral memory of rapacious wolf packs that was hard-wired somewhere deep inside his brain. Then fear pricked him and lengthened his stride. He led the chase far beyond the boundaries of his territory, through countryside that he remembered from his travelling days. But when he became exhausted - the first time in his life he had experienced the sensation - he turned towards home, preferring to die on his own ground. He slipped into a farmyard where he knew that the resident dog was normally chained. The bloodhounds were close behind and he fully expected they would follow him in, but they did not. They were called away from beyond the adjoining field.

Had he been able to understand, he would have heard the Master of the Hunt say to his companions, ‘We’d better not go onto Bob Wainwright’s property. He’s an "animal lover".’ Something in his voice managed to convey the quotation marks, and his words were greeted with laughter.

                                                            ~

As spring began to warm the countryside, his relationship with the vixen became increasingly disjointed. She would dart off without warning to attend to private matters. Or, patrolling with her, he found himself abandoned at the entrance to a burrow while she engaged in feverish housework underground. Quite suddenly, over a few short days, her belly grew alarmingly fat and lost its covering of fur; her graceful trot turned into a waddle. She chose one of her spring-cleaned breeding lairs and disappeared from view, making it clear to him by voice and gesture that he must provide for her. He was willing. Consumed by an inexplicable sense of anticipation, he brought a stream of small corpses to the earth, grunting his arrival as he approached. Advancing gingerly a few steps into the tunnel, he dropped the food at her side and retreated quickly, aware of some powerful presence sharing the space with her.

Then, on one of his visits, he was surprised to find she was not alone. The darkness was filled with squealing and sucking. He managed to sniff at the squirming mass of bodies and to lick them experimentally before the vixen’s snout pushed him away. Backing out of the den, he paused at the mouth of the tunnel for a full minute contemplating this new turn of events. He could not grasp its significance but he knew it was important.

He was just a few days over one year old.

Over the winter the Hillside Drive residents spared hardly a thought for their erstwhile fox neighbours. Sandy McBeath was organizing an international Geophysics conference to be held in Manchester over Easter. As a consequence, he was buried under a mountain of conference papers dealing with every conceivable implication of Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift. He was on such a short fuse that Sheila suggested his colleagues should encircle the McBeath home with seismometers; the results could be as interesting as anything from Mt. Pinatubo. She herself was stocking up for the craftmarkets that would occupy her weekends from summer through to Christmas.

Next door, Joan and Alfred Duckworth were learning to live with Joan’s mother and she was learning to live with them. Territorial boundaries were being drawn between them, and all without the benefit of scent-marking. The garden was firmly within Louise’s territory; here she declared war on dandelions and opened friendly relations with the birdlife. The newest member of her circle was a chubby moorhen who had taken up residence somewhere on the wooded side of the stream, and spent its days stalking like a jerky wind-up toy in the shallows or on the Duckworth lawn.

In the Johnson household the all-absorbing preoccupation was the twins’ future. They had left college and were thinking about their careers. In reality this meant they were arguing with their father about their careers. He wanted them in his textile business, an idea they were resisting. The urge to cut loose affected them as strongly as it did any young fox. And besides, as they said, ‘It’s bad enough getting yelled at when we're at home - why should we want to get it at work as well?’

                                                            ~

From the middle of February a pair of foxes was occasionally seen gliding through the sparse winter greenery across the stream, often in daylight. Sheila McBeath saw them stop one afternoon at the opening of a field-drain a few feet above the stream at the back of the McBeath garden. The smaller fox entered the drain and disappeared for a full ten minutes while her large companion curled up patiently outside the opening, his brush draped over his face. When the vixen emerged they slunk away together through the Johnsons’ garden towards College Rise.

One Morning thin snow covered the ground and a single line of footprints showed that a fox had patrolled across the back lawns during the night. Sandy McBeath told Sheila, ‘There’s something funny about those prints.’

‘What’s funny about them?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’s a single line. there should be a double line - one for the left feet and one for the right feet.’

She thought about it. ‘Isn’t it just that their feet are close together? And they obviously walk in a dainty way, like models on a catwalk - you know, putting one foot in front of the other.’ She demonstrated across the bedroom floor.

‘I suppose so,’ he agreed. ‘But there’s something else funny about them. They’re too --- too sparse somehow. I don’t know - there don’t seem to be enough tracks for a four-footed animal.’

‘I don’t see why,’ she said. ‘But they are pretty - like a string of beads, or like - ‘

‘That’s exactly it,’ he interrupted her train of thought. ‘It’s a series of equidistant prints, like beads on a necklace. It’s what you’d expect for a two-legged walker, not a four- legged one.’

She lost patience with him. ‘You always have to analyse everything to death. You can’t appreciate beauty without tearing it to pieces to see what makes it beautiful.’

To her annoyance he spent half an hour in the back garden with a tape measure and a sketch-pad before driving to work. On arriving home in the evening, he announced that he had solved the mystery. Putting on his tutorial voice, he explained, ‘The line of tracks looks like it’s been made by only two feet, a right foot and a left foot close together. OK?’

‘If you say so professor.’

‘Well, it’s like when humans walk. I mean, you get a line of equidistant prints don’t you?’

‘Just get on with it!’ She found herself thinking disloyally, He must be a lousy lecturer.

‘Well, the only solution is that the back feet must step precisely onto the prints made by the front feet - that’s why you see only half as many prints as you’d expect.’ He beamed at her in a self-satisfied way.

She was not impressed. ‘Have you spent all day thinking about this? You have, haven’t you? Just when you’re so busy with the conference that you haven’t got time even to talk to your own children on the phone.’ But she could see that, in spite of the lost day, he looked less harassed than he had for several weeks, as though he had had a shot of some illegal substance. He was still sucking at the problem, trying to make it last longer like a sweet in his mouth. It was a trait she had often noticed in him; when she felt a subject was well and truly exhausted he still wanted to pursue it, examining the small print.

‘Now I wonder why they walk like that,’ he mused.

‘Does there have to be a reason?’

‘Of course. It must have survival value, otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved in such a way. Mightn’t it be to do with walking silently? I’m just guessing now - perhaps it’s because they can see where their front paws are treading but not the back ones, so the safest thing for the back paws to do is to tread in the same spot. What d’you think?’

Were the ways of animals really so logical? Her view of the World was much more untidy, much more accidental.

                                                            ~

The foxes reclaimed their attention in a serious way around the middle of March when the Johnsons saw that the cubbing earth was in use once again. Inside and outside the house the same routine was followed as in the previous year. The Johnsons spied from behind their security lamp while the dogfox brought his mate her breakfast-in-bed across a floodlit stage. Sometimes he entered the burrow with his offering, but other times the vixen met him at the door, and then the raucous cackles and fatuous mouth-gaping postures caused a lot of amusement behind the window pane.

The Johnsons began to save kitchen scraps, which they placed on the lawn after nightfall, thereby experiencing the unique thrill that comes from seeing one’s gift accepted by a wild creature. But they were surprised how unskilful the dogfox appeared to be in finding the scraps. Clearly he knew there was food in the garden but, in poor light, his sense of smell was unable to lead him directly to it. He needed to search for it laboriously, criss-crossing the lawn with his nose to the ground. Was this really the performance of a deadly predator?

In due course four cubs made their appearance above ground and turned the Johnsons’ rockery into their nocturnal playground. By now the vixen slept on the surface. She called the cubs out in the evening with a barely audible, panting signal. Soon they waited for the signal outside the entrance of the den, and after a week or two they did not wait at all, commencing the evening war-games before she arrived.

The vixen took over the job of collecting the few donations from the lawn, leaving her mate to do the more serious foraging. She was obviously alarmed when extra food flew out of the window in her direction, yet she stood her ground long enough to gather it up before retreating across the stream. But these small contributions were little more than appetizers; from time to time the human watchers saw the dogfox appear through the line of trees above the rockery, carrying in his mouth things that did not bear too close a scrutiny. Then his whole family would glide through the shrubs to join him on the grassy expanse beyond the trees.

                                                            ~

Early in May the family routine was evidently disrupted in some way because neither adult was seen for several days. Now and then the cubs mooched around on the rockery, but without their usual boisterousness. The Johnsons began to appreciate for the first time how an attachment to wild creatures inevitably carries emotional penalties.

One afternoon, April Johnson stood on her lawn looking across the stream at the entrance hole. Later, it did actually cross her mind just for an instant that she might have fallen asleep standing there, because what happened over the next half hour had a decidedly dream-like quality. The vixen emerged from the den pushing the four cubs, reluctant and complaining, in front of her. She turned her yellow eyes on April and gave a low whining growl. Fearing that her presence might seem threatening, April backed away a few steps towards the house. To her surprise the vixen shepherded her cubs across the bridge and onto the lawn. And it was quite obvious that she was severely injured. She did not groan or wince, but one hind leg hung limply as she hobbled on the other three; she looked gaunt and her coat was unkempt. The cubs were making an almighty racket, perhaps distressed at their unusual treatment. Uttering again her growling call, their mother pushed them over the lawn towards April. Where the hell was she taking them?

And then a flash of intuition illuminated the extraordinary scene for her, and she found herself talking to the vixen woman to woman. ‘I think I understand. You want me to look after your nippers. You’re hurt aren’t you? Where’s your old man? They’re never around when you want them are they? But what the hell am I going to do with these kids of yours? I can’t take them in the house - you know what our Smokey’s like.’ She put her hand over her eyes and concentrated on the problem in darkness. She was a strong woman, not given to collapsing in a crisis. Clearly she must feed them - kitchen scraps were not enough.

‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ As she ran into the house she prayed that nobody had seen her holding a conversation with a wild animal.

She reappeared carrying a tin of dog-food, which she tipped onto the ground, spreading it so they could all gain access without a fight. Pushed forward by their mother, the cubs made short work of the meal, ears laid back and jaws working away like four jerky pairs of scissors. The next course was a handful of dog biscuits, the last of her spare pet-food. When these disappeared, she fought and won a brief skirmish with her conscience. The next time she left the house there was a plateful of fillet steak in her hands; her family’s evening meal was about to be sacrificed. With a silent apology to her absent menfolk, she threw the meat across the stream, near to the foxhole, and was gratified to see the foxes follow it back onto their own territory. ‘And you eat some of it yourself Missus,’ she called out as she made her way indoors to phone the Chinese takeaway.

Over the next few days, food supplies were thrown across the stream each evening until the vixen showed signs of substantial recovery. This happened with a speed that was astounding: within two days she was using the damaged leg, albeit with a pronounced limp; within a week the limp was only noticeable when she broke into a trot. Thereafter the handouts were spread over the Johnson lawn, from where she collected them, while the cubs waited for her on the rockery, hidden among the bushes. And did the vixen reward the Johnsons for their help in her time of need, by giving them her trust and allowing them to take liberties with her? Not a bit of it. As soon as she was fit again, they got the cold shoulder, she treated them like strangers.

The famine-relief campaign might have been expensive had it not been for the pugnacious ingenuity of the twins. They searched the private yards behind a few of the local supermarkets, arguing that food packs which were past their sell-by dates must be disposed of somehow. Sure enough, they found a skip used for this purpose behind one of the stores. As a result the Johnson food-aid blossomed into an exotic variety, with bacon and egg sandwiches one day and Chicken Tieka the next.

                                                            ~

When the dogfox had been absent two weeks they concluded he was dead. Most likely he and the vixen had been hit by the same car. But one evening in late May Robbie Johnson, standing alone at the viewing window, surprised his family with the announcement: ‘Hey, what d’you think - her old man’s back. And it looks like he’s brought his maintenance cheque with him. The Social Security must have caught up with him.’ When April joined him he told her, ‘You should have heard the reception she gave him. She was giving him a right bollocking - just like you do to me when I come home late.’

But April was more discerning than he was. ‘I don’t think it's her old man,’ she said. ‘He looks different. look at his tail; He hasn’t got that big white splash at the end. Maybe he’s even a she; why should we think he’s a he?’

‘He’s a lot bigger than the vixen.’

‘Yes, but women aren’t always small are they?’

‘That’s true, thank God!’ And he looked at her appraisingly. Then, turning back towards the dim shapes across the stream, ‘It’s like that joke about looking into a nudist camp,’ he said. ‘You can’t tell whether they’re men or women because they’ve got no clothes on.’

‘Hmm. I guess he’s probably male,’ April said. ‘I imagine that’s the way it works in their family groups - if she’s a girl, he’s probably a boy.’

‘Right. Not many gay relationships among foxes then. So that would make him her new fancy man.’

‘I suppose so. Shocking example to the children.’

If they had known that the new boyfriend was the vixen’s brother, the male cub of the previous season, they still would not have been genuinely shocked, but they might have been surprised. A fox does not return to his birth-range except under very unusual circumstances.

His sister’s warm affection washed over his wounded spirit like a moist tongue licking away the hurt. What sounded like a bollocking to human ears was really a most enthusiastic welcome. The yearling dogfox received it gratefully, his ears back and eyes half-closed as though tasting something sweet. He was needed here. There was a paternal role to play which he knew well; he had learned it far from here, in the Cheshire countryside, where fatherhood had surprised him - had taken him by the scruff - one evening in mid-March. It seemed so long ago now, a distant event dimly-viewed through a haze of anguish....

                                                            ~

He had not understood that he was a father. Later he would come to know that he was, though not in a biological sense - the concept was quite beyond him. At first all he knew was that his mate was involved with mysterious underground rituals which made him feel somehow abashed and a little scared, and that he had a responsibility to provide for her while she attended to her secret female rites. He welcomed the task and discovered that most seductive of pleasures: the satisfaction of hard work done well. How convenient it was that all the prey species were excavating holes and hollows and leafy chambers, and stuffing them with helpless nestlings just when he needed them. Like a conveyor belt, he brought a continuous stream of offerings to the breeding den.

As he overcame his awe, his fascination with the cubs became insatiable. There were so many of them, and they grew so fast. It dawned on him only gradually that they were foxes. By the time they reached the age of three weeks, he knew - his ears and his nose told him - that they were what he and his sisters had been, and he realized he had turned somehow into his own father, that massive presence looming in his past. By four weeks the vixen was calling the little ones out for brief excursions. They were miniature foxes and so he greeted them respectfully, prostrating himself in a most unfatherly way. They jumped on him and he became a cub again, fighting with them very gently. They chewed his lips and he vomited his own food for them to eat.

Just at this time he made a discovery that helped him satisfy their new appetite for solid food. Since joining the farming community he had become accustomed to the commonplace sight of grazing sheep, fat and black-faced, like an infestation of giant maggots on the skin of the landscape. He had no interest in them until he stumbled upon the lambing field. Here the local ewes were making their contribution to the great springtime population explosion. An unfamiliar smell first drew him into the enclosure, where he watched one of the sheep struggle briefly against an invisible opponent. And then, to his amazement, the miracle of birth was revealed to him for the first time. The new-born lamb looked attractively vulnerable and he ran a possible attack scenario through his mind: he would have to take it broadside, his canines gripping through the chest wall, and bring it to the ground before shifting his grip to the throat. But the ewe was large and forbidding. Her eyes were fixed on him while she cleaned up the lamb, as though reading his thoughts. She would not just stand by while he went into action. He turned his attention to the afterbirth, which lay on the ground behind her. It was a succulent piece of flesh the size of a young rabbit, and had come from inside the ewe’s body. Dodging the flying hoofs, he snatched it up and carried it home.

While the bonanza lasted he returned many times a night to the lambing field. He found that he needed to be on hand at the very moment when the piece of meat popped out, otherwise the ewe would eat it herself. So he hovered around the sheep as they gave birth, like a concerned midwife. It was much easier than hunting and the reward was great; half a dozen afterbirths could feed the whole family for a day. Best of all, with the shorter working hours he was able to hang around the den most of the night socializing with the cubs. More like a mother than a father, he tore the food into small pieces and pre-chewed it for them. He escorted them on sniffing expeditions and demonstrated the tactics of a predator. He talked and laughed with them, and allowed them to beat him up.

But the supply of afterbirths dried up in just a few days and he returned to the painstaking business of stalking the woods and hedgerows for live prey. There were seven cubs in the litter, and as their need for solid food increased day by day, so did his workload. This in spite of the help he got from the vixen who was now able to make short foraging trips. He became a workaholic, extending his activities to the daylight hours for the first time in his life. While he relished the task, it was almost beyond him. And so, from time to time, he returned to the lambing field hoping to find another miraculous harvest.

Inevitably, his calculating gaze settled once again upon the lambs - what a feast just one of those would provide! He saw that a ewe with two lambs might be outwitted into leaving one unprotected momentarily. Choosing one such, he made a feint towards one of the lambs and then towards the other, and then back and forth on his springy legs as though dancing to some inaudible drumbeat. When he thought the ewe was sufficiently confused, he made a decisive lunge at one of the targets. But before his teeth were able to close on its flank, an almighty thump on the ribs knocked him breathless to the ground. Over the next few days his painful breathing reinforced the lesson he had learned: he never made a second attempt.

His visits to the lambing field did not stop altogether, but he kept a respectful distance between himself and the sheep. His patience was rewarded one bitterly cold night when he stumbled upon the body of a lamb whose sickly constitution had been unable to withstand the sudden drop in temperature. He dragged the carcass outside the boundary fence so as to consider his plan of action without the distraction of the glaring ewes and their surprisingly powerful weapons. Rotating his body like the hand of a clock, he shuffled around the lamb, examining it from every angle. In his mind’s eye he saw himself dragging it home and felt the strain in his jaw and neck muscles. He and the vixen would tear it open for the cubs to eat. He licked his lips, trying to imagine the taste. But he could not, since he had never sampled it. The thought came to him of biting into the flesh and finding it unpleasant like a mole or a shrew. He should eat some before investing all the effort of taking it to the den. The decision made, he crushed the neck between his powerful molars, severing the head from the body. This allowed him to rip away the hide and tear a piece of flesh from one shoulder. The flavour was strange, but acceptable considering how great his need was. He ate more, satisfying his own hunger before tugging the prize home. The severed head was left behind, half buried. He had sprinkled his signature on it so as to inform any passing fox that this was his handiwork.

Joseph Ramsbottom found the odorous relic early the next morning when he visited his lambing field. His mind sharpened by cold fury, he examined the evidence, named the crime, identified the chief suspect, tried and convicted him, all within a matter of minutes. A further few minutes were enough to decide the sentence.

When the fox paid his next visit, the firing squad was in place slightly downwind of the lambing enclosure. At a distance of twenty paces he caught the muffled whine of a dog under restraint, and he bolted. There were shouts and barks, and shockingly loud noises like branches being snapped right inside his ears. A searing pain struck him; he thought the jaws of some savage hound had thudded into his hindquarters, ripping away the flesh. He swung around to face it, but it was not there. Yet he knew that Death was at his heels - it took the form of a clamouring throng of men and dogs some distance behind him.

Blanking out the pain, he ran on three legs while focussing his thoughts on the need to find refuge. Time slowed down and a calm sensation flooded his mind - nature’s gift to any creature finding itself in extreme peril. He was able to think clearly, allowing his imagination to range over the territory, searching outwards from his present location within it. Among his memories he found the farmhouse, just a couple of fields away, in which he had hidden from the North Cheshire Hunt. On that occasion the men and dogs had stopped short. Without hesitation, he turned towards the Wainwright farmyard.

Bob Wainwright’s supper was disturbed by the barking of his own dog out in the yard. When he stepped out from the house the dog was at the end of its rope, scrabbling at a pile of rotten planks and rusty machinery. And an angry posse had just entered the yard. Bob called his collie to heel and greeted the visitors impassively, ‘Evening lads,’ while his eyes swept across the tense faces. Several of the local "fox-shooters" were there, including his neighbour Joe Ramsbottom. They carried shotguns, and their dogs strained at the leash.

