The fox is back, and this time she has four kits with her. It was the last week of April when we began hearing those weird, high, harsh shrieks at night – fox alarm, or fox mating calls, I was told.
Later in the week our dog Sam began snuffling around the base of the boat shed. And then one evening, as I pulled into the drive, an adult fox streaked across my headlight beams.
It was the same fox, we assumed, that had taken up residence beneath our boat shed about the same time last year, but this time, it appeared, she had birthed a litter there. Kathy saw them first, from her study: first one, then two, and eventually a second pair, cautiously poking their young snouts out from beneath the shed. Then they hopped out into the open and into the sun. We guessed they were about five or six weeks old, endearing hybrids of kittens and puppies, playing, gamboling, sunning themselves on the sandy soil beside the shed.
We watched them from the screened porch, and Sam, when he actually saw them, stood entranced and silent. They were cautious at first, constantly looking around, but never up to where we were above them, and so they seemed oblivious to our presence. Since they had chosen to live under one of our structures, I decided we had the right to interact with them, if we could. I picked up a few of Sam’s soft animal toys and placed them on the ground where the kits had been playing. Sure enough, shortly afterwards, we saw one of the fox kits playing with them. By the end of the afternoon the toys had all vanished, presumably dragged back under the shed into their den. This made me wonder just how far we could tame these kits if we wanted to – but we didn’t want to. We were content just to watch this wildly domestic scene on and off through a stretch of sunny afternoons.
But the mother fox, or vixen, it seemed, had apparently sensed our presence and had already decided that there had been too much contact between her children and us. At about 4 o’clock we saw her return to the shed-den, and shortly after headed out again down the hill behind our house with two of the kits in tow. At first we speculated that she may have been taking them off on a training exercise in hunting food. But soon she returned to the shed alone and shortly left in the same direction with the second pair of kits right behind her.
In any case she appeared to have relocated all four kits to another den, something mother foxes often do. We decided to leave them to their new-found solitude, a bit regretful that we had inadvertently pushed them out of the den under our boat shed, but grateful that we had gotten to witness them, at such close range, for several days.
So do we shape our stories about nature. But few narratives in the natural world are so linear and complete, and so it proved with this one. The day after we had watched the fox kits being removed by their mother, Kathy saw them back at the shed, playing