He asked, quite superfluously, ‘What’s up then? What you after?’

With a jerk of his head Joe indicated the spot that had so excited the Wainwrights’ collie. ‘We’re after the bloody fox what’s hiding under them planks. It’s a sheep-worrier Bob - it’s had one of me own lambs the night before last.’

‘Your lambs are goin’ on three weeks old by now Joe. It must be a hell of a fox to take a lamb that big - unless it was already dead. Or sick.’

‘Look Bob, I don’t want a debate about it. That animal’s a killer. We’ve had a shot at it and it’s likely bleeding to death in there. We’ll let the dogs loose and it’ll all be over in no time, quick and humane.’

Bob shook his head. ‘I’ll not have any creature torn apart in my yard. If that’s what turns you on, go and do it on yer own land.’

‘Aw come on Bob, yer talking like a fuckin’ townie. That’s Benjamin Bunny talk that is. They can’t suffer if they aven’t got conscious minds. They’re not aware of what’s happening to them.’

Someone said, ‘He cares more about vermin than he does about his neighbours.’

‘I care about me neighbours. And I care about meself,’ Bob said. ‘I don’t have any bother from foxes but I have plenty of bother from rabbits and rodents. And if it wasn’t for foxes I’d have a lot more. Joe ‘ere doesn’t grow vegetables but some of you others do - you know what I’m talking about.’

‘What about the lambs?’ Joe’s voice was developing an edge. ‘Foxes kill lambs. Are you goin’ to say they don’t?’

‘Aye all right, foxes kill some lambs, and farmers kill ten times as many with bad husbandry. No Joe, I’m not looking at anyone in particular. But maybe you should be shooting farmers instead of foxes.’

‘Don’t tempt me!’

‘Look, I’m just saying they kill some lambs but they don’t kill many. The trouble with you is that even if foxes took just one lamb in the whole fuckin’ country, you’d want to wipe them all out.’

‘At the moment I only want to wipe out this one. And so would you if you saw what it did to that lamb. The way it killed it. It tore its head off! That really turns my stomach - what kind of vicious bastard would tear a lamb’s head off?’

‘Why should that worry you Joe?’ Bob asked innocently. ‘The lamb’s only a dumb animal - it can’t feel any suffering remember. Or is it just foxes that are too dumb to suffer? I suppose lambs are the intellectual giants of the animal kingdom.’

There followed a short silence throbbing with angry thoughts. Somebody asked, ‘What you goin’ to do wi’t fox Bob? Are you goin’ to adopt it into yer family?’

‘He’s goin’ to train it up as a sheepdog,’ another voice suggested. Laughter broke the tension, and Bob felt his muscles relax.

Joe said, ‘This is a bad night’s work Bob,’ and turned to leave.

As they disappeared into the night, Bob heard one final remark. ‘He always was a contrary bugger Bob Wainwright, even in bloody nursery school.’ He had to smile, recognizing as he did the truth of the comment. He definitely was a contrary bugger, and that was the real reason for his defence of the foxes in the face of his neighbours’ horrified incredulity. It was precisely their predictable reaction that led him to adopt the role of animal lover. In the last analysis his behaviour was no more rational than theirs.

As he approached the makeshift refuge, the musky odour of his uninvited guest cut through all the farmyard smells to meet him. He scratched the stubble on his chin and spoke to the pile of scrap: ‘What the hell am I goin’ to do with you, young man?’ Still thoughtful, he returned to the supper table, taking the collie inside with him. He pulled his chair back but did not sit down. He picked up his plate and carried it out to the yard, setting the food down beside the heap of rubbish. ‘I really don’t know if you’re a saint or a sinner,’ he said to the empty yard. ‘I’ll tell you one thing though: if you’ve got to go round tearing off lambs' heads, you’d better get yourself a new lawyer.’

The yearling fox knew that he must lie still for many days - his body told him so. But he was heartsick for his deserted family. He felt their impatience just as though he were waiting with them.

The man whose feet smelled of cow-dung walked near the shelter every day and carelessly left his own food and water on the ground. The fox scavenged it gratefully while the man was not there to watch. Mostly he slept, waking periodically to lick as much of his wounded flank as his tongue could reach. His young body mended quickly. On the fourth night he squirmed from his refuge for the last time and hobbled from the yard, pausing every few paces to let the pain subside.

The half-mile to the cubbing earth drained him, and when he arrived his wound was bleeding. Yet he was so filled with thoughts of family that he was hardly aware of any discomfort. He uttered the warbling growl that would summon the cubs to welcome him. But they did not appear, and the tunnels of the den were empty and silent. The smells were weak and were contaminated with alien hints of dog scent and human scent. Outside the entrances, the excavated soil was heavily trampled.

While trying to grasp the meaning of this desertion he fell into an exhausted sleep. When he woke he recalled how the vixen had once transported some of the cubs to another earth only to return them after a few days. He dragged himself hopefully to the remembered spot, and then he visited in turn all the other sites the vixen had prepared in the weeks leading up to her confinement.

All in vain. Over the next few days, as his strength grew, so also did a great despairing hollowness inside him. He brought prey back to the breeding earth, hoping this might conjure up those who should be eating it. And he slept there to be close to their waning smell.

He combed the territory, zigzagging back and forth, pausing every few paces to lower his muzzle and fill the night with his wah-wah-wah love call. Bob Wainwright heard it and felt unaccountably heavy-hearted. Others who heard the call found it provoking; it represented a continued threat to their livelihood.

And so it was that the fox was disturbed from his sleep one morning by the stealthy approach of men and dogs downwind of the breeding earth. At the instant of waking he knew with absolute certainty why the vixen and cubs were not here where they should be. The whole scene flashed through his mind in all its ugly detail: the bumbling arrival of the implacable group; the wiry dogs down the tunnel; the screams; the barks; the small corpses dragged into the daylight; the vixen’s futile struggle; the smell of blood. An urge to be away from this place lifted him to his feet. He slipped out the back way, crouching low until he reached the field boundary. Then, with the hedgerow to screen him from view, he cantered as fast as his injury would allow.

At a hawthorn hedge bordering the public road, he paused. This was the boundary of his territory. He turned to take one final sniff. Memories crowded into his head. But they were dislodged by the clamour of his pursuers. His home had become tainted; he set his face against it and loped away down the country lane. More distant memories of suburban gardens and parkland meadows now drew him eastward into the sunrise.

                                                        ~

He did not need to stop and think about the route; the whole region was etched on his brain from his time as a vagrant. A few motorists were startled to see a fox streak across the busy Hale-Mobberly road in broad daylight, and the children at Ashley Primary School paused in their playground games to watch him skirt a field of sprouting wheat. By late morning he stood on high ground bordering Styal Woods, looking back myopically over the gently undulating farmland. Several bright fields of rape wafted their sickly-sweet aroma to his twitching nostrils. The wind ruffled their surface like the soft fur on a young cub. He turned away into the woods and headed for the nearest of many well-remembered hiding places.

When he woke it was dusk. It took a moment to re-orient himself to the surroundings - to separate dream from reality, and become re-aquatinted with the pain in his soul. The thought of his childhood home tugged him with ever greater urgency. Without pausing to forage he cut across the Country Park to Styal Village and then retraced the steps that had brought him this way many months before, through Handforth and Heald Green and along the A34.

He entered the park - his park - through the fence opposite Cheadle Royal Hospital. Absorbing the familiar smells of the meadow, he noted the absence of fox-odour; there were some faint unrecognizable traces only. Hunger, long suppressed, forced its way into his awareness. He caught three adult voles in quick succession under the tangled weeds. Then, perking his ears for the squeaks of nestlings, he raided several nests, filling his mouth with tiny plump bodies. Some lingering paternalistic instinct prevented him from swallowing them. He continued his exploration with a full mouth.

And so, when he arrived at the cubbing earth on Hillside Drive, he brought gifts with him as befits a visiting uncle. The cubs thrilled him, oblivious though he was to the complicated relationships linking them to him - they were his nephews and nieces but also his half-brothers and half-sisters. They were wary of him but that would soon pass. He knew their mother instantly by her smell and her voice , and by her unusual white paws - he remembered how brightly they flashed when she moved through the grass. She was his sibling and playmate. Her warm affection washed over his wounded spirit like a moist tongue licking away the hurt.

The Johnsons were uncertain whether to continue their contributions to the fox family. As a self-made businessman Robbie was dead against the Dependency Culture - it was one of his favourite topics. The vixen was a single mother but she now had a lover boy living in. According to DSS rules the welfare should stop. April disagreed. She pointed out that the lover boy was clearly an invalid. And besides, she wanted to see them on the lawn rather than hiding behind the trees like last year. It was a democratic household, so she listened carefully to his arguments and then did what she wanted.

In truth they all welcomed the chance to study the new lover boy, to assess his potential as a step father. The more they saw of him the more they found to appreciate. He had a calmness of manner that was unique among the foxes they had known. His unhurried pace and nonchalant demeanour contrasted sharply with the nervous darting behaviour of the others. The Johnsons themselves were even allowed to join him in the garden provided they made no sharp noise or sudden movement and provided they did not approach too closely. And so it was that they were treated to the astonishing spectacle of a fox demolishing chicken leg bones as though they were stalks of celery. The sound effects at close range were awesome - more like a mechanical crusher than a creature of flesh and blood. It was an impressive display of power.

But under the tough shell there was a soft centre. They glimpsed it in the way he greeted the vixen with a kiss when she joined him on the lawn one night. Leaving his slice of pizza, he turned towards her as she jumped the stream. They quickly darted together crouching low on their stomachs and touched noses. He showed it too in the unselfishness of his foraging behaviour. After eating just one item on the lawn he would ferry the remainder across the stream and through the trees where the others usually hung out. When he tried to carry more than one piece of food in his mouth he managed to look both inept and thoughtful at the same time. With a large piece in the back of his mouth he could not manage to pick up a smaller one because his jaws were too wide apart, but this did not prevent him from trying repeatedly with an air of gormless puzzlement. If he succeeded in holding two pieces he might well lose them by trying to take up a third. He was not entirely stupid though; while he could not foresee the correct order in which the pieces should be picked up, he clearly realized there was a correct order because after several failures he would purposely drop what was already in his mouth and try a different sequence.

The vixen was a much less willing performer on the Johnson stage. She was surprisingly shy, considering the bold way she had recruited April as a foster mother when she became widowed. Her visits to the lawn were brief and she vanished at the merest hint of a human presence. Even her cubs, from about two and a half months old, were more brazen than she was. When they first began to appear on the lawn they seemed to be there for adventure rather than food. Though they sometimes picked food up, they usually put it down again after frisking a few paces with it. It was a game; they were playing at being adults, showing they could provide for themselves if they really wanted to. A favourite stunt was to cross the stream onto the Johnsons’ lawn and then dash across several gardens before returning to the safety of the trees via a different bridge. Along the way several security lights were triggered one by one and the neighbours twitched their curtains aside to catch the end of the display.

                                                            ~

Sandy McBeath was one of them. But he was not satisfied with these public performances. He wanted to spy on the foxes’ private lives. It was scientific curiosity, he said, but was not able to explain to Sheila in what way that was different from simple prying and interference. He hid for long periods among the trees, squinting through the leaves like a Peeping Tom at a keyhole. And he saw the cubs and adults roistering on the huge expanse of lawn that belonged to the posh street running parallel to Hillside Drive. Their games all seemed to be various kinds of martial art and he classified them methodically into three categories: wrestling (which began with one fox pouncing upon another), boxing (upright, face to face) and jousting (charging at each other and colliding flank to flank). Invariably he was discovered and the family melted away at a single warning bark from the vixen. The lover boy usually remained on the playground looking bewildered and slightly offended at being deserted so abruptly. As for Sandy McBeath, he would slink home, torn between feelings of exaltation and guilt. On the one hand his patience had been delightfully rewarded, but on the other hand he had intruded on their private pleasures and had alarmed them. Perhaps they would emigrate to a more peaceful home where their privacy was not invaded.

He dragged Sheila into his self-recrimination by asking her, ‘What d’you think? D’you think I’ve frightened them off?’

She said, ‘Yes, you probably have. You just don’t understand how Nature needs to be left alone to take its own course. You show your concern by meddling. But what’s the point of discussing it? You’re worried now but you’ll be out there again tomorrow doing the same thing.’ And then she said something about goldfish that made him pensive and a bit shamefaced. It was a code word between them referring to an episode in their past where he had harassed to death a series of goldfish by insisting on changing their water every day. It epitomized for her the lethal quality of his affections.

Just as she predicted he did hide among the trees again the next evening. And the next.

It was through one of these spying expeditions that the lover boy acquired a proper name, which was adopted by common consent among the neighbours. It was still light as Sandy McBeath made his way home that evening, and he met Joan Duckworth with her mother. ‘Our new fox is definitely a boy,’ he told them gleefully. ‘It’s official. He’s got the equipment to prove it. And quite impressive equipment it is too.’ As he walked away he announced to the world at large, ‘I hereby christen him Big Daddy.’

They watched his retreating back for a few moments and then Joan cast a concerned glance at her mother. But she need not have worried; Louise was quite unruffled. ‘He probably meant some kind of scientific equipment,’ she explained. ‘It’s amazing what they can measure these days.’

When Sandy gave the news to Sheila she said, ‘You must have really crawled on your belly to get that view.’

‘Well yes,’ he admitted with a sheepish grin, ‘I did have to stoop pretty low.’

She read aloud from a tabloid headline that seemed to be written somewhere in the air above her: ‘Peeping Tom University Professor in Animal-Genital Scandal. "I have sunk pretty low," he admitted this evening.’

Sandy McBeath’s most puzzling experience during this period was an encounter with the vixen. She came upon him as he hid among the trees and he froze, hoping he looked like a tree trunk. Clearly he did not, because she was startled and shied away from him. But, surprisingly, she did not run away. After glaring at him intently for a full minute, she continued to forage among the bushes, sniffing here and there and pushing her nose under patches of superficial debris. Every so often she turned suddenly and stared at his motionless figure as though seeking confirmation (of what?). She could see him, but she was not afraid. Yet if he had made the slightest movement, he knew she would have been put to flight instantly. It seemed unlikely, with his living scent, that she mistook him for a statue. There was evidently some deep distinction in a fox’s psyche between moving objects and stationary ones.

                                                            ~

Joan Duckworth was determined to be on good terms socially with the new neighbours, so she decided to invite them over for tea on the Duckworth lawn. She was ideally placed to do it as their South-Manchester pub was renowned for its bar meals, and the portions were big enough to ensure a constant supply of leftovers. So it was that the Hillside foxes were treated to dishes featured in the Egon Ronay Guide. Alfred was indignant with her. ‘If you want to turn them into pets, why don’t you give them Pedigree Chum and have done with it?’ But by this time she was past saving. Her mother Louise experienced a brief crisis of loyalty when her beloved friend the moorhen disappeared. Naturally suspicion fell on the foxes, but there were no eyewitnesses and no fingerprints were found, so Joan was soon able to regain her support. Thus, the next time Alfred said, as he sometimes did when particularly weary, ‘I think I’ll give up serving meals at the pub - I think I’ll just concentrate on getting people drunk,’ the two women told him to think again.

Looking out in the late evening, their neighbours sometimes saw cheese, with a smattering of quiche and pate, showering down from the Duckworths’ window like some bizarre meteorological phenomenon. If there were foxes in the garden when the ‘cheesing’ occurred, they were torn between the impulse to run and the temptation to stay and eat it. The usual compromise was to grab one piece and high-tail it across the stream. Normally they arrived in the lulls between showers, and then they would feed on the lawn quite calmly, permitting a close scrutiny from the darkened window. In the security beam, it became apparent that their colouring differed widely, from flame-red to sandy yellow. And there were subtle variations of shade over the different areas of the body - a deepening of colour across the shoulders and grey streaks on the hindquarters. Big Daddy was predominantly tawny with black leggings. His thick brush had a covering of fine black guard hairs, as though encased in a fishnet stocking, and it sported a small grey tuft at the end. The patchy raggedness of the moult gave him a somewhat mangy appearance, but by the end of June he was smooth and as lean as a hungry wolf in his summer coat. The vixen had a small white tip to her tail, and also a splash of white on the front of each paw which caused her feet to flicker in the bright glare like reflectors on bicycle pedals.

The search for food led to much surprised amusement in the Duckworth household. The foxes meandered randomly over the lawn with their noses to the ground; it almost seemed that their noses must collide with the food for its presence to register. Then it would be taken aside to be eaten in private, with back turned towards the other members of the group. Some of the food was cached on the other side of the stream and occasionally in the flowerbeds of the adjacent garden. This was done in a way that appeared wonderfully slapdash: the front paws would flash briefly like alternating pistons to produce a shallow depression, and then the snout was used to shovel soil back over the cache. It all seemed so careless and hurried - Joan was convinced some of the food must still be partly visible. She felt an uneasy qualm at the thought of her garden-proud neighbour, who was already ill-disposed towards the foxes, discovering caches of putrefying cheese among her spring flowers. Ought she to go out herself and remove the evidence under cover of darkness? It was unthinkable. She would just have to be extra sweet to her neighbour. One time, seeing a fox bury a large chunk of cheese under the turf of her own lawn for once, Joan hurried out to investigate before she forgot the precise location. She was surprised to find that the cache was almost invisible from the surface and that the food lay beneath four inches of well-compacted soil. From her window the manoeuvre had appeared just as makeshift and hurried as it usually did and yet the craftsmanship turned out to be rather impressive.

The most intriguing episodes on the Duckworth lawn were the various meetings between foxes. If one of the local group was foraging, it showed remarkable sensitivity to the approach of another family member. It would look up towards the bushes on the opposite bank, ears pricked and nose sniffing the air, a full twenty seconds before the other fox appeared. There might be a sideways flap of the tail, perhaps demonstrating pleasure at the thought of the imminent meeting, like a smile of anticipation. When they met, they greeted with strange, contorted writhings. The greetings were often perfunctory, but sometimes they were prolonged and accompanied by gaping mouths and harsh grating noises like fingers scraping across a balloon. Joan and Louise puzzled over the meaning of these encounters: they looked and sounded like domestic aggravation, but gradually it began to seem more likely from the context that they played the same role as hugs and smiles and laughter.

Encounters involving foxes from outside the family group were more mysterious and offered tantalizing hints about territoriality. Hillside Drive ran East-West. To the East of the Duckworth house were the McBeaths and the Johnsons, and eventually College Rise. To the West was the anti-fox neighbour with the beautiful garden. When the strangers approached from the West they were tolerated by the resident group. From Big Daddy they sometimes even received the reassurance of a cursory greeting - a swish of the tail perhaps and a flattening of the ears. The aliens did not linger though. A quick snatch and grab and they were off, across the lawns to the West from which they had come. Interestingly, the Hillside foxes never took this route themselves. They travelled North across the stream, or East towards College Rise, or sometimes South through the front gardens and across Hillside Drive itself in the direction of the A34. It seemed that a territorial boundary cut across Hillside Drive slightly to the West of the Duckworth garden.

Very infrequently, a stranger approached from some other direction, and then the behaviour was quite different. Its jittery search for food would be punctuated by periods of intense surveillance of the overgrown area over the stream. And when it sensed the approach of one of the rightful tenants, its departure was immediate and swift. The local fox, Big Daddy or White Paws, arriving on the scene in a state of wild excitement, would lower its nose to the ground and retrace all the intruder’s meanderings at a frantic pace. Then, the direction of retreat having been established, there would be aggressive pursuit. The human observers were struck by the degree of intolerance shown to these intruders in contrast to the mild treatment of trespassers from the neighbouring territory. Joan and Louise tried to see it in human terms. It was like looking out of the window and seeing a stranger in your garden. Your reaction is angry and aggressive. But if you recognize the trespasser as your neighbour, even though he’s on your property you do not feel threatened.

When Joan met her own neighbour Sandy McBeath, the talk was always about the foxes. One day he was surprised by the ardour with which she told him, ‘You know, I feel deeply privileged that the foxes have come to live on our street.’ She felt a powerful emotion she could not quite express. It was more than merely the pleasure of observing wildlife. It was the thrill of discovery. She was not just watching a group of animals; she was glimpsing a whole separate world with its own social structure and its own conventions of behaviour.

One evening in late June, Big Daddy was in the park meadow with his sharp snout buried in the turf almost up to the eyeballs. He sniffed deeply, turning his body around like a radar antenna scanning for its target. His nostrils were inside a mole run. His nose informed him that the mole was retreating a few yards away in that direction. He withdrew his face, sneezing furiously, and excavated the surface, collapsing a short section of tunnel. Then, springing ahead of the quarry, he jabbed his nose down hard. He had judged perfectly; his nostrils were breathing the musky mole scent in the opposite direction this time. He sealed off the tunnel again. The mole would now be darting back towards the first excavation. He pounced half a yard short of it and jabbed down once more for confirmation before digging feverishly towards the target. Within a few seconds the taste of its dusty fur was in his mouth as he held its wriggling body. He knew the taste of mole was unpleasant, but in any case he was not hungry; the hunt had been for pleasure only. The pain of his injury was now quite gone, and he was just enjoying his sense of fitness and agility, and the pitting of his mental powers against those of the prey.

And the game was not yet over. There was more entertainment to be had by releasing the prize. It fell to the ground and lay rigid, mimicking a piece of stone. He gave it a pat of encouragement, which sent it scurrying towards the ruined burrow. He launched himself high from his long hind legs, landing with a thump of his forepaws onto its back. Some bones broke - Big Daddy felt them crack under his paws. But the creature was not dead; it dragged itself away in a last vain attempt to escape. Big Daddy caught it up in his mouth. Then he focussed his whole being into the space between his jaws, preparing for the thrill of the death spasm.

But the thought came to him that he could repeat this enjoyable game if he allowed the mole to re-enter its run. So he tossed the squirming body towards its refuge and watched it creep away. Before it reached safety however, he had it clamped in his mouth again. Another picture had come into his mind, a picture of the cubs playing with it. They were still inept and he thought that not all of them had yet experienced the joy of killing warm- blooded prey. Amusement bubbled inside him at the thought of their clumsiness. They could practice on this disabled creature and one of them would have the pleasure of crushing out its life. As he made his way Westwards across the park, he continued to think about the cubs. They were growing at an incredible pace thanks to the overabundance of food in the area. The vole population was exploding at a rate that surpassed even the previous year’s teeming hordes. He and White Paws together could scoop up enough nestlings within a few hours to feed the family lavishly for the whole day. Thus one of the cubs was now almost as large as its mother. But their skills did not match their size or their enthusiasm. He remembered watching the smallest one foraging inexpertly for earthworms - they were breaking apart because she snatched at them so fast. It came to him that he would show her how to pull them gently but firmly, so as to draw the tethered end slowly from the ground; then the worm would twang in your face as the tension was suddenly released, wrapping itself round and round your nose.

Emerging from the park’s boundary hedge, he paused at the curb of College Rise, ears alert and eyes averted from the glaring headlights. At the opportune moment he crossed unhurriedly and trotted down Hillside Drive. When he came to the second house, he turned into its driveway and made his way round to the back garden, pausing cautiously as always when he rounded the corner of the building. This was one of the households whose people cached their food openly on the grass. His mouth dribbled at the thought of the human food; though it lacked the piquancy of live prey, it had strangely appetizing flavours. Crossing the Johnsons’ bridge, he climbed over the rockery and joined the footpath that led through the trees, parallel with the stream.

Something was different about the shape of a tree-trunk. He stopped and peered short-sightedly at the unexpected lump, sniffing and swivelling his ears forward. The lump moved and immediately he saw that it was the fat man who often hid himself in this particular spot. The man must have been startled too because he dropped the food he was carrying and stepped back several paces. Big Daddy patted the morsel sideways under a holly tree that was a particular favourite of his; its canopy drooped down tent-like, enclosing a large internal hideaway. Here, he allowed the mole to drop, planting one foot on it while he ate the tasty chunk of pork-fat. It occurred to him that the man might come to retrieve his meat; but for some reason he did not. Big Daddy allowed his thoughts to dwell briefly on these humans who shared the territory. He did not fear them, but was instinctively cautious in the way any animal is towards those who are bigger and more powerful than itself. In the countryside the humans had hounded him and had destroyed his family, yet he saw those as a different species almost. It had been a monstrous organism made up of men and dogs all yelling together that had chased and wounded him. The people here did not form themselves into raging packs; they were individual creatures who spoke quietly and moved in a slow, unthreatening manner. The most disconcerting thing about them was their upright posture - a posture that denoted extreme aggression among foxes. He sometimes had visions of them pouncing down on him and crushing his neck in their small jaws.

Taking the mole in his mouth, he slipped through the bushes and onto the large expanse of lawn beyond the trees. He could already hear the footfalls of the other foxes, and their sharp smells were carried to him by the gentle summer breeze.

Sandy McBeath was thoughtful as he entered the house. Just as he crossed the threshold, he had a strong sense of passing from the fox world into the human world. The feeling of privilege that Joan Duckworth had mentioned welled up like a warm spring inside him.

He announced to Sheila, ‘I just met Big Daddy and we passed the time of day together - we chewed the fat you might say.’

‘Well I hope he was the one who chewed most of it,’ she said, looking at his waistline. ‘Did anything interesting turn up in the conversation?’

‘Well yes. He thinks we ought to open our own fox- restaurant like the Duckworths and the Johnsons have. And I agree with him. He was carrying something disgusting in his mouth but he put it down when I invited him for a quick snack. You see, we could be saving a lot of furry little animals if we provide handouts.’

She was unconvinced. This kind of benevolent interference always had repercussions. But he was determined the foxes should feed in their garden too.

When he next called at the supermarket on his way home from work, he inquired at the meat counter about leftover bones and skin. But it seemed their ‘cuts of meat’ were not actually cut from animal carcasses at all. As far as they were concerned, meat was created in a factory and came off a production line in plastic wrappers. So he asked them what they did with packages that were past their sell-by date. Unwisely he joked, ‘I bet you change the date and put them back on the shelf.’ He was curtly informed they did no such thing and moreover, their planning was such that the problem did not arise. He took this to be flannel, in view of what the Johnson twins had told him about skips of reject food in supermarket backyards. So, early the next morning, interrupting his journey to the University, he drove around to the rear of the premises and parked outside the heavily-fenced backyard. The massive steel gate was open, and beyond it a few skips beckoned him encouragingly. He was already delving into one of them when a large hand clamped itself to his shoulder. Turning his head with difficulty, he saw that the hand was joined to a rather muscular arm. The tattoos that decorated it seemed to indicate a serious interest in Zoology, with special reference to eight-legged arthropods. A gravely voice came from somewhere high up behind him.

‘If you’re from Environmental Health sir, might I suggest you go and speak to the manager first.’

‘I’m not from Environmental Health.’

The man allowed him to turn around and looked him up and down, taking in the rumpled clothes and unkempt hair. ‘No, I can see you’re not. So what exactly are you doing here?’ he asked in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer.

‘I’m looking for reject food packages you throw out when they pass their sell-by date.’

A smile of satisfaction told McBeath that his reply had been anticipated. The interrogation continued.’ And I suppose you’re going to tell me its for your pet doggies.’

‘No, its for ---.’ Looking up at the large, unfriendly face, McBeath decided this was not the moment for honesty. ‘Well yes actually. Its for my pets.’ Shit! He was not very good at this kind of situation. He had a huge talent for appearing shifty, and the hesitation had completely ruined his credibility. He tried the matey approach. ‘Look - uh - mate ---’

But the security man interrupted him. ‘No, you look - uh - mate, you make me puke you people. You spend your benefit money on drugs and then you come round 'ere scrounging for free food.’ His thick forefinger, jabbing downwards for emphasis, encountered a layer of irritatingly soft flesh. ‘You get your fat arse out of 'ere before I kick it out. Go on, piss off!’

McBeath fought a brief struggle with his eye muscles, which were trying to force his gaze down towards the man’s own considerable backside. He retreated through the gate with as much dignity as he could muster. As he opened his car door, he glanced back and saw the man’s face light up triumphantly. He would be regaling his friends for years with stories about welfare scroungers driving late-model saloon cars: ‘I seen it with me own eyes ---’

In the conduct of his own research work, Sandy McBeath had one very serious failing - it was his reluctance to drop a line of enquiry that was proving to be unpromising. In the same way he now determined to give the skips one more try. If he returned twelve hours later, the unfriendly security guard would certainly not still be on duty. That evening saw him parked once again outside the security fence. He barely had time to open the car door before the belligerent spider-enthusiast was advancing towards him. He closed the door hurriedly and fumbled with the ignition while a superfluous warning reached his ears through the window. ‘You want meat off them skips do you? I’ll tell you something Wanker: If I see you round ‘ere again, there will be meat on them skips. And I’ll be the one who slices it off your fat bum!’

The episode discouraged him. Rather half-heartedly, he suggested to Sheila that they could buy cheap cuts of meat for the foxes. But Sheila was now facing a demoralized opponent. She did not have to fight hard: he would ruin the foxes with his kindness; they would forget how to hunt; he would turn them into welfare dependants;---. Unsure of himself and intimidated by the forces ranged against him, by the time the goldfish were mentioned he was already in full retreat.

Big Daddy crouched motionless behind the rhododendron foliage, his head resting on his front paws. All his senses were focussed upon the rabbits grazing dimwittedly over the open meadowland above their warren. Dawn was several hours away but the light of the waning moon was silvery bright on this July morning, flooding the scene helpfully with a ghostly illumination. He employed the same methodical technique for the stalking of rabbits that he had developed one year before on this very spot. Downwind of the prey and protected by adequate cover, he waited patiently for their unpredictable movements to bring one of them within range of his 40 mph sprint.

While he waited, his mind wandered as randomly as a grazing rabbit, hopping between the various smells and sounds and pictures that formed the prominent landmarks in the landscape of his memory. When images of the cubs bounced into his consciousness he felt a pang of concern. They were always hungry. If ever they found him with his mouth full they still begged from him and he did not have the heart to refuse, but he very rarely took food home because the time had come for them to be self-reliant. They were managing to survive, but their lives had become an arduous grind. After snatching the human scraps from the lawns, they spent the greater part of the night foraging for earthworms and beetles. It was a poor diet and a dull one, with very few high spots - they had discovered that young garden birds could sometimes be caught on the ground where their movements were clumsy, and very infrequently some rodent was sufficiently unwary or inept to fall prey to their bumbling efforts. Big Daddy’s thoughts ricocheted from this image to that of the multitudes of field voles in the park meadow. He wanted somehow to insert the hungry cubs into this scene; he pictured their jaws crammed with wriggling bodies, dark blood staining the white fur under their chins. From some deep place in his mind a distant memory drifted up into his awareness: a group of cubs was being shepherded across College Rise to new sleeping quarters in the park. He had been one of the group. Now there were new cubs, and he saw that he must bring them across in the same way.

The focus of his attention shifted abruptly to the moonlit scene before him. One of the rabbits had taken several encouraging steps in his direction. His limbs stiffened in readiness, but the foolish creature meandered its way out of danger. He relaxed, lowering his muzzle once more onto his front paws. Although hungry, he was not impatient for food. This was not his first hunger of the night. Waking before sunset, he had foraged briefly with Whitepaws and the cubs around the area of the den before setting off on his evening patrol. And now, nudged by the memory, he followed the familiar route in his mind: through the trees behind the den and then towards the setting sun, across the big lawns to a thick hedgerow which formed a boundary between his territory and that of a neighbouring group. Here he always dallied to investigate the traces of the other foxes with interest, recognizing the scent of each individual. He also sprinkled the area himself and added a neat black turd at one or two spots to which he was particularly attached. These marks were messages, and each time he wrote one he imagined other foxes reading it and knowing that it was he who wrote it. Apart from territorial boundaries, he would sign his name at other important places: on the remains of a half-eaten prey; at a place where food, now gone, had left a deceptive smell; on the site of a victorious encounter with some intruder; on a member of his own family for whom he felt a sudden strong affection; on some bright object or prominent landmark that happened to impress him. Often the point was to signal, ‘I was here; I did this; I killed this prey; I saw this pretty thing’ - like a graffiti dauber writing, ‘Kilroy was here’ at any spot he considers significant.

From the hedgerow, his route took him northward between the large houses bordering the lawns and then across the quiet street onto which they faced. He passed other houses and more gardens, carefully avoiding one that housed a Doberman Pincher. For reasons that were utterly mysterious to him, Whitepaws took a perverse pleasure in taunting this particular dog through the slatted wooden fence. Big Daddy preferred to give it a wide berth. It barked in frustration as his sharp scent approached and slowly receded. His next pause was in a garden across the next suburban street where a warm aromatic heap of decaying vegetable matter often contained scraps of meat and bone. Another territorial boundary ran East-West behind this row of gardens. He followed it eastwards slowly, sniffing, peeing, crapping, and rubbing his various scent glands against pillar and post. Emerging on College Rise, he trotted south along the pavement, turning right when he met Hillside Drive. Behind the houses on his right was the den. But he turned left into the single large garden that faced them. Here some caged peacocks and an aviary containing hundreds of smaller birds were meticulously investigated from every side, but their defences were found as usual to be impregnable. Leaving their exotic shrieks behind him, he continued southwards across two more suburban streets, pausing as he rounded each corner, comparing his perceptions at every stage with those in his memory, warily studying every new smell or sound, circling downwind of any new garden ornament or one that was moved from its usual position.

At the southernmost edge of his territory, adjoining the A34 trunk road, was a training centre for the Bank of Scotland set in an extensive expanse of undulating grass and shrub. He often loitered here an hour or more, exploring every shadowy corner. Rats and mice were to be found around the old building, but not on this particular night. So when he crossed College Rise into the park meadow, his second hunger of the night urged him towards the thick carpet of nesting voles where he satisfied his hunger and his blood-lust in one half hour of easy killing. He cached some of the meat nearby in case of future shortages, and then, crawling into a thick bramble bush, he slept for several hours.

Awaking in bright moonlight, he had felt again the pleasant resurgence of appetite. While he stretched and yawned and groomed his fur, the taste of rabbit flesh popped into his thoughts, summoning the saliva to his mouth. And so he now found himself lurking at the warren, enjoying the sense of power that comes from observing while being unobserved. He was startled out of his reverie by an explosion of activity in front of him. The rabbits were scattering for their bolt-holes, thumping the ground as they ran so as to warn those still below ground that they should remain there. A graceful shadow streaked across the open ground, spreading a familiar vixen-scent in its wake. Big Daddy stepped out from cover the better to watch the ruin of his careful preparation. He had seen Whitepaws use this technique before. She made no attempt to seize the scurrying creatures, but turned at the end of her sprint to watch their panic. She would then choose one of the openings with a little cover downwind of it, and wait there for the rabbits to reappear. With luck she would snatch one just as it emerged unprepared from the burrow. Ruefully he turned away from the scene; it was useless to pursue his own patient approach in the face of her disruptive competition.

As he slunk away, his thoughts flipped abruptly from his sister to the mate who had been taken from him in his farmland home. He recalled with amusement the approach she had used to outwit the rabbits. She would stroll nonchalantly through their grazing area without a glance in their direction. Amazingly, rather than running for cover, the rabbits would approach her, standing on their hind legs to get a clearer view - they wanted to see exactly where she was going, and to scrutinize her body-language, which seemed to exhibit a reassuring lack of interest in them. And then, just as their sense of danger began to ebb, she hurled herself at them, singling out the most vulnerable as she charged.

Big Daddy’s hunger tugged his thoughts back to the present. He paused and turned towards the vole runs for the second time that night. As he padded through the long meadow grass, the thought of the voles reminded him that he intended to bring the cubs over to this side of the big road. The picture in his mind suggested to him that he would do it this very morning. First he would satisfy his hunger and then he would go to the den. By dawn they would be settled in new accommodation.

Big Daddy awoke and crawled from under his bramble shelter. He yawned and scratched and then he sat on his haunches sniffing the air and enjoying the evening sunshine. He was reluctant to move much before dusk because his route would take him across the recreational area of the park where people liked to walk their dogs on such a sunny evening. But the sun would set quite soon. It was late August and the nights were growing pleasantly longer. As the shadows lengthened, he began to make his way cautiously through the park, pausing a full thirty seconds each time he topped a rise or broke from cover to survey the scene in front of him before stepping into it. Past the manor house, he stole across the sward where the dogs exercised and slipped into a grove of mature beech. On the far side where the rough meadow began lay a clump of rhododendron in which the vixen and cubs lay up during the daylight hours. They were already facing his way when he stepped out from the trees.

Whitepaws crouched in welcome while the cubs converged on him at a furious dash, squirming in rapture, their tails flailing and corkscrewing. he found the ritual greetings both painful and sweet. The affection they showered on him was delightful but the element of submission in their grovelling postures was not. He took no pleasure in their subservience; it reminded him of his own timorous feelings towards the dogfox of his childhood, his Mother’s companion. And so he always countered their submissive posturing with an unseemly prostration of his own body. He wanted to present himself as just another cub, giving as much respect as he received. The result was a lengthy and noisy competition in self-abasement and mutual re-assurance.

                                                            ~

Half an hour later Big Daddy was combing a long, shallow ditch filled with tangles of grass and dead leaves in which the field voles particularly liked to burrow. The other members of the group were strung out in line on either side of him, each pursuing its own evening meal. The hunting was easy. The voles advertised their presence by chattering and squeaking at each other incessantly. They were belligerent and territorial creatures at the best of times and this year’s overpopulation had made them ferociously irritable. In fifteen minutes of intense concentration he slaughtered and devoured two dozen tender nestlings. Some died under the thud of his front paws, while others viewed the world for the last time from within his crushing jaws, soaked in blood and saliva. When the frenzy cleared from his mind and the hunger pangs from his belly, he turned to watch the cubs with paternal interest. At five months old, they were strikingly handsome. Their sleek bodies were long and tall, yet slim and streamlined, their long tails bushy and stylishly curved. And large, mobile ears framed their slender, pointed faces. They had a cheeky way of standing with head up high - as they grew older the harsh business of life would press those heads closer to the ground. He saw one of the youngsters briefly chase its prey through the long meadow grass, leaping and side-stepping with elegant agility, tail swinging gracefully to preserve its balance. They were still inexpert but they succeeded in making their kills. Watching them, Big Daddy relived his own earliest kill, as he had so many times before, thrilling once again to that first delicious taste of death in his mouth.

                                                            ~

At two o’clock in the morning Big Daddy’s routine patrol was disturbed by a cacophony of yapping. His sharp ears led him to the Bank of Scotland training centre bordering the A34. Two of the cubs, the largest male and one of the vixens, were wrestling on the flowerbeds, happily squashing a multitude of delicate plants. The female broke away and the male followed in hectic pursuit across an expanse of rolling turf. Big Daddy joined the chase enthusiastically. Soon the other members of the group were drawn to the field of combat, each from his own separate patrol route, and flung themselves into the fray. They split into smaller groups, which dissolved and merged and divided again in a joyful, chaotic rampage. There was such fierce pleasure in playing together. Play was really fighting, and had all the excitement associated with fighting but without the pain and without the danger. To play means to fight with someone you love. It is a self contradiction - that is what makes it such a great joke!

When the games were finished, they groomed each other and dozed on the grass. Big Daddy felt happy. A sense of lazy contentment flooded through him. This was, after all, the laziest and most contented time of year, since young prey were still plentiful and each fox had only one mouth to feed. Later in the year, as the surviving prey grew older and wilier, hunting became a more exacting challenge.

                                                            ~

There was already a hint of pale blue in the eastern sky when Big Daddy crossed College Rise, his mind running ahead of him towards his daytime couch under the bramble bush. He had separated from the others two hours earlier but now, in the early morning stillness, he heard footfalls away in front of him and to his right where Hillside Drive opened onto the main road. The texture and rhythm of the sounds identified Whitepaws before she rounded the corner and paused at the roadside. He quickened his pace so as to meet her as she crossed College Rise. They merged and separated and moved on together, two shadows gliding through the shadowy twilight.

They paused at a gap in the park boundary hedge before passing through it. There was a particular reason to be cautious this morning; a car was parked at the curb-side and Big Daddy’s mind already held a disturbing image of the man and the dog who had almost certainly arrived in it for an early morning walk. Indeed, a fresh smell of dog trailed through the opening and onto the turf. They followed the scent just far enough to pinpoint the present disposition of the unwelcome visitors, and then circled them as far downwind as they could manage, which meant skirting the very boundary of the A34. Early as it was, traffic was already building up on the busy trunk road. So their sensitive ears gave them no warning of the alsatian's approach until it was almost upon them. The dog was young but was nevertheless half again as hefty as Big Daddy. The foxes separated as they sprinted away, forcing the dog to choose which one to pursue; he chose the weaker. Big Daddy veered aside and pursued the pursuer. He hurled himself at the alsatian’s hindquarters, tearing the flesh with his canines as he pulled away. The dog had not barked before, but now it howled and flung itself towards Big Daddy who was already streaking away through the rough grass. Now the vixen snapped at the dog’s heels, so he turned on her and found himself harried again by her brother. Confused by the bewildering tactics used against him, the young dog’s reactions became sluggish and he fell prey once again to Big Daddy’s teeth, receiving a painful nip to one of his hind legs. He lost heart and turned tail. But he was not pursued; Whitepaws was loping towards the rhododendron thicket that was her sleeping quarters, while Big Daddy attended to the important matter of anointing the spot with his urine and then strutted after her, his tail held smugly aloft.

When they reached her couch, he only lingered briefly to nuzzle her while she licked the alien blood from his face. Then he slipped between the beech trees and hurried to his own bed.

He curled up under the brambles and closed his eyes. But sleep eluded him. A feeling of discomfort brought him to his feet. He changed his position but the discomfort followed him - it came from within his mind. The uneasiness grew into a formless apprehension, which drew him out into the waxing sunlight and drove him to retrace his earlier route through the meadow, towards College Rise. The thing that he feared took shape in his mind only after it appeared before his eyes. The crumpled body of a cub lay in the ditch by the boundary hedge. A pang of almost physical pain brought him to a halt. The mystery of death overwhelmed his spirit. He had romped and sported with this playful young vixen earlier that morning. Now, as he watched, the last few drops of life trickled from her torn throat.

Sandy McBeath stood on his back patio one misty November evening and sniffed the air appreciatively. A musky odour pervaded the whole area. It was so distinct! And it was always there. Yet he had not noticed it until this moment, just as, so often, one can look at a familiar landmark without seeing it. He noticed it now because it had been called to his attention - he had been reading about foxes. With interest, he examined the smell more closely. It was like the scent of pine, but with a tart creosote-like touch. And was there not a hint of some aromatic herb? Rosemary perhaps, or thyme. Catching sight of Joan Duckworth over the stream, gathering the last of her autumn leaves, Sandy McBeath joined her.

‘Have you ever noticed a very distinctive smell around the back here?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve just realized what it is.’

She looked puzzled, and then her face lit up. ‘I know just what you’re going to say - it’s the smell of foxes. It’s their urine, and other juices that they squirt from special glands. I’ve been reading a book about them.’

‘So have I. What’s your book?’

‘It’s "Urban Foxes", by Stephen Harris.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Well, it’s very light-hearted, very concise and very simple. He answers all the obvious questions you want to ask. What’s yours?’

‘Mine’s Gwyn Lloyd’s "The Red Fox". It’s a nice book, but I wouldn’t say it’s light-hearted. If you want a comparison of what foxes eat in South Wales versus Northern Sweden, or the average size of a fox embryo at three weeks old, you’ll find it all in there. What does Stephen Harris say about feeding urban foxes? Does it turn them into sissies?’

‘He says it’s okay. They’re opportunists - you know, they survive whether you feed them or not. I gather that if you want to see them in your garden you feed them, and if you don’t, then you don’t if you see what I mean. He even tells you what to eat and drink while you watch them: Shropshire Blue cheese and Bordeaux wine as far as I remember.’

‘Hmmm.’ Stephen Harris could be a useful ally. ‘Tell you what,’ he said to Joan, ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’ He had the childish sense of humour common to many who mixed with students too much.

‘What?’

‘I mean, shall we swap books?’

Shortly after, as he approached his back door with Stephen Harris’ book in his hand, he was already rehearsing the re- opening of his debate with Sheila. But he paused before entering, for one more breath of that evocative perfume. How to define it precisely? But the formula eluded him. It was unlike any other smell.

Throughout the rest of their lives, for the Hillside humans, the fox scent would be one of those instantly recognizable smells, like spilled petrol, escaping gas or freshly baked bread. Walking on some country pathway or past a suburban gate, particularly on damp misty evenings when the earth seems to exhale its vapours, they would pause and sniff and take pleasure in the thought that a fox had recently travelled the same route and left its signature.

There is a certain corner shop in Didsbury village that has been a renowned fishmonger's since before the First World War. It is a Mecca to which every South Mancunian with a love of fresh fish makes his pilgrimage sooner or later. Very early one Monday morning, the telephone behind the fish counter rang and was answered by Ian Middlehurst. Something in the tone of his voice and his body language attracted the attention of Eddie and Michelle who were arranging the window display. So, when he replaced the receiver with a shrug, Eddie asked him, ‘What was that about?’

‘I’m not too sure really. But anyway, put some fish stock in a bag - there’s this bloke coming in for it later. He says it’s for his dogs.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, I suppose. It was just a funny kind of conversation. He says do we have fish heads to throw out, that we could give him for his dogs? So I say yes, how much does he want? He says he’s not sure. So I ask him how many dogs has he got? - you know, so I know how much to put by for him. And he says four or five.’

‘Four or five? you mean he doesn’t know how many dogs he’s got?’

‘Well, that’s what it sounds like. So then I asked him what breed are they? And he says, ‘Well er, well er---’ - you know, he’s thinking about it! So I say, well how big are they? - so I can get an idea how much he’ll need. And he says they’re about as big as foxes.’

‘What d’you make of it then?’ asked Michelle.

‘Well, Mum and Dad once told me about a bloke who used to come in for fish stock. He used to say it was for his pets but everyone knew he wanted it for himself - you know, for soup. He didn’t want to let on for some reason, so they never said anything.’

‘That’s bound to be it,’ said Eddie. ‘He thinks it’s like begging, asking for free food.’

‘I don’t know; perhaps we’ll get a better idea when we see him,’ Ian said. ‘But just remember - ‘

‘I know,’ Eddie interrupted him. ‘The customer’s always right. We’ll be dead polite, won’t we Shelly?’

‘What? Can’t we even snigger a bit?’ asked Michelle.

‘Just watch it!’ Ian warned her, but he could not repress a smile.

When Sandy McBeath came in, mumbling self-consciously about fish heads, Michelle hurried to serve him. She said, ‘You can make very nice soup with these you know.’ They watched him discreetly and noticed the involuntary grimace. So much for that theory!

‘Perhaps he’s feeding foxes,’ Ian suggested when McBeath had left the shop. ‘I’ve heard about people doing that. It did seem a funny thing to say at the time, about being the same size as foxes.’

‘But why should he say it’s for dogs then?’ asked Eddie.

‘Well he might be embarrassed. He doesn’t want to seem nutty.’

Eddie was not convinced. ‘I don’t know. If it was me, I’d have my story all prepared if I didn’t want to tell the truth. I’d say I had four dalmations or something.’

Michelle was thoughtful during this exchange. Then she said, ‘I bet I know what it is - I’ve seen this kind of thing happen with me own Mum and Dad. He’s phoning up to ask for some stuff for the foxes, and just when he’s dialled, his wife says to him, ‘Don’t say anything about feeding foxes - you don’t want them to think you’re balmy. Tell them you’ve got dogs or something!’ That’s why he didn’t have his story ready.’

When McBeath called in the following week for another donation, Eddie asked him, ‘Did the dogs like the fish stock?’

‘Well it all disappeared, so I suppose they must have taken it.’

‘Taken it where?’

‘Well, I mean they--- I mean they took it away from the ---they ate it.’

He seemed embarrassed, so Ian intervened with a change of subject. ‘What about some chicken carcasses? We sell chicken breasts and legs separate, so a lot of carcasses are thrown out for pig-feed. D’you think they’d like those?’ The suggestion was not entirely without guile, because Ian knew that most dog owners were wary about chicken bones.

Michelle said, ‘They probably would like it, because foxes like chickens don’t they?’

McBeath was taken aback. ‘Foxes?’

‘Well, your dogs are a bit like foxes aren’t they? They’re the same size.’ she explained innocently.

‘Oh yes, I see.’

‘And if they really like it,’ she added, ‘they might stand still long enough for you to count them. It would be handy to know how many you’ve got.’ Out of the corner of her eye she caught the expression on Ian’s face and reluctantly desisted, allowing her fish to wriggle off the hook.

When Sandy McBeath left the shop, he carried a bag bulging with chicken bones; the first of many. The Cheshire farmer who supplied the chickens hated foxes with a fervour that was essentially religious - in other words, derived from generations of superstition and folklore. Yet over the next few years he would contribute generously to the comfort and welfare of a family of foxes living just ten miles north of his battery farm.

On a chilly February evening Big Daddy stood within the canopy of the holly tree behind the Fat Man’s house, staring in amazement through the screen of foliage. The Fat Man was standing on his lawn, flinging pieces of flesh into the air with no regard for where they would land. Big Daddy had found carcasses on this patch of grass since the start of the cold weather and knew whose property they were. But this was the first time he had seen the strange manner in which they were deposited. He would return during the night to raid the cache. By that time the Fat Man would have retired into his bright den where the sun seemed to shine even at night.

                                                            ~

Two hours later Big Daddy stood among the same trees. This time his gaze was directed the opposite way, onto the broad expanse of turf beyond them. His mate stood on the sward, her head turned in his direction, sensing his presence. She came towards him curling her tail in greeting. As always he enjoyed the flicker of her white feet as she moved. There was a coating of dew on her thick winter fur like a silvery sheath in the moonlight. The beauty of her took his breath away. He licked the glisten from her fur and nuzzled among the sensitive whiskers around her snout. There was a pleasurable ache in his chest and a powerful sensation deep in his guts, as though they were melting. It was love. And he felt it just as warmly as any man does for his woman. He had loved her before, when she was his playmate-sister, but he had become bewitched and the nature of his love transformed during the season of courtship, when their mournful cries had invaded many a dream in the neighbourhood. Then, over a few short days of noisy ecstasy a vortex of passion had sucked them in and spat them out leaving a softer, gentler emotion behind it.

When Whitepaws moved away, following the line of trees, he shadowed her. He knew she was going to work on the new den. Over several nights she had been exploring possible cubbing earths, and this time he had some inkling about the significance of her obsessive behaviour: when there was an underground den there would be cubs. Apart from cleaning out existing sites, White Paws also excavated new holes wherever the cover was good and the ground soft. These usually came to a halt against hard rock or thick tree roots. But there was a heap of branches, leaves and grass that the humans had piled up during the warm season, and below this they found that the earth remained soft but firm as they tunnelled through it. The previous night they had worked together to excavate a single chamber with one tunnel leading to it. Tonight they would dig another tunnel; a den must have at least two exits.

They dug by turning themselves into sharply pointed instruments, snout down low between the front paws, which paddled the earth backwards at a drum-roll tempo.

Their labour was interrupted by the arrival of Hightail, the yearling vixen. He greeted her warmly; her playful nature was easy to respond to, and he enjoyed the way her bright tail turned up high at the end. But he noticed that, as usual, the greeting between the two vixens was not so warm. Whitepaws expected a show of deference appropriate to her superior status, and she received it in abundance. The yearling vixen grovelled abjectly. And then she applied herself to the digging, shoving the others aside in her eagerness to show how willing a slave she was. She had joined their group during the period of great restlessness when the young foxes disperse to find new homes and new lives. In her case the journey had been a short one: she came from the neighbouring territory to the west. Her smell was already familiar to the Hillside foxes even before she joined them, and they accepted her without fuss, albeit in a subordinate position. Dispersal was not so simple for a dog fox as Big Daddy remembered all too painfully. He had not been accepted so readily. For him it had been necessary to find a kingdom without a ruler. He contemplated the energetic vixens briefly and then slipped away into the gloom, following the age-old compulsion to retrace again and again the pathways of his dark realm.

                                                            ~

During the wintertime, when the growth of the turf slowed and finally ceased, the habitual movements of the foxes left an indelible imprint on the suburban gardens. It was a curious pattern that emerged: the areas in which food might be found were unmarked, because the foxes criss-crossed them in a random search pattern. But the unfruitful areas were strongly marked - they were traversed quickly along well-worn paths, precisely the width of one fox paw. And so, many people who were hardly aware of the existence of foxes found that their winter lawns were scored deeper and deeper, as if by the action of some phantom scribe. The fox-friendly gardens were linked by these dark furrows like the beads on some gigantic necklace flung down onto the residential area to the south-east of Cheadle village.

Behind Hillside Drive, the particular groove that cut across the fat man’s lawn was softening now and would soon disappear since he had begun to cache his food in the same negligent way as his neighbours did. The fat man’s kills were mostly large birds, which he tore into pieces before scattering them on the grass. The fresh meat tasted good but Big Daddy ate only a few morsels before moving on. There really was little need to steal from the humans. Plenty of game was still available in the park meadow. Since the voles had reproduced so lavishly in the summer they were abundant even now. Of course they were older and wiser and hence much more of a challenge, but there was pleasure in that too. The joys of winter, so different to those of summer, were no less real: the long nights, the satisfaction of hunting difficult prey, the howling winds buffeting the trees and carrying an exciting cocktail of scents to his uplifted nostrils, the white frost sparkling on the grass and on his mate’s luxurious winter coat.

The last garden he visited on his serpentine route was that of the Bank of Scotland. Standing on the edge of the rolling lawn, he sniffed the cold air and gave a low growling call. It was a signal to the children of Whitepaws - an invitation to play. They came quickly to him, one male and one female, and with them yet another immigrant vixen, around whom the spicy smell of sex wafted tantalisingly whenever she moved. Big Daddy ran so they could chase him, leaving four dark swathes across the frosty surface. Their games were less boisterous than in former times when six players used to rampage on these grounds. He knew how many there had been, and who the missing ones were. White Paws did not venture this way since the territory had become split into two. As if by some negotiated agreement, the cubs had taken the portion to the south of Hillside Drive for their own, while Whitepaws took the northern half. Big Daddy was not party to the agreement; he was puzzled by the split and ignored it. He alone crossed Hillside Drive, patrolling two territories now, and was accepted in both camps. Another missing reveller was the vixen cub playfully murdered by the young alsatian just the other side of College Rise. And the fourth cub had disappeared at the time of dispersal, following some siren call from across the A34. Big Daddy did not expect to learn his fate and he never would. In fact he had made little progress. Following the A34 just a few hundred yards northwards, he had ambled up the slip road onto the M63 motorway and his short life had ended under the wheels of a Belgian juggernaut. Later, as the tyre that had crushed him turned and turned, minute traces of him were deposited like invisible fox pawprints along the trunk roads of Continental Europe.

                                                            ~

When Big Daddy re-visited the new den in the early hours he found that the second tunnel had been completed and the chamber enlarged. Working his way round to the opposite side of the rubbish heap, he began to scratch out a third opening, drilling his way down with instinctive precision towards the hidden chamber. The pleasant smell of fresh earth still clung to his fur when he retired to bed.

In the final days of Whitepaws’ confinement, when her abdomen ballooned out beneath her, she abruptly abandoned the new premises in favour of the familiar birthing den of previous years. A bemused Big Daddy was on hand to witness her waddling, hundred-metre dash to the little stone archway. For several minutes he regarded the dark opening as though his eyes might draw her back into the open. Then he turned to face the new den. The idea came to him that some lurking thing inside it had disturbed his mate, so he probed its five stately corridors and its many-lobed central chamber. But it was empty; to him it seemed darkly inviting. With a mental shrug he bent his thoughts to the serious changes lying ahead.

At just short of two years old, he was at the peak of his physical and mental powers with all the confidence of a reigning monarch in his prime. Yet the events unfolding even now beneath his feet unnerved him to such a degree that he was hardly able to contemplate them directly. But he sensed quite distinctly a glow of excitement that seemed to percolate from the ground into the surrounding atmosphere. A new era was about to begin.

‘How much do you drink, Robbie?’ It was a few weeks before Christmas. At the Cheadle Medical Practice Robbie Johnson’s GP was completing the medical section of an application for life insurance.

‘Oh, about half a bottle of spirits.’

‘Half a bottle a week?’

‘No, half a bottle a day. That’s not much - I can take it.’

‘Not much? If I write that down you’ll never get life insurance.’

‘Really? Well don’t write it then. Tell me what I ought to say and I’ll say it.’

‘Robbie, you know very well I can’t do it that way.’

‘Now don’t come all moralistic on me. There’s nobody listening. Let’s just say you misunderstood me. I meant to say I drink half a bottle a week - what did you think I said?’

‘I’m sorry, that’s not on.’ The doctor put his pen down and leaned back.

‘Whose side are you on? I’m the one paying for this service, not the insurance company.’

‘Robbie, if I lie on the form and then your liver packs in because it’s pickled, what d’you think will happen? Your policy will be declared null and void and I’ll be in big trouble. Look, if you don’t trust what I’m telling you I can arrange an appointment with another member of the practice.’

‘Oh yes, That’ll be dead useful. You doctors always stick together.’ He stood up to leave, picking up his form.

‘You’re reacting to this all wrong, Robbie,’ the doctor said, but he also stood. ‘The important thing is to cut down your drinking.’

‘Nah!’ Robbie was scornful. ‘Some of us can take it and some can’t.’ Yet he was concerned enough to arrange a check-up at the local private hospital. They told him his liver was severely damaged. They also said his level of consumption defined him officially as an alcoholic. More than anything, it was the label that shocked him. It undermined his self-image as a man in complete control of his own life. So when they told him that he must give up alcohol altogether, he said, ‘Fine, no problem.’ And he never touched another drop.

There was a slight problem though. Much of his half-bottle of whisky had slipped down his throat in the evening while fox-watching at the window. As he told April, ‘It doesn’t feel right without a glass in my hand.’

‘You could put something else in the glass.’

He tried it, but somehow a pavlovian connection had been established in his brain between foxes and whisky. For the sake of his liver he had to turn his thoughts away from both of them.

                                                            ~

The twins did not spare much thought for the foxes either. For Christmas, Robbie had presented them with a rusty heap, which he claimed was a car, though they took a bit of persuading. Together with the car came two overalls and a set of tools. To the neighbours it seemed that a set of dolly birds was also included - just like the TV adverts often suggested - because as soon as the car arrived, a swarm of them constantly surrounded it. Ninety percent of the twins’ spare time was spent under the car, and ten percent test-driving it rally-style on the country roads. Some time must have been spent on the dolly birds too, but this was not very apparent.

During the winter the twins’ interest in foxes surfaced for just one day. It was the day their car ran into a cat, killing it outright. They came home shamefaced and confessed to their mother, who consoled them with a hug.

‘I was driving dead slow honest, Ma.’

‘I know, love, I’m sure you were.’

‘It just ran out without warning.’

‘It’s not your fault lads. You mustn’t feel guilty.’ With her arms around them she noticed a ripe smell, but this was not a tactful moment to mention personal hygiene. She would have to say something later though; young lads could so easily get into sloppy habits.

‘It seems a waste to leave the body there, Ma. Don’t you think so? We didn’t really want to leave it.’

‘Were you thinking of donating it to Medical Science? I don’t think there’s much call for cat cadavers.’ That smell. It was not quite like perspiration. She noticed for the first time that one of them was carrying a plastic carrier bag. There was a brown stain spreading inside it. ‘Get that bloody thing out of here, you silly buggers.’ Her motherly tenderness had evaporated and two yards of empty space had materialized between her and the twins, as if by magic.

They put the corpse on the lawn, which is what they had intended all along, and as it grew dark they awaited developments at the window. It was a disappointing night. The visits of the foxes at that time of year were sparse and random, and when they came, their reaction to the special treat was surprisingly negative. They sprang back from it in horror, their legs flexed in readiness for action, poised between fight and flight. It was as though they feared it might get up and bite them. Why were they so whimpish? The Johnsons had seen frequent meetings between foxes and cats; there was usually a wary truce between them. Besides, this cat was clearly dead. Surely that obvious to any creature, no matter how dim. By eleven o’clock the corpse was still untouched.

April said, ‘You’ve got to dispose of it first thing in the morning. I don’t care how you do it, but I’m not having it putrefying out there all day.’

But there was no need. By morning it was gone.

                                                               ~

The McBeaths were already familiar with the remarkable way the foxes reacted to the unexpected appearance of a corpse. They saw it when the chicken carcasses were first offered to them. Later, Sandy McBeath began to dismember the carcasses before tossing them onto the lawn, but on that first day he had left them whole. They lay on the grass pink and naked, looking almost human. And the foxes shrank from them like ham actors in a silent movie recoiling from some horrific apparition. The McBeaths were reminded of a group of British tourists they had once seen confronted with a plate of octopus. Whatever the problem was, the foxes eventually overcame it since no scrap was left by morning.

Having established his regular supply of food for the foxes, Sandy McBeath began to spend serious amounts of time watching them. With one room brightly lit, he would stand in the darkness at the window of another - some of the foxes were so nervous that the slightest hint of a light ray behind him, silhouetting his shape at the window, was enough to scare them away. He tried to identify the various individuals, but found it extremely difficult to distinguish their markings in the dim light. In the end he made progress by focussing attention on their tails; of all their features, this was the one that varied most from fox to fox. Once he could tell them apart, the random sightings became more like scientific observations, inviting speculations about social structure and family relationships. He started a notebook - given his training, this was inevitable - in which to disgorge and chew over the many questions piling up inside him.

He managed to distinguish nine individuals before he stopped counting. Most of them visited only a few times before disappearing forever. Evidently they were just passing through, participants in the great winter dispersal. But there was a hard core of three permanent residents. Big Daddy, large and black- tailed, was easily identified by his calm demeanour. If there was any doubt, a tap on the window pane would clinch the identification; he was the only one to stand his ground in the face of such shocking intimidation. Whitepaws had her very distinctive footwear and a small white tip to her tail. She was shy, but not so shy as the third member of the group, Basil Brush. Smaller than Whitepaws but bushier of tail with a flamboyant white brush kinked upwards at the tip, this fox was timid to the point of neurosis. Whether Basil was really male or female was quite impossible to tell; a fox hides its sexual characteristics very effectively between its legs. Its name derived from the facial expression that accompanied its continuous nervous scrutiny of the windows - the beady eyes, the perked ears and upward-curving snout mimicked perfectly the face of the eponymous TV puppet. Each time Sandy McBeath saw the Basil Brush impersonation, he was unable to suppress a snort of laughter. And this tiny sound from behind a closed window was enough to induce instant flight. Yet when the jumbo jets coming in to Manchester Airport threw their big-baby tantrums directly overhead, screaming for attention just a few hundred feet up, not one of the foxes even gave them a glance.

Sheila McBeath had long given up the struggle against the fox handouts. She accepted her husband’s weekly ritual of dismembering carcasses on the garage floor, the risks of Salmonella poisoning, the disgusting packages occupying a whole shelf of their freezer. ‘OK, feed them if you must,’ she told him, ‘But why d’you have to watch them eat it?’

‘For the same reason we feed monkeys at the zoo and then watch them,’ he said. ‘We don’t feed them because we think they’re malnourished; we want to see them accept our gift. I think it’s a sort of rudimentary communication. It’s all part of this urge we have to communicate with alien species.’

‘Well, you certainly have that urge. I don’t know how many other people have it,’ Sheila said. Then she added, provokingly, ‘I sometimes wander if that’s why you married me. I was probably the most alien thing available on the marriage market.’ He laughed it off, but he knew there was some truth in it. Sheila was an Arabic Jew - she had seemed to him like an exotic bloom in a patch of dandelion. It certainly had been part of the allure.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. Jan.7th:

‘You know, you’ve got a fox living under your shed - or somewhere very close to your house,’ Joan Duckworth told Sheila McBeath when they met one day outside their front doors.

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Because we can hear it from our place, barking and squealing. I’ve heard it loads of times - the noises seem to be coming right from your house.’

When Sandy came home Sheila told him, ‘Your fox-communication experiments have got to stop. No more barking from the window if you don’t mind. It’s very embarrassing - Joan thinks there’s a fox living in our house. And I’m not sure she’s wrong!’

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. Jan.20th:

‘Why are they so useless at finding the food?’ Sheila wondered. ‘Aren’t they supposed to have supersensitive noses?’ Sometimes she joined him at the window; she said it was her only chance of maintaining contact with him. ‘Just look at this dozy beggar.’ They were watching a fox zigzagging across the lawn in a random search pattern, even trying out dead leaves in case they were bits of chicken.

‘Perhaps their noses are only sensitive to the smells of living animals or of putrefying flesh. Maybe fresh meat has a very weak smell for them,’ he suggested.

‘You open the window and you’ll soon see how weak the scent is. I can smell it easily enough. Our garden smells like a bloody abattoir.’

He had to admit it was true. It was enough to turn his own stomach sometimes. ‘It does seem strange, doesn’t it? I guess it must be because smell is not directional. They know from the smell that food is around but don’t know quite where it is unless they can hear it or see it.’ It sounded plausible enough but he knew that he was just scratching around for excuses to save their reputation. Whatever the reason, the effect was one of utter gormlessness.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook Feb.10th:

Joan Duckworth was the only one in the three households who saw any actual mating. Being a light sleeper, she was woken one morning in the early hours by an alarming cacophony outside her window, just as though a whole party of drunken foxes were staggering home after a wild night out. She heard high pitched yapping and screaming, and the ah-ah-ah-ah, like a magpie, that she knew was made with gaping mouth. There was also a harsh warbling that was new to her, like a bamboo pole rattling across metal railings.

She listened for a minute or two while she surfaced from the depths of her sleep, and then she sprang to the window. There were only two foxes on the lawn: Big Daddy and Whitepaws standing back to back, looking over their shoulders at each other. Detecting some movement at the window, Whitepaws tried to move away, and then Joan saw that they were firmly attached one to the other, prisoners of their act of passion. They stumbled to the bank of the stream and Whitepaws flung herself across the water, compelling her lover to perform a belly flop behind her. They were last heard struggling noisily through the shrubbery.

Joan would have liked to tell Sandy McBeath what she had seen but she did not. She was afraid he would take the opportunity to be coarse.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. Feb.22nd:

Up to April 1st it was easy to believe that the mating behaviour had all been a sham. Whitepaws was as agile and as svelte as ever. Then she swelled up explosively over just a few days. By April 4th she was waddling visibly and then she disappeared for several days.

When she next showed herself it was only for quick snatch- and-grab raids, sporting a pink naked underbelly studded like a football boot.

Big Daddy and Basil Brush were both seen to push food into the entrance of the old rabbit warren. As they approached they used a special signal, a repetitive grunt muffled by its passage through their stuffed mouths.

By early May the handouts of the Hillside residents invariably vanished within an hour after sunset. So great was the demand that Sandy McBeath doubled his supply of carcasses. He became increasingly adept at separating the bones and, in the process, developed quite an interest in the articulation of the skeleton. In their tender moments together Sheila was often puzzled by the novel character of his caresses, which seemed to focus around the various joints of her limbs.

Big Daddy tore off a clump of grass with a sideways yank of his head and swallowed. There was a discomfort in his belly that he knew could sometimes be eased by swallowing a ball of grass. The pain would be scraped out of his insides.

In spite of his malaise, he was here in the park meadow to hunt, although he himself would not eat tonight. Moving across a patch of matted grass he jabbed his nose down several times at random, leaving a series of conical depressions. The area was already pockmarked as a result of his previous visits. He knew this was not the right way to search for vole nests. The sounds of the nestlings should be drawing him to the exact spot. But there were no sounds, so he thought that maybe they had become silent. There should be lots of nestlings in these fields by now but he could find none. There were only ageing adults and these getting fewer by the day. He stopped and listened to the silence, remembering how it had been the previous year. There was some problem here that he ought to solve, but thinking about it just made his head spin. Was he looking in the wrong place? Could the voles have been eaten by other foxes? He tried to imagine hordes of marauding foxes invading the territory, but he could not.

In fact there were some vole nestlings in the park but they were of the long-tailed variety that lived along the banks and hedgerows. They were never very abundant at the best of times and now he was rapidly depleting their population. And the same was true of the rabbit population. The disappearance of the short- tailed field voles, normally so hugely plentiful, had left a massive hole in his food supply.

The thought of Whitepaws’ cubs came into his mind, not with the usual thrill of pleasure - he felt too sick for that this evening - but rather as a heavy responsibility. There were five of them, five mouths just beginning to clamour for solid food. He would have to rely on less favoured prey: worms and beetles; rats and mice from around the homes of the people; the occasional bird. Fat pigeons were particularly plentiful in the area. They were also very stupid and he was already developing a range of techniques for stalking them, but of course they could only be taken in the daytime.

Once, he had found the corpse of a dog on College Rise and had dragged it to the den. It had not been appetizing.

The food he stole from the people was not enough to feed the growing cubs but it had become a vital contribution. He had taken to waiting among the trees so as to see them cache the food and then steal it immediately.

He saw that the sky was now darkening, which meant that the people would put their food out soon. Casting a last disappointed glance over the rough grass that had been loud with squeaks and rustles the year before, he made his way towards Hillside Drive. But he took a slight detour past the park’s ornamental pond, just so he could gaze across the water at the island where the ducks slept in safety. He considered swimming across, but that would be slow and noisy, and they would escape easily. He recalled how, during the very coldest part of winter, a bridge of ice had allowed him to sprint over and snatch himself a delicious meal one night. He had returned the following night to do it again but found that the ice had been broken up.

When he arrived in Hillside Drive there was no smell of food in any of the three gardens, so he sat down to wait in the middle one. Uncharacteristically, perhaps because the bellyache and the fever distracted him, he sat in the open rather than behind tree cover. And while he waited he thought about the torn- up carcasses the Fat Man threw on the grass. In his mind’s eye there was a vision of the man dismembering them with his teeth and his paws. He recalled the very first time the carcasses had appeared. They were left whole at that time, freshly murdered corpses lying on the sward. He had been alarmed, of course, to stumble upon dead creatures in this unexpected place. He was not wary of the corpses themselves - they were dead - but rather of whatever it was that had killed them. It was an instinctive reaction to any mysterious death; whatever had killed these creatures might also try to kill him. When he recognized the Fat Man’s weak scent on the bodies, then he knew who the killer must be and was able to regain his composure. It was safe to take the food while the man was inside his den. In the other gardens he had even snatched food while the people were standing nearby and yet they had not threatened him.

He fell into a light doze and was woken by the clattering noise people make when they come out of their homes. As the Fat Man clumped around the corner, shaking the ground with each footstep, Big Daddy stood up. The smell of food in the man’s hand swept over him, followed by a wave of nausea. The man halted abruptly and stared at him. Human speech flowed like bubbling liquid from his lips, reassuringly soft with no aggressive edge to it. Then he did something utterly astounding. Taking a piece of meat in one paw he extended it in a gesture that was quite unmistakable. He was offering the food! The man shuffled forward on his ungainly hind legs and Big Daddy backed away instinctively from the threatening upright stance. The man stopped, and he threw the morsel at Big Daddy’s feet. There was no possible doubt; it was intended for him. He picked it up and took it to the mouth of the den. And as he made the short journey his fevered brain was churning with the implications of what he had just witnessed. He tried to picture the people eating the food they cached on the grass and he realized he had never seen them do that. They never ate the food! They cached it for him and for the other foxes.

Making his way back across the bridge, he saw that the Fat Man had another piece in his paw. He was already holding it out in front of him.

‘Have you seen this cheeky bugger?’ Sandy McBeath spoke over his shoulder to Joan Duckworth who had come to her window and was leaning out. ‘I swear he was waiting for me out here.’ Big Daddy had stepped off the bridge and was facing him at a distance of ten feet, his head on one side as though listening to the conversation. His upper canines, long and white, overlapped his lower lip like daggers stuck through a pirate’s belt. Imagining how it would feel if they were to close on his fingers, Sandy shuddered pleasurably.

‘See if he’ll take it out of your hand,’ Joan suggested, as though prompted by his own last thought.

‘He won’t. I’ve tried.’ But he tried again, lowering his hand towards the ground, and the fox approached to within five feet before stopping. This was the limit. He would not allow the distance between them to decrease further. The yellow gaze was unblinking and was riveted on Sandy’s own, eyeball to eyeball. Even when the food was dropped and he stooped to take it in his mouth, he still maintained eye contact.

Over the next few weeks a routine was developed. Big Daddy waited on the lawn before sunset, sitting or reclining. He would remain fifteen minutes or so, and then move on if there was no action - like an impatient diner kept waiting too long at a restaurant - to sit on the Johnsons' lawn or the Duckworths'. Sandy McBeath watched from the window. If the fox was waiting he tapped on the pane to let him know he had been seen. By the time Sandy opened the back door, Big Daddy was on his feet, his thin tongue mopping the saliva from his lips.

Sandy yearned for the thrill of having the food taken from his hand. So there was usually a battle of wills - which the fox always won. He would wait calmly for perhaps two minutes at a distance of a few feet, his eyes fixed on the man’s face. If the food was not dropped by then he would walk away. And Sandy, reduced to abject surrender, would call after him ignominiously, ‘OK, OK. Have it your own way.’

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. May 6th:

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’ Sheila McBeath was waiting at the front door when her husband stepped out of the car one evening. She had the pent-up look of someone impatient for a showdown. She had not even paused to wash her hands, which were covered in clay from the potter’s wheel. ‘Joan from next door came to see me this morning. She was absolutely mortified to have to come and talk to me, and I was even more so when I heard what she had to say. She told me it wasn’t that she minded so much herself - although of course that can’t possibly be true can it? She say’s it’s her mother’s reaction she’s worried about, if she ever sees it. And can you blame her?’

‘If she sees what? What is it she doesn’t mind - or does mind, whichever one it is?’

‘She does mind! Of course she bloody well minds. And what about me? How can I ever face her again?’ With exasperation, she saw that he really was not catching her drift. So she was forced to spell it out. ‘It’s the peeing, for Chrissake. She said you were peeing in the garden, behind the bushes. More than once.’ As the light dawned on his face she continued, ‘Why don’t you just come in for a pee? Or do it before you go out. My God, listen to me. I feel like I’m talking to a six year old.’

‘I’m not doing it to relieve myself. You see, the foxes leave messages for each other by urinating around the territory. So I’m, you know, sort of leaving a message of my own.’

‘You’re trying to talk to the foxes by peeing in the bushes?’ She was incredulous.

‘Well, I just want to see their reaction.’

‘I see. Sandy, can you explain to me - I suppose I’m too thick when it comes to these questions of inter-species communication - can you tell me why you can’t pee into a jamjar behind closed doors and then write your messages with that.’

‘What a good idea! Why didn’t I think of it?’

‘Jesus Christ!’ She put her head in her hands, oblivious of the wet clay smudging her face and hair, and took a few deep breaths. It failed to calm her. ‘You’re supposed to be a highly cultured man - an intellectual. Tell me, is it considered cultured behaviour to - to - to crudely piss in public view?’

‘You shouldn’t really say that.’

‘What? What the hell shouldn’t I say?’

‘Well – .’ He hesitated, realizing too late that this was probably not a good idea. ‘I just mean you shouldn’t say ‘to crudely piss’. You’re splitting the infinitive. You can say ‘to piss crudely’ or ‘crudely to piss’. Not that it really matters I suppose,’ he finished weakly.

She appeared stunned. And then she began to sob. Or was she laughing? He could not tell, but there was a note of hysteria that alarmed him. He could not calm her. Each time he tried, the sound of his voice redoubled her convulsions. Finally, exhausted, she managed to croak, ‘That’s so ludicrous. But you don’t even see how ludicrous it is. You know, sometimes you’re like a caricature of yourself. It’s unbelievable.’

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. May 13th:

But he persisted for no more than a week because he became concerned about an alarming development. From early May the cubs had begun to make short excursions from the mouth of the den. By the middle of the month they were clambering and wrestling all over the rockery. Then they vanished. And on the night of their disappearance no food was taken from the gardens - the local magpies were treated to an unexpected feast the next morning.

Sandy McBeath was assailed by pangs of guilt. ‘D’you think my urine’s frightened them away?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Sheila was not prepared to offer false comfort. ‘Would you patronise a restaurant where they pissed on your food?’

‘No. But then I’m not a fox.’

‘I’m very relieved to hear you say that. You’ve started to scent-mark your territory but at least you do still realize you’re human.’

The following night, although the cubs did not reappear, the adults foraged on the lawn as usual. But Sandy had become apprehensive about the jamjar. He allowed it to gather dust while waiting for the situation to clarify.

                                                            ~

The Johnsons did not normally like to pry too closely into the warren. But within a few days April’s impatience drove her to crouch on the bank of the stream and peer through the stone archway. She found a small skull just inside, with bits of flesh still clinging to the bone. When she showed it to Sandy McBeath they both thought, from its size, that it could be a rabbit’s. He would clean it up, he said, and try to identify it. One hour in the university library convinced him the skull was that of a fox cub. Evidently something more disturbing than his piddling experiments had driven the foxes from their home.

The dark cloud that enveloped him as he left the library did turn out to have a considerable silver lining. He carried with him the book that had clinched the identification of the skull. It was David Macdonald’s superb chronicle of his researches into fox behaviour, Running With The Fox, which was to give him many hours of great pleasure and some insight into the ways of foxes.

Big Daddy crossed Hillside Drive travelling south into the large garden with the caged peacocks. Before slipping between the trees he paused to look back; the voices of the other foxes were still audible and he wanted to listen to them for just a moment more. He felt happy from playing with Whitepaws’ cubs around the new den. This was the den that Whitepaws had shunned when it was newly built but now, out of fear, she had moved the three surviving cubs into it. Something had raided the old warren while the cubs were unguarded, taking two of them for meat. The alien scent which still seeped from the empty burrow was one that he knew he had smelled before, but he was not quite able to pin it down.

For the past several days a despondency had frozen the spirits of all of them like ice in the blood. But tonight, as he looked back across Hillside Drive, he sensed the warm glow of reviving high spirits settling over the area like the gentle darkness of nightfall. The change in mood seemed to arise spontaneously, but recalling the way it had happened he saw how the vixen Hightail had bounced them out of their melancholy. Her very nature was bouncy like an oversize cub, and the jauntiness of her movements were a constant invitation to play. Yet of all of them, she had been the most distraught when the warren was violated. She had haunted it, carrying food offerings right into the deserted chamber as though expecting the missing cubs to rematerialize from the few pitiful fragments that remained. And then this evening, throwing off her melancholy, she had barged him without warning and jinked away with a cheeky backward glance, rolling a couple of the cubs onto their backs as she ran. That was how the game began. It ended when Whitepaws finally decided it was getting too raucous. She had pushed him away and had snapped at Hightail. Distracted, the cubs had looked for something else to do and the sight of their mother’s pink nipples had tempted them to suckle. She did not encourage it these days but they attached themselves before she could prevent it. As he turned to leave, his last glimpse had been of a tangle of bodies hanging down under her legs. They were pushing so roughly that she was in danger of toppling over.

Gliding into the shadows of the peacock garden, he tugged his thoughts back to the present, retracting the threads of his consciousness within him. From inside him, they seemed to flow down through his limbs to the ground on which he trod and into the foliage that brushed against him. As always, the movement of his body triggered a vivid awareness of his own muscular strength and resilience, and that awareness spilled over into the familiar surroundings as though they were an extension of his body. It was as if he were moving through his own extended body, flowing along its trails like a ripple of blood in his own arteries.

He was making for the Bank of Scotland training centre where another family of cubs was being raised. With the disappearance of the field voles, their young mother and her two companions were finding it a struggle to keep them fed. Big Daddy usually foraged for them en route, begging from certain householders who were known to him. The discovery that the Hillside people put food out for him rather than for themselves had been staggering, but he was quick to exploit it. Since then he had exhibited himself shamelessly to other people who happened to be looking from their windows, in case they too wanted to offer him something. Often they did, and he managed to negotiate many long term contracts.

A wooden fence barred his way. He leapt onto its crown, enjoying the easy surge of power in his legs, and perched a few seconds to survey the scene before dropping down. This was one of the places where people offered handouts. There was sunshine inside the house, which spilled out onto the lawn through its glaring eyes. If he placed himself within the bright area, the people would see him and they would want to feed him the way he himself felt a tender urge to feed the cubs. He sometimes imagined how it would be if he offered food to one of the people. But the image startled him - it was unthinkable. How peculiar that they should feel concern for him as though he were helpless. The ways of people were utterly strange; their behaviour lacked the predictability that was customary in the animal world.

Reclining on the grass he watched the silhouettes pass to and fro behind the windows and listened to the jangle of noise from within. He knew that later in the night the inner sunshine would dim and the noises would subside. Then the people slept; their regular breathing was clearly audible from outside as he passed by. When he heard it he pictured all of them curled up together on the earthen floor.

                                                            ~

Later the same night he was back on Hillside Drive, the corpse of a rabbit dangling from his mouth. He felt excited, anticipating the pleasure his gift would bring to Whitepaws’ cubs. But as he paused on rounding the corner of the Fat Man’s house, the pleasurable thought dropped out of his consciousness just as the rabbit dropped from his mouth. The night-time sunshine had flared abruptly from the cheese house and in its glare something from his past life was lumbering across the lawn through the scattered cheese, making for the nearest bridge. And across the bridge was the new den. The smell that filled his nostrils was the same one that had wafted from the mouth of the old warren after the cubs were murdered there. In his mind’s eye he clearly saw how the great beast must have torn them in pieces. Now the remaining cubs would be taken. A rush of adrenaline cleared his mind and galvanized his limbs. He bounded over the grass just as the beast turned onto the bridge. The beast swung round to face him and he leaped back on his springy legs, out of reach but not retreating. The creature scrabbled over the bridge, nervous of his presence behind it. A slim shadow sprang across its path and sent it shuffling back towards Big Daddy. He felt a glow of admiration for Whitepaws; she was now stalking the beast at a safe distance as it approached him. He hopped backwards, allowing it to step off the bridge. It turned onto the Fat Man’s lawn but he jumped into its path and out again, startling it into a change of direction. It must go back the way it came; it must be expelled from the territory.

Now Whitepaws was with him on the grass, one on each side of the beast but slightly behind it, encouraging a retreat across the cheese lawn. Each knew exactly what to do as if they were two parts of the same mind. Whenever it turned aside , one of them would alarm it by feinting across its line of sight. Increasingly bewildered and uncomfortable, the dim-witted creature broke into a clumsy gallop, Big Daddy and his mate following in close formation.

Alfred Duckworth was at the window when the security light was triggered. He had been marvelling at the bats swooping back and forth through the darkness. How prolific they were! - almost like the day-time population of birds. He wondered whether it was the same in winter; did they not hibernate? Most people, he supposed, had as little idea as he did what went on in their gardens at night. And then the light blazed, illuminating his train of thought with unexpected vividness.

He said, ‘God All-Bleeding-Mighty!’ Joan and her mother were surprised to hear it from someone so notoriously fastidious about bad language. When they joined him a few unladylike words might have escaped from their own lips but, if so, nobody heeded them. Something remarkable was ambling across their lawn.

‘It’s a badger, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it’s a badger.’

‘Have you ever seen one before?’

‘No, never.’ Joan grabbed the telephone. ‘I’ll have to phone Sandy next door. He’ll never forgive me if I don’t.’

‘I can see I’ve missed a lot with being at work every night,’ Alfred said. ‘D’you think we might spot a Komodo Dragon? I rather like those.’

Both households witnessed the impressive way in which the foxes manoeuvred their unwelcome guest from the premises. It was an intriguing confrontation: brute strength on the one side, intelligence and agility on the other. The co-operation between the two foxes was extraordinary, their movements as co-ordinated as a graceful Pas de Deux. When the badger finally broke into a shambling run the foxes followed with taut mincing steps, as though treading on hot coals. They were like two ballet dancers escorting a battletank.

Both households stayed up late to watch for the foxes’ return. But neither Big Daddy nor Whitepaws was seen again that night. Only Basil Brush collected food from the lawns. There was a lot to think about. Was it the badger who had emptied the warren? Would a badger kill fox cubs? Presumably it would, just as a fox would take badger cubs if given the chance. At least there was comfort in the thought that some cubs must have survived - how else to explain the foxes’ concern to remove the badger? And the cubs must be nearby for the same reason, but where? Alfred was soon to discover that they were in his own garden; he stumbled - quite literally - on the new den.

Alfred was at home at the time of the badger episode only because he was nursing an injury. His leg had been broken during a brawl at the pub; he had been forced to evict a group of rowdies and they decided that he should be left with this memento of their visit. They themselves were unscathed. During his convalescence he had plenty of time to ponder the injustice of life as exemplified by this incident. The hooligans always came off best because they could damage you more than you could damage them. In fact, unknown to him, they were compounding the damage even as he recovered, by their telling of the story. In their version he became a ‘fascist’, who kicked customers out merely to indulge his authority. As the rumours spread they even began to specify a particular right-wing party and his senior position within it. Of course trade suffered, and eventually the nonsense circled its way back to him. But what could he do other than shrug it off? Once a ripple of disinformation like this is generated it seems to spread out through the Universe at the speed of light; it is not as though one could overtake it and turn it around.

In the meantime he hobbled around the garden on crutches. Many of the neighbours had actually never seen him before, and now suddenly there he was, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight like an enormous and jovial pink mole. He began to enjoy his freedom. For the first time in years he crossed over the stream to the overgrown area on the far side and pushed his way gingerly through the tangle of shrubs and weeds. And then alarmingly the solid ground gave way under one of his crutches and he found himself face down in a bed of nettles. It was not a comfortable mattress but at least it was soft, and so his injury was not aggravated. He pulled at his crutch, which seemed to be buried three feet deep in the soil; it slipped out as easily as a sword from its scabbard. Pushing the nettles aside he found a neat round opening from which a tunnel dipped down at a steep angle under a large pile of leaves and prunings that had been allowed to accumulate over several years.

At this point he decided the terrain was too hazardous for him to investigate further so, like a prudent general, he retired to headquarters and sent in a scout. This was Joan, who discovered five widely-separated entrances. If these were all part of the same system, then this portion of their garden beyond the stream was completely undermined - an area of about five hundred square feet.

As soon as the information spread among the neighbours their attention focussed like a powerful beam on this patch of ground. Pretty soon the cubs appeared, as though the intensity of the human scrutiny had itself conjured them from the shadows. They flitted from bush to bush, dashing out of one tunnel and into another. Within a few weeks they were invading the adjacent properties. In the immaculate garden of the Duckworths’ neighbour the cubs carefully picked out the most delicate of the spring flowers, the most expensive of the young shrubs, and promptly destroyed them. And after a few more weeks they were capering over the bridge to grab the occasional scrap of food for themselves.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. July 16th:

Big Daddy was still absent the next night, and the one after. By the fourth day Sandy McBeath was in mourning. ‘Big Daddy’s dead,’ he told Sheila. He said it with an air of finality but she knew he really wanted to be dissuaded, so she tried.

‘Why can’t he just be ill, or injured? Why must he be dead?’

‘If he was sick or injured he’d still have to eat. He’d drag himself here where he knows there’s food.’

‘What if he’s too sick to drag himself?’

‘Then he’s as good as dead since he can’t survive without food. So whichever way you look at it he’s definitely dead.’

‘God, you’re such a pessimist. There must be a thousand possible explanations. Perhaps he’s gone on a trip. Perhaps he’s having an affair with a vixen on the other side of Cheadle.’

‘Foxes don’t have affairs; they’re monogamous. And they don’t go on package tours to Majorca.’

‘Sandy, you’ve got to snap out of it. We’ve got no time for this nonsense.’ She was particularly exasperated because it was their turn that year to host the annual Geology Department party one week hence. The party was always held just after the last examination meeting. Unofficially, it was a way of celebrating the departure of the undergraduates for the long vacation. ‘I can see you’re going to be no help to me at all. It’s your bloody party but I’m going to be doing all the work.’

As it turned out, this was almost true. While she spent her evenings preparing, he maintained an intermittent vigil at the bedroom window, offering some grudging help between observing sessions. But his expression was so hangdog that she found his presence irritating and preferred him to stay away.

Day by day he sank deeper into despondency. The depths of his despair surprised even himself, not because Big Daddy was a mere animal, but rather because it seemed out of all proportion for such a brief acquaintanceship.

Big Daddy twisted his head to lick the wounds on his flank and his thigh, straining to wash away the oppressive smell of sickness and with it the pain. At first the pain had been so huge that it had filled his consciousness, squeezing out every other concern, but then quite soon it had shrunk to the size of the injuries themselves and he was able to collect some of his thoughts. The first thought had been to reach cover, a matter of dragging his shattered hindquarters a few yards into the park and under the thickest vegetation within reach. Only then did he register surprise at the behaviour of the car that had struck him. When he crossed in front of it the car had accelerated and swerved across the road as though pursuing him. He had made the mistake then of facing the glaring eyes and so he was lost.

Later there had long periods of sleep from which he had woken into a state of delirium, not knowing whether it was night or day. He dreamed that the vixen Hightail was drinking his blood. When his fever cooled he found she visited him several times each night and licked the puss that was seeping out of him. As soon as he was able to eat she brought him food. Her visits were affectionate but fleeting. As she kissed him hurriedly he could smell on her the strain of providing for Whitepaws’ cubs as well as for him. And what of the other family of cubs that depended on his help? He was oppressed by visions of slaughter and starvation, prompted by memories of an earlier time when he had lain up recuperating from injury while those who depended on him were destroyed. So he exercised his limbs obsessively, and forced himself to his feet time and again though he felt his senses drowning in a flood of pain. And he twisted his head to lick and lick the smell of sickness from his wounds.

When he was not sleeping or exercising or cleaning his injuries, he fell into a dream-like reverie. Random thoughts floated into his consciousness and out again. Often he sent his mind to accompany the other foxes as they moved about the territory, hunting with them, foraging with them among the gardens, shepherding them across the dangerous roads, as though he might contribute at least a surge of mental energy to their welfare.

If the foxes drifted out of his mind the people usually drifted in to take their place. He puzzled endlessly over their many contradictions. Their fur was uncanny; its texture and shade altered from day to day, and only a tiny trace of their natural smell found its way through it. Such an insipid scent it was, and often masked by alien perfumes - the one who gave them cheese smelled more like a flower than an animal. And the only one of them who scent-marked its territory was the Fat Man; each time he came upon the pungent aroma, he imagined the ungainly figure crouching with its leg cocked.

                                                            ~

As soon as he was able to take a few steps Big Daddy shuffled and crawled his way to Hillside Drive. It was a slow journey and a spasmodic one; waves of nausea and pain brought him repeatedly to a halt. When he entered the small road he was alarmed by an unusual concentration of cars parked along it. To avoid the strange vehicles he detoured around the back of the first house and limped across three gardens towards the cheese lawn behind which was the den. But before that was the Fat Man’s house. As he approached it he saw that it was ablaze with light, which burst from every window, illuminating a scene of utter chaos within. Big Daddy reclined on the paved patio to regain his strength, and while he rested he stared in wonder at the throngs of people milling around inside the house. Every mouth seemed to be open; the jangle of voices was amazing to hear. Many of the faces turned to look in his direction, their eyes wide, their lips bubbling with sound.

‘Hey Prof, there’s a fox trying to gatecrash your party.’ The announcement came from a group of research students standing by the window. Across the room Sheila looked up in time to see Sandy rush to join them. He cupped his hands around his face to screen out the light, and then he shouted.

‘Ha!’ Searching out Sheila’s face in the crowd he called to her that Big Daddy was outside. A wave of pure relief washed over her. But the relief soon turned to dismay as she caught brief snatches of his animated explanations to the guests crowding around him. He was telling them at great length how this was a close friend whom he had feared was lost to him. She thought, Please God don’t let him start blubbing. Now he was suggesting they switch off the light the better to see any outside activity and there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for the idea. How much of it was genuine? Of course they would feel they had to humour him.

Turning away, she caught the eye of the department Secretary, Margaret, who was watching her with some amusement. The two of them were old allies at these events, finding themselves drawn together in a kind of mutual defence pact.

‘Don’t you like foxes?’ she asked Sheila.

‘It’s not that. It’s the way he goes about it, doing things that would horrify any rational person.’ She thought about the business of the urine and blushed, hoping to goodness he would have the sense not to mention it to anybody. ‘I mean, he’s got specimen jars in the garage with fox turds in them. I mean, he collects fox turds! He stirs them up in water and gazes at them under a microscope - with his nose stuck one inch above this almighty stench for hours at a time.’ Margaret was smiling encouragingly, so she continued. ‘In the boot of our car we carry plastic bags around with us wherever we go. Would you like to guess what for?’

‘Collecting fox turds?’

‘No. They’re for road casualties. You know, squashed rabbits or squirrels or blackbirds or pheasants - whatever’s going, it’s on the menu. When he sees one, we’ve got to stop the car with the warning lights flashing while he gets out and scrapes it off the road. He brings them home as a special treat for his friends out there. This is an animal lover? I’ve told him, When I die please don’t give me to the foxes!’

Margaret chuckled and grimaced in a reassuringly sane way and said, ‘You know, I’ve been studying academic scientists at close range for years - a sort of scientific study of my own. And I’ve got a theory about them. I mean, this business of bringing dead animals home is a perfect example of the behaviour pattern. It’s the kind of thing we all did as children - that’s what distinguishes these boffin types from normal people: they’ve never grown up. They get fascinated by some toy they’re playing with and lose sight of all other considerations. They lack a sense of proportion, just like kids do.’

Sheila looked towards the group at the window. They were rigging up a cassette player on a long lead. She gathered they intended to play music to the foxes. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. They can be clever but without much common sense.’

Margaret was encouraged to present more data. ‘Just recently, I heard an intriguing story from someone in the Department of Anthropology. They’ve just appointed a new female professor who’s supposed to be brilliant. Her husband is also an anthropologist, but they’re separated. Apparently he was appointed to a very prestigious chair in Oxford many years ago, and before taking up the post he went off to Papua New Guinea on a field trip - you know, to study the primitive societies. Only he never came back. The term started in Oxford without him. They wrote and enquired and searched for him but nobody could find him, so they had to appoint someone else. It seems he’d gone native. He got so interested in the people he was studying that he became one of them. His responsibilities to his wife and kids, his job - all his commitments were just forgotten. He built himself a native hut, shacked up with a local woman and started raising pigs and growing root vegetables.’

‘But that’s monstrous behaviour!’ Sheila was indignant. ‘It’s utterly irresponsible.’

‘Yes, but isn’t it also touchingly childlike? - like William Brown deciding to leave home and become a savage.’

With only the briefest of mental struggles, Sheila managed to shrug off an absurd vision of her husband dragging his sleeping bag down a foxhole. Still, there was an uncomfortable resonance between some of his recent excesses and the story she had just heard.

                                                                ~

‘Universities are a waste of tax-payers’ money.’ Robbie Johnson had cornered a timid young lecturer and was educating him about the nature of the real world outside the ivory tower. ‘Not that I pay taxes mind. I pay an accountant instead.’

The Johnsons and the Duckworths had been invited out of courtesy, to forestall complaints about the noise and traffic congestion. Apart from Robbie, they felt somewhat out of place, contenting themselves with observing the unfamiliar customs from the margins, the way anthropologists in a Papuan village are supposed to. But Robbie was unabashed in any company. For one thing, his glass of orange juice gave him the assurance of moral superiority. Many of the guests had found it waving in their faces while he expressed high-minded regret for the damage they were doing to their bodies by indulging in alcohol.

‘What type of business are you in?’ the young lecturer asked him.

‘Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that. You could say I’m in the Robin Hood business. I steal from the rich and give to the poor. In my case the rich are my creditors and the Inland Revenue.’

‘And the poor?’

‘Well now, I guess that would be the Johnson Family Pension Fund in Liechtenstein.’

                                                               ~

Sheila ambushed a Danish research student as he crossed the living room. He was in danger of being sucked into the fox-watching group.

‘Would you like to hear some of my son’s old tapes? He’s got ---,’ she waved her hands vaguely, ‘He’s got Heavy Metallic Rocks.’ Or was she getting confused with her husband’s interests? ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ll like them.’

‘Thank you Mrs. McBeath, but no. I prefer Mozart. But now I go to view the foxes.’

‘Wait! Have you met my niece? She’s helping me this evening.’ She called through to the kitchen, ‘Amy, come and talk to this young man. Tell him about your new job. It sounds so interesting.’ She left them sitting together on the sofa.

‘What is your new job?’

Amy giggled. ‘I’ve got a vacation job at a sewage works.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You don’t have to be. It’s not your fault.’

‘I suppose it must be interesting in some ways.’

‘Not very.’

‘But Mrs. McBeath said.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it. She probably just wants us to get married.’

‘Ah. I think maybe I have heard about this. It is the Jewish Mother Syndrome, yes?’

‘Well, the Jewish Auntie Syndrome in my case.’

                                                            ~

‘You’ll have to call in at the pub.’ Alfred Duckworth had decided to break the ice with one of the less outlandish among the university guests.

‘Actually I did come in a few years back. I’m afraid you threw me out for not wearing a tie.’

                                                            ~

‘A Labour government would be death to British business.’ Robbie Johnson was debating politics with an ageing hippie.

‘Not these days surely. Didn’t a party spokesman say something just the other day about wanting to make peace with the business community? He talked about launching a Dove of Peace.’

‘Oh yes? Knowing them it’ll turn out to be a fucking pigeon. And it’ll crap all over us.’

                                                            ~

In the dying stages of the party a few durable guests were sprawled in a cluster around Sandy McBeath. Drifting into their orbit, Sheila caught the tail end of somebody’s question. ‘---- if you were to put some of your urine on the bits of food that you offer him?’ She hurried away so as not to hear any more. But the discussion continued.

‘I don’t think it would make him less wary of me, judging from their usual reaction to my urine.’

‘This reminds me of something that happened in my own college,’ an American visitor said. ‘We have a gorilla named Koko whom they’re teaching to speak with American Sign Language. You must have heard about these guys. Well it seems that Jane Goodall - you know, the woman who studies chimpanzees in the wild - was visiting this research group and they asked her to suggest a question for Koko. So she suggested something she’d always wondered about in her own work. She wanted to know whether he preferred people to stand or to sit while they were with him. And the answer was, he preferred them to sit. Maybe you should try that with your Big Daddy when he won’t take the food from your hand.’

‘There’s something of the kind in Homer’s Odyssey,’ one of Sandy’s research students chipped in, naturally delighted with such a legitimate excuse to exhibit her erudition. ‘Odysseus is threatened by the dogs of some village, so he sits down. Homer says it was well known that the dogs of Ithaca took it as a friendly sign.’

Big Daddy woke on the springy turf by the den. He had been kissed and pawed into a state of happy exhaustion and then had slept more soundly than ever before in his life. He saw that he was alone; the others had left him to sleep in peace. For the first time in many days his initial thought on waking was not about the pain. Something had woken him; perking his ears he found that it was the sound of silence. The racket from the Fat Man’s house had subsided and the night was dark and gentle around him. He sniffed the darkness. It smelled of fresh-mown grass mingled with traces of the food eaten earlier by the foxes. And there was his own smell, his own vigorous body smell without the taint of sickness. He knew he was alive, and it felt good.

He listened to the silence. There was a fine texture to it made up of all the familiar night-time whispers and murmurs: the distant hum from the trunk road; owls twitting to each other in the park; tiny scratchings and rustlings all about him. Then, quite distinctly, the Fat Man’s tread across the stone patio and onto the grass. Perhaps he was bringing food. Big Daddy shambled over the bridge, feeling for the wooden slats with care so as not to slip between them. The man was grunting quietly, as he often did when they met, in the manner of a fox taking food to the cubbing den. There was a lump of dark matter on his outstretched paw. It was not meat; the smell that wafted from it was as sweet as honeysuckle. A pleasant idea came to Big Daddy: he would carry the fragrant morsel to the family of cubs he had neglected for so long, at the other den.

He wanted to pluck it from the man’s paw - he even pictured himself doing it - but his limbs refused to propel him towards it. The tall figure, reared up in the posture of rage, was quite simply not approachable. Man and fox were locked in their customary stalemate.

This time however the man behaved unexpectedly. He collapsed clumsily onto the grass with his long hind legs folded under him. The sweet-smelling food was just a few inches from Big Daddy’s nose. Intoxicated as he was with the euphoria of his reviving health and the renewal of his family affections, Big Daddy was in an unusually compliant mood. He stretched forward to smell the enticing substance more closely. The man’s eyes were comfortably level with his own; they had a warm look to them. It would be so easy just to tilt his head on one side and open his jaws to take the food. He did it delicately so as not to hurt the man’s paw. The material crumbled as he closed his mouth around it, leaving fragments behind. Big Daddy laid his mouthful carefully on the grass and returned to lick the crumbs from the man’s palm. He licked each long finger, marvelling at their nakedness and their fragility. The salty taste of the man’s skin contrasted pleasantly with the sweetness of the pastry.

Big Daddy did not manage to reach the Bank of Scotland with his gift. By the time he entered the peacock garden pain and exhaustion had conquered him. So he ate the pastry himself and fell asleep where he lay, with the flavour still fresh in his mouth.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. August 8th:

Late one night Sandy McBeath told Sheila that he was going out to investigate the fox range and he might be some time. Though she mumbled an acknowledgement, she did not even look up from the potter’s wheel. Her pots were drying faster than she could turn them. She would be working till the small hours once again, turning all the pots she had so imprudently thrown the day before. Like most potters, she made the mistake of overproducing while in a throwing frenzy. Nevertheless, as she heard the front door close she did experience a momentary tremor of apprehension about what exactly he intended to do outdoors in the middle of the night.

When the phone rang she saw that two hours had slipped by unnoticed. The voice was somewhat hesitant.

‘Umm, I hope you’re not going to tell me you’re Lady Macbeth.’ There was some muffled laughter in the background, which cranked her blood pressure up another notch.

‘I’m Mrs. McBeath. Who are you?’

‘This is Cheadle Police Station, Mrs. McBeath. We have a gentleman in our custody who claims to be your husband - although he may be somebody else’s husband too for all I know.’

‘What on Earth can you possibly mean?’

‘Well, we’re not entirely sure what we’re dealing with but, from what he himself is saying to us, it does seem to involve bigamy in some way. Can you throw any light on that?’

‘Bigamy?’

‘Look, I think you’d better come over and help us sort it out.’

Bigamy? Sheila found herself clutching the sideboard for support as a surge of vertigo threatened to overcome her. The solid ground seemed to drop away leaving her falling freely. Such is the pathetic lack of confidence we have in our own knowledge and judgement when faced with the insidious power of eyewitness evidence.

She drove slowly because the sudden collapse of her whole world was affecting the steadiness of her hands. But, walking into the police station, her common sense returned like a splash of cold water in the face when she saw her husband, dirt-smeared over dark clothing, with one of their children’s old balaclavas pushed back ridiculously on his head. She marched straight to the sergeant’s desk. ‘What’s all this nonsense about bigamy?’ she asked him. But it was Sandy who answered her.

‘It’s Big Daddy. I’ve discovered he’s a bigamist.’

Big Daddy! She laughed and kissed his dirty face, which he enjoyed. But he never did understand why there were tears in her eyes or why she called herself a faithless blockhead.

It took a bit of time to convince the sergeant that Big Daddy was not her husband’s nickname. And then it took some more time to explain why he had been seen lurking in two separate gardens as well as in the private grounds of the Bank of Scotland. The bank’s caretaker had been understandably alarmed for the safety of his three children after watching him crawl and dodge among the bushes for a good half hour, and had finally collared him. Sheila was surprised how readily her explanations were accepted. Apparently the idea that a person would stalk wild animals around the suburbs at dead of night was not new to the police. Sandy was released with a caution, and with a suggestion that he visit the caretaker’s family to make his peace since they might still wish to press charges.

On the way home Sandy was elated and quite unabashed. ‘Big Daddy’s got a bit on the side at the Bank of Scotland,’ he told her, and she listened with unusual attentiveness because of her guilty feelings. ‘I’ve discovered that he’s got two separate territories and two separate families. What a stud, eh! I named him right, the randy bugger.’

But Big Daddy was not a bigamist; his crime was quite a different one. The father of the cubs at the Bank of Scotland was Whitepaws’ son from the previous year. As for Big Daddy, he was married to his sister, whose previous mate had been their father. All unknowing, the respectable dormitory suburb of Cheadle was doubly contaminated with incestuous practices. In future years, with fox groups tightly packed and a plentiful supply of spare vixens spilling over between neighbouring territories, this type of disreputable behaviour would become rare.

On a misty evening in early November, Big Daddy ambled through the wooded strip behind Hillside Drive in a state of olfactory bliss. The dampness amplified each and every smell to such a pitch that he seemed to be wading through air thick with intoxicating fragrances. But one particular fragrance caught his attention and pierced him to the heart. He followed it into the Fat Man’s garden, to a pair of muddy boots abandoned outside the back door. He lowered his nostrils to sniff the boots. The mud was not of this area - it was laced with cow shit. With his eyes closed he breathed in more deeply and found himself re-living a bittersweet fragment of his past life in vivid detail.

For several minutes he stood quite still, breathing in his memories along with the farmyard aroma. When he emerged from the trance his movements were purposeful. At the steady loping canter of a migrating fox, he made his way along Hillside Drive and College Rise to the A34, and from there southward and westward towards Styal Village and the Cheshire farmland beyond it. He did not spare a thought for the consternation he would leave behind him - and not just among the foxes! His thoughts moved ahead of him, tracing out the steps he had taken two years before.

It was a very different fox making the journey this time. His injury had left him with a permanent legacy of stiffness and pain. There was a price to be paid for every little movement, and big movements were carefully avoided. But while time had robbed him of his youthful resilience, it had given him something in return: an inner strength; a self-assurance that was entirely lacking in the nervous yearling who had cringed from the bullying attentions of all those he met on the way. On this occasion the resident foxes who challenged him were faced with a calm indifference they found quite unnerving. He just ignored them, and his coolness so intimidated them that they stepped aside to let him pass, convinced that had they stood their ground he would have walked through their very bodies.

He reached his farmland territory in just one night’s travel, entering via the same gap in the same hawthorn hedge by which he had left two years earlier. Making for the nearest suitable thicket, he crawled in and slept soundly through the hours of daylight. When he woke he needed a full minute to remember he was not dreaming, that he was really here. Within five minutes he was at the cubbing earth - which was intact but empty - sniffing for traces of the lives that had been shattered there, his own life among them. Then he moved on to sniff around the sheep where the lambing pen had been. And so he criss-crossed the range in an orgy of nostalgia lasting two whole nights, re-visiting all the sites of his greatest happiness and his greatest sorrow.

On the third night he put aside his memories and began a week of carefree enjoyment, like an office worker letting himself go on a solitary camping trip. The weather took an exciting turn; an exhilarating wind howled across the farmland, tearing the last few leaves from the trees and ruffling up his fur. It carried all the nostalgic smells that had drawn him back to this place. It filled the air with the groans and creaks of branches under strain. He criss-crossed the range again, this time visiting the banks and hedgerows and the patches of uncultivated scrub that once had been his best hunting grounds. Throughout the summer and autumn the prey had been scarce in his Cheadle range but here they were plentiful even though the nesting season was well past. In particular he was delighted to find no shortage of field voles in the area. They scurried in their hundreds along their tiny runways, chattering and squeaking as aggressively as ever. He was able to indulge his passion for hot blood and bones in a way that had not been possible since the previous winter. And the pleasure was as much in the stalking as in the eating: listening for the small sounds of the prey, judging its precise position and then thumping the flimsy tunnel roof down hard onto it before it even sensed his presence - these were the skills of his trade and he would never lose the thrill of exercising them.

There was a solitary dogfox in the territory - whom he treated as invisible and who eventually tolerated him albeit resentfully - but no vixen and no cubs. After all, foxes were killed here as he knew only too well. At the end of a week Big Daddy himself was targeted by the hunt. Their yelping clamour and the shaking of the ground woke him from his daytime sleep. This time he knew exactly where to go: within ten minutes at a relaxed pace he was standing in Wainwright’s farmyard watching the motley crowd mill around in confusion before retreating over the fields. From the farmhouse door the man with the shitty feet clumped across the yard and stood by him. Big Daddy looked up calmly at the man’s face and listened with interest to the warbling that came from his mouth. Yes, he remembered the tone - he was beginning, with difficulty, to distinguish one person’s voice from another’s. He lowered his head to sniff the man’s feet and as he did so, an image came to him of a pair of muddy boots abandoned by the door of the Fat Man’s house just a few paces from Whitepaws’ cubbing den. And then he thought of the people of Hillside Drive and of Whitepaws and Hightail and the young ones, and of the other group at the far side of the territory by the thunder road. It was time to go home.

In the McBeath household Big Daddy’s death was being mourned for the second time in four months.

‘There’s no hope for him this time,’ Sandy insisted, though he was secretly harbouring a few hopes, which he badly wanted Sheila to nourish with some arguments of her own.

‘That’s what you said last time,’ Sheila told him, ‘but he wasn’t dead after all, was he?’

‘He was almost dead; he was barely alive. So I wasn’t very far wrong. I still don’t understand how he survived so long without food. It was a bloody miracle - we can’t expect him to be so lucky twice in a row.’

‘Is that a mathematically respectable argument? You’re saying good luck is rationed? It seems to me your scientific rationality is only a thin veneer; after just a little bit of abrasion the age-old superstitious heartwood shows through.’

‘Look, you know what I’m talking about. The reason he went missing last time is that he was at death’s door. He wasn’t visiting the red light district and he wasn’t away on holiday as you suggested at the time. So it’s quite reasonable that I should assume the worst. After all, the average life-span of a fox is only about eighteen months, mostly because of what we do to them.’

He found his own arguments more convincing than her’s and so sank into an ever deeper melancholy. Sheila felt there was something almost unsavoury about it. She told him, quite woundingly, that he had not been so dejected when his own mother died.

‘I’m the last person to deal in ethnic stereotypes,’ she said, ‘but I sometimes think there’s a bit of truth in what foreigners say about people in this country - you seem to care more for animals than you do for humans.’

‘Well, that’s charming,’ he said icily. ‘But if you’re going to resort to racial stereotypes, at least get the right one. It’s the English who are supposed to care for animals more than people. I’m Scottish remember!’ And since he was glaring at her so angrily, she did not dare to say there was no difference.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. Nov. 9th:

Big Daddy extracted a piece of chicken from the Fat Man’s paw and carried it over the stream to eat in private. But his privacy was disturbed by the arrival of Hightail looking impressively fat. Her cubs would be born very soon - she had been cleaning and repairing both cubbing dens. Although he tried turning his back so as to protect his meal, she managed to outflank him, nuzzling and cajoling. As she leaned against him he felt a wriggling movement inside her belly that impelled him to relinquish his food without further dispute, hungry as he was. He would have to find another meal somewhere. The Fat Man had returned to his lair, but he would throw more food later when the night became dark. In the meantime there would be food in many other gardens that he knew.

Watching Hightail eat, he thought ahead to the serious foraging that would begin when she disappeared underground and would intensify as the cubs were weaned. He could rely on the help of Strongfox who was Hightail’s mate, but he was not sure about Quickvixen, another of last year’s cubs, who was restless by nature and may yet move away from the area. The third yearling cub had already left but only to join the neighbouring group at the Bank of Scotland. The thought of her induced him to commence his patrol and his search for supper in that direction, across Hillside Drive and into the peacock garden.

But while still in the Fat Man’s territory he sensed the approach of Strongfox from just within the park. He waited, knowing that Strongfox would already be aware of him and would come this way to greet him before crossing the stream. The yearling began to flatten his body to the ground, snake-like, while still many paces distant, kinking his head upwards in a genial gape. The two foxes met broadside, spiralling inwards anticlockwise to touch whiskers before gliding apart in opposite directions.

There was a strong bond of understanding between these two. Big Daddy knew the young one’s thoughts as though he could crawl inside his mind; they were the lusty thoughts of a young dogfox just coming into his prime, ready to grab the whole of life in his jaws. Thus he had grabbed Hightail’s affection when she came into season and Big Daddy had been glad to see them in love. The smells of their passion excited him too, but Whitepaws made him wait many nights before she accepted his embrace. Then, when they coupled, he felt his very bones melting within his body. He loved her so much, it hurt just to think of her. Even now that she was gone. Especially now that she was gone.

Before reaching the Bank of Scotland Big Daddy met another of the neighbourhood’s nocturnal inhabitants. The black cat who travelled this way each evening towards the Fat Man’s garden crept through the foliage silently and invisibly, betrayed only by its scent and the cold glow of its eyes. It would wait in the shadows to take a share of the Fat Man’s meat and then would stalk through the thickets by the stream for much of the night. Big Daddy paused to contemplate the creature as it stole past him with arrogant unconcern. A twinge of apprehension assailed him briefly, associated somehow with the movements he had felt in Hightail’s belly. But the thought slipped away cat-like before he could examine it closely.

                                                            ~

As the early morning mist began to glow in the first light he felt a sudden urgency to make contact with Hightail. He hurried to Hillside Drive broadcasting a wah-wah-wah ahead of him. Hightail did not meet him but she was there; her smell, washed bright by the moist air, clung to the area. It was a subtly changed smell, tinged with disturbing references to open wounds and flowing blood. He understood that she was already underground, in the den behind the cheese garden. There was a buzz, a kind of warmth under his paws as he walked over the ground above it. He must think of her now in a new way, a newly respectful way. The responsibility of motherhood, awesome, mysterious, had fallen squarely onto her small and bouncy frame.

By the start of the new year it seemed that every garden in South Manchester had its resident fox and every suburban street was suffused with the pleasant aroma of fox urine. The dispersal of the yearlings over the winter had completed an invasion of the city that had begun just three years before.

On Hillside Drive the year began badly. Robbie Johnson died. While waging a gutsy campaign against liver disease, he was ambushed by stomach cancer and succumbed within a few months. The neighbours had no warning at all; he refused to tell anyone outside the family of his illness. He could not bear to suffer their sympathy. And so, to them, it seemed he was his usual cheerful, optimistic and pugnacious self one day - and dead the next. They were stunned in a way that only happens when people of a certain type die - those larger-than-life characters who leave a great empty space when they go.

A pawl of gloom settled over the street, filtering the brightness from life, leaving it colourless and tasteless. But the fog evaporated during the course of the funeral service where the mourners were greeted with the Morecambe and Wise rendering of Bring Me Sunshine, and the funeral oration from a friend of the family began: ‘Teetotaller, non-smoker, model husband and father, always gentle and soft-spoken, honest and generous in his business dealings - that’s a description of me as I was before I met Robbie. He taught me a lot. Now I drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney; I swear at everyone; I never make mistakes, and even if I do it’s someone else’s fault; I shout at my wife and lock my kids up in their rooms when they annoy me----’. After the service people collected in small groups and discussed Robbie: his life, his achievements, his strength of character, his outrageous ideas, his jokes (on his last night a nurse had asked him, ‘Are you comfortable Mr Johnson?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I’ve got a few bob.’). By taking him apart they were somehow able to put him back together whole again, at least in their thoughts. They gave him a proper send-off.

                                                            ~

In late January, those on the lookout for mating among the foxes saw the familiar behaviour pattern and yet were surprised by what they saw. Their attention had been focussed on Big Daddy and Whitepaws, but the lovers turned out to be Basil Brush and one of the yearling cubs. Unfortunately both of them were found to require an immediate change of sex; the cub - assumed to be female - was clearly playing the male role while Basil appeared to be a girl. They were re-christened Romeo and Juliet because their love was almost illegal according to the authorities on fox behaviour. It was surprising enough that Big Daddy allowed another dogfox to remain in the territory; to let him mate while he himself had not done so was surely remarkable. Big Daddy’s admirers saw this as yet more confirmation that he was an unusual fox.

Ten days after Romeo and Juliet’s lovemaking, Big Daddy and Whitepaws began their own, and the foxaholics of Hillside Drive anticipated with some glee the prospect of having two separate litters in the area. Was that allowed to happen? There was a strong possibility of some entertaining chaos. But their daydreams were shattered by an unknown motor vehicle travelling south on the A34 several weeks later.

The natural life-span of a fox is ten years; its life- expectancy is eighteen months. Mostly it is we who kill them, either intentionally or by accident. An urban fox normally ends up in an encounter with a vehicle bumper. Whitepaws encountered hers on a murky night in mid-March. She was thirty five days pregnant - just two and a half weeks from her confinement.

Sandy and Sheila McBeath found her remains on the roadside. They needed several minutes to identify her with certainty because she was so damaged and so bedraggled with road-mud. And what the hell was she doing so far south of Hillside Drive anyway? Sandy gathered her up and carried her to the car. Sheila took the driving seat. She tried not to think about the dark fluids that were already staining his clothes and the upholstery. He was looking into the fox’s mouth, examining her teeth.

‘So, how old was she?’ Sheila asked.

‘About three years. Well, since we’re in March that means exactly three years. Funny - three years takes us right back to those excavations under the shed. She could have been one of that very first litter.’

When they reached home she switched off the engine and squeezed his arm. ‘I’ll help you, Luv. Just let me get an overall on.’

‘You want to help me?’ He was puzzled.

‘Course I do. But we’ll have to find a suitable place, not here. Somewhere out in the country it should be.’

‘I was going to use the garage.’ He knew before she did that they were at cross purposes, and resigned himself to the coming storm.

‘The garage? What exactly are you planning to do?’

‘What did you think I was planning to do?’

‘I assumed you wanted to bury her.’

‘Well I suppose so, but not yet. First I’m going to dissect her.’

Sheila stiffened. Her sympathy evaporated. ‘You’re going to cut her up! I thought you were upset. I thought you felt some affection for her.’

‘I do feel affection. I’m not harming her - she’s already dead for Crisake. It just doesn’t feel right to stuff her under the ground without taking the opportunity to - - to explore as much as possible of her, to find out what she was and what sort of life she had. Actually, in taking the time to do this I’m honouring her.’

‘My God. You! Your affection is dangerous. You’re a menace to anyone you feel affection for.’

There was a minute of silence while each thought his own thoughts. Not for the first time, Sandy wondered if other couples had such combative relationships.

Then Sheila said, ‘Look, I’d better tell you from now, to prevent any future misunderstanding: I don’t want to be dissected when I die, OK? I’ll dispense with the honour if you don’t mind - an ordinary funeral will be just fine.’

She kept well away during the post-mortem but she helped with the burial, even offering to sing Bring Me Sunshine. It was a relief to learn that he was not intending to feed Whitepaws’ corpse to the other foxes. They buried it in the countryside many miles from their home, so whoever dug it up and ate it was unlikely to be a close relative.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. March 14th:

Sandy McBeath did not record in his notebook how touched he had been by the four tiny embryos, each looking so hopeful at the end of its fat coil of umbilical tube. Perhaps his paranoia over the affair of the black cat becomes almost understandable in the light of these sentiments. He was worried for Juliet’s cubs, as yet unborn; they would be so vulnerable when they first began to venture above ground. He was frankly unimpressed by the ability of the adult foxes to protect them. Firstly, the badger episode of the previous year was not a good precedent. And secondly, in all the interactions that had been seen - with one exception - the black cat seemed to get the better of the foxes quite effortlessly.

The cat had appeared in the area quite suddenly the previous autumn and since then had been a regular visitor to the Hillside gardens. To whom it belonged and from where it arrived each evening, nobody knew. But it was there waiting, an invisible black hole in the darkness, whenever food was scattered on the grass, and it was always the first to avail itself, much to the annoyance of those who provided the food. Even its table manners were irritating. Whereas the foxes chomped and swallowed each morsel rapidly and completely, the cat mincingly removed all the choice bits of flesh from the bone and then discarded the rest, moving on to pillage another piece. The foxes, arriving late, would scrutinise the cat as though considering the options, but no aggressive move was ever seen - at least not on their part. The cat showed plenty of aggression if any fox dared to sniff at it too closely. After a leisurely supper it would stroll across one of the bridges and creep unchallenged into the foxes’ very heartland.

The one incident in which a fox was seen to put one over on it was a demonstration of guile rather than courage. Entering the McBeath garden, Romeo found the cat sitting by the lone Cypress tree in the centre of the lawn, nibbling in its dainty way at a piece of chicken. Sandy McBeath saw him move behind the tree and then, edging around it, make a feint towards the cat, who spat and showed its claws. But Romeo was already advancing around the other side of the trunk, and when the cat spun round to face him he switched sides again. He danced in and out, first one side and then the other, like a swordsman taunting his opponent, and clearly had no intention of making contact. The cat, bewildered and disoriented, eventually became separated from its meat, which was promptly snatched away. Could it be that guile is not quite the same thing as intelligence? - there was plenty of other food strewn on the grass, which Romeo could have picked up without all the effort. Either he was too thick to appreciate this - which seems unlikely - or he actually relished the thought of outwitting the cat.

Juliet grew suddenly big and vanished on schedule into the Duckworth den. Both the dogfoxes were conscientious providers but apparently negligent as protectors of the young family in that they continued to ignore the threat of the black cat. At least that is how Sandy McBeath saw it. He tried to share his concerns with the neighbours, but they refused to be concerned. The cubs would begin to play outside the den at four weeks of age, he reminded them, just where the cat spent much of the night prowling. And had they not all seen the cubs left to play unattended so many times in previous years? But they giggled openly at his fears, and he was compelled to admit that his case was weak, especially as two more adult foxes had joined the group.

The new vixens both showed signs of having lived through hard times. One had a gash extending from flank to flank across her spine, the result of some terrible injury. As the wound healed, it became a permanent black belt around her waist. So she came to be called Judo. The other was emaciated; her fur was sparse and ragged, and the ribs showed through it so clearly that they seemed to be outside her skin. These two sorry specimens arrived on the scene a fortnight after Juliet's confinement. From the outset they were fully functional members of the team without any period of apprenticeship, and they were both energetic scavengers.

There were now four adults foraging on the lawns, but the black cat sauntered among them with cool disdain. Once, Sandy saw it encircled by all four as it licked and chewed at a piece of chicken. The foxes stood stiffly facing inwards. They looked at the cat and looked at each other, and then at the cat. There was surely an air of menace in their piercing gaze. It seemed that a mugging was imminent. But the tableau dissolved and the moment passed.

The next evening Sandy called at a sporting shop and then a supermarket on his way home. Sheila found him later at the bedroom window with a bag of dried peas and a serious-looking catapult. How could he be so absurdly inconsistent in bestowing his compassion? She confiscated his weapons, threatening to report him to the neighbours and to the RSPCA. This gave him an idea. He phoned the RSPCA to ask their advice about dealing with a stray cat - he had come to regard it as such, perhaps because that gave him more freedom of action. They referred him to the Cat Protection Society who told him - as of course they would - that the cat had more to fear than the foxes did. He should leave it be, and he should admire the plucky little creature, he was told. Well yes, all right, he did admire the plucky little bleeder. And he accepted without censure that its impulse to slaughter the babies of other animals was entirely natural. He just wanted it to go away and slaughter someone else’s babies.

The cubs were now four weeks old. He began to hatch desperate plots to kidnap the black cat and release it far away from Cheadle. And then it vanished. Not gradually, the way a Cheshire Cat should, but all of a sudden. Life went on, the cubs appeared, the adults came to them now and then with pre-chewed mouthfuls of solid food, but otherwise supervised them in the usual lax manner. And there was no cat to be seen; the area was a cat-free zone.

Sandy McBeath feared that the neighbours would point the finger at him. How could they fail to after all the fuss he had made? So when he met Joan and Louise he could not resist the impulse to raise the question of the cat’s disappearance. ‘Isn’t it remarkable that it should vanish just at the precise moment I was dreading so much?’ he said. They had not thought it remarkable, but now of course they did. ‘It must have been the foxes, don’t you think?’ he said. His manner was shifty; there was guilt written all over his face. What he was really saying was, ‘In case you suspect me, I’d like to divert your suspicion elsewhere.’ They had not suspected him, but now of course they did. It was very frustrating - how could he plausibly accuse the foxes when he was the one who had insisted they were not assertive enough to deal with the problem on their own.

In fact the whole episode left him feeling uncomfortable about the foxes. He, the defender of their reputation, felt somehow betrayed by this cold-blooded act of violence. There had been no need for it. A higher standard of baby-sitting would have dealt with the situation quite adequately.

Big Daddy reclined a few feet from the den watching the other foxes at work and at play. The cubs were fighting over a rabbit carcass. They tugged three ways at its limbs. If one of them pulled it free, he ran with it and then defended it against the other two. The eating would come later when it was reduced to manageable portions. Hightail ran with her cubs and around them, excited by their game, barely restraining herself from joining it.

When Damage and Tiny came grunting from among the trees with the first cheese of the evening, the rabbit was temporarily abandoned in favour of this more accessible food. Not that the cubs had much choice since Tiny-vixen literally pushed the cheese into their mouths in her anxiety to see them eat. She had joined the group while the cubs were still underground, and Big Daddy reflected that he had scarcely seen her swallow a morsel herself in all the time he had known her. She was the thinnest fox he had ever seen, practically skin and bone. Yet her energy was tremendous. Life to her was all work and no play; she was serious, fussy, hyperactive and bossy. Damage-vixen had come to the territory with Tiny, as though the two had travelled together. She had arrived bearing a horrific wound across her back, the flesh torn away by the jaws of a large dog - it could not have been anything else. There was now a strip of bare skin straddling her backbone where the fur would never grow again. She was elderly, which is unusual for a migrating fox, thick-set, slow-moving, rather stolid by nature, with a tendency to moodiness. Only one strong emotion ever seemed to quicken her pulse: it was her inexplicable animosity to the yearling Quickvixen who, as a result, was virtually banished from the day-to-day life of the group.

While Tiny pestered the cubs with her cheese, Damage left her own piece on the ground with no fuss and plodded over the bridge for more. Big Daddy considered collecting some of the cheese himself but then decided there was no need. Life was much more relaxed this year than in the previous cubbing season; he spent a lot of the time sleeping, even during the night.

Finally he rose to his feet, stretching and warming the stiffness in his joints, greeting each twinge of pain like an old friend. He would patrol his boundaries and visit the other group by the road of thunder and smoke. And he would steal among the shadows of the park for a while to find himself a meal of living flesh. But he delayed his departure when he heard the patter of Strongfox returning with a mouthful of nestling voles - their smell reached him from a distance, shining quite clear and bright from within the Strongfox-odour. Some were still alive. Big Daddy could hear them struggling and gasping, drowning in saliva. His own saliva dribbled at the thought of them. What a joy it had been to find that they were nesting in the area once again this year, albeit in much smaller numbers than he remembered from the old times.

Before starting his patrol he waited around long enough to watch the cubs enjoy their living playthings.

                                                            ~

The following evening, he was woken prematurely from his brambly lair in the park by a rabble of woodpigeons fidgeting and squabbling for roosting sites in low branches just above him. One of them was pushed off its perch and flapped to the ground close to where he lay. He sprang without making any conscious decision to do so. The bird clattered its wings desperately but its take-off was as sluggish as a pre-war Dakota. Big Daddy caught it well before it reached the end of the runway. For a brief moment, as his jaws closed, the inside of his mouth was all that existed in the entire world. When the twitching was quite stopped he snipped off the long flight feathers and the claws, and prepared to eat the rest, plumage and all. But then he thought the creature might be a novelty for Hightail’s cubs, so he took it in his mouth and limped towards Hillside Drive, hugging the early-evening shadows.

Slipping from bush to bush he came upon the scent of Quickvixen. It was very strong in this region of the park, an area that she claimed for her refuge. He had thought she would certainly leave the territory during the winter when the yearling foxes become restless. But here she still was in spite of the way she was persecuted by Damage vixen. In his mind he now placed her firmly within the group - he felt the need to take stock of his assets from time to time as a form of reassurance. He lapsed into the pleasant ritual now as he dodged over College Rise and trotted down the pavement of Hillside Drive. Apart from the Yearlings, Quickvixen and Strongfox, there was Hightail and her cubs and the two helper vixens. Then there was the Restless Vixen who came to them for many nights at a stretch, smelling of far off regions, joining with their lives and then leaving without warning. Was she really of the group? She had a warm presence that made her welcome whenever she came, but she was only partly of the group, like the Fat Man -----! He stumbled over his own feet, so surprised was he by this odd thought. Could the Fat Man be one of the group? He foraged for the group; often he even groomed Big Daddy’s fur with his blunt claws. He was not a fox, and yet partly he was a fox. Sometimes he spoke to them with a human voice; but other times he used a fox voice, or his urine, to speak with them.

Perhaps Big Daddy would never have done what he did, had he not come upon the Fat Man squatting on all fours just as these unusual thoughts were sinking from his consciousness into the deeper layers of his mind, nourishing them. The image of the crouching figure settled onto this fertile ground like a seed. A strange notion sprouted from it. He imagined that the Fat Man was hungry and begged him, Big Daddy, for food just as the other foxes did sometimes. On an impulse, he darted towards the enigmatic creature and dropped the pigeon between its front paws.

Sheila’s heart melted inside her when she saw Big Daddy offer his kill so generously. Next door, Joan Duckworth was also at the window. She liked to watch Sandy McBeath feed the fox by hand. This time though, quite the opposite seemed to be happening. It was remarkable and it was touching. The next moment both women put their hands to their mouths and ran, retching, through identical bedrooms to identical bathrooms where they heaved up their dinners into identical toilet bowls. How could he? How in God’s name could he do something so vile? Yes, it was childlike, but children could be monstrous sometimes. Only a stupid child would become so immersed in his role-playing as to take the unspeakable thing into his mouth.

                                                            ~

That year, the family structure of the fox group was richer and more tangled than ever before. And it was the most delightful of cubbing seasons. The cubs were tireless entertainers; they wrestled for hours at a time up and down the embankment across the stream; they ambushed each other from within the clumps of sedge grass. They were friskier and more fearless than in any previous year.

It was the year of the raisins. Joan Duckworth discovered their power. She found that foxes are so enticed by them that, once they believe a raisin is hiding somewhere in the area, they will search obsessively until they find it. Here was a way to reduce their darting movements to slow motion, to make the timid vixens bold - their timidity struggled against their lust and was routed. A new stack of video tapes appeared in the Duckworth home and soon grew very tall.

It was the year of the three vixens. They should have been mere supporting players in the fox videos but tried their best to steal the show. There was a furtive one who visited late at night. If any food was left on the lawns she grabbed the lot and took off, her jaws festooned with chicken fragments dangling like jungle vines. She always came and went via Hillside Drive. Sandy McBeath followed her in stages - waiting further along the escape route each night - all the way back to her refuge in the park. Usually he saw her negotiate College Rise with admirable care, but sometimes she streaked across, trailing another vixen inches behind as though the two were tied together. Their speed was unbelievable; they were utterly oblivious to the traffic. Could this be why road-casualty foxes are often found in pairs?

The pursuer was Judo the black-belted, normally so ploddy and impassive. She was an outsider enjoying the hospitality of the group and yet, like an officious house-guest, she seemed to have taken it upon herself to decide who should be allowed into the family circle.

The skinny vixen who had been taken into the group at about the same time showed similarly pushy tendencies. She was a bundle of nervous energy. She talked to herself non-stop while foraging on the lawns. Foxes are usually tight-lipped creatures; they speak only when they have something important to say. But this one growled and grumbled and grunted incessantly. The fox- watchers had heard these sounds used before, to call the cubs out from the den and to announce the arrival of food. But she, in her eagerness, seemed to be rehearsing the conversation out loud before she even had any food in her mouth. Many times they saw her beg food from Big Daddy so urgently that he gave her whatever he had, just as he had given his pigeon to Sandy McBeath. She did not eat it herself; she took it across to the cubs, which is just what he would have done anyway. As the cubs grew, the skinny vixen gradually took over their care altogether, keeping them jealously to herself and even pushing Juliet to one side. Then the people were unable to get anywhere near them. She would bark pugnaciously - a throaty howl almost like a mating cry - whenever she got a hint of their presence, even if they just whispered too loud at the window.

It was the year of the ceramic foxes. Sandy McBeath found them in Sheila’s pottery showroom, pushed to the back of a shelf behind large pieces of domesticware. They were head-and-shoulder sculptures about two inches high, each one in a different posture: alert with ears perked; head on one side, listening; enjoying raisins with ears slanted back and eyes shut; snout forward and ears flat on the head as in greeting. One of them was Big Daddy for sure, wearing the calm expectant look with which he greeted Sandy each evening. The foxy-coloured glazes had been applied with painstaking attention to detail. He was amazed that she had looked at the foxes so carefully and with so much interest. She was clearly not as hard-headed about them as she pretended. But why pretend? Might it be that she thought it sentimental to be too concerned with animals? In any case, he did not dare to tell her how much he liked her sculptures - she would feel as though she had been found out.

                                                            ~

Each year acquires its own unique texture, like a carpet scuffed and trodden by every movement across its pile. On Hillside Drive, death had passed by early in the year and left its heavy imprint. And before the year was out Big Daddy also would die.

Sandy McBeath’s notebook. July 3rd:

When he told Sheila about his Timeshare theory, for once he was quite eloquent, conjuring up a picture of suburban areas all over Britain where sunset was a signal for the people to move into their burrows while the foxes moved out of theirs. It was a genuine symbiosis: the people left scraps for the foxes, while the foxes cleared away vermin and provided entertainment. Watching her husband’s animated face while he talked, she was quite glad she had not married a real grownup.

The meadow grass had been left to grow long and thick. Big Daddy pushed his way through like a tick crawling in the fur of some great beast, loving the swish of the grass against his body, curling his tail sideways to amplify the noise. Then he lay for a while on the trampled stems listening. From all about him a familiar sound buzzed in his ears: it was Life.

A sudden gust carried the smell of foxes to him from the other side of Hillside Drive and brought him to his feet. He loped woodenly across the park, rolling back and forth on his stiff leg, until the road loomed in front of him like a black river. He laid a paw down onto the dark surface but then withdrew it as the glare of a headlight swept over him. A car was approaching very fast from his right.

                                                            ~

A Porsche has terrific acceleration, even climbing a one-in-four slope. The three young gentlemen in this particular one laughed out loud with the pleasure of it. The warm air of August pummelled their faces at the open windows. They had had a good night out and now they were laying their customary trail of rubber all the way back to the stockbroker enclave south of Altrincham.

‘Hey, there’s that facking fox again, the one you hit last year.’

‘Don’t be a cretin. I killed that bagger stone dead.’

‘Go on, get him.’

‘He’s on the facking pavement.’

‘Get the blighter you facking wetto. Tally-bloody-ho! Halloo! Halloo!’

They heard two satisfying thuds. But one of them was just the impact of the front wheel on the curb.

                                                            ~

The last sound that reached Big Daddy’s ears was human laughter, and then the world became quiet. A white mist billowed about him. It cleared for an instant and he glimpsed his mother’s corpse stretched out on the tarmac, just here as he had found her. Other foxes came forward, both living and dead. They made a circle around him, watching him. Their smells floated into his nostrils, each one distinct, unique, intoxicating. The ground began to rise up very slowly under him. He felt it cradle his head. The exquisite taste of warm blood filled his mouth. Something he recognized was approaching from out of the fog: it was Death.

He was three and a half years old; he had loved two vixens and lost both; he had three children living and three grandchildren; he had brought a strange joy into the lives of many people.

                                                            ~

Sheila found him the next morning while snatching a quick walk before the business of the day. She carried him back with her and laid him down in her workshop. His fur had become ruffled, and so she stroked it smooth, following the natural swirl and flow of its pile. A tick crawled out from beneath her hand onto the table, staggering like a drunkard under the weight of its swollen body. Somehow it was an affront - like adding insult to injury. She crushed it, spattering herself with yesterday’s blood.

She said nothing to Sandy until he came home, because she wanted her arms to be around him when he heard. Afterwards they went together into the workshop.

Sheila said, ‘I’d like to help with the dissection.’ He did not respond but she explained herself anyway so as to fill the silence. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day and I can see its a kind of funeral ceremony. You want to celebrate the whole person by revealing all his parts, to see what his life amounted to. Isn’t that it?’

‘It’s honouring him,’ Sandy said.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Giving him a proper send-off.’

‘Yes.’

While Sheila prepared the table and selected a blade, Sandy stood quite still, cradling the stiff bundle against his chest. Gently, he parted Big Daddy’s lips to expose the worn front teeth, gauging his years. Strange; how everything seemed to hark back to that moment when he stood behind the garden shed fuming over a pile of fresh earth.

Sheila found his self-control disturbing. She had expected some rage. She said, ‘Say something Luv. Go on, swear and shout if you want to.’

But all he could manage was a whisper, ‘Shit and buggeration.’ His eyes were unfocussed, looking into the past. ‘Shit and buggeration.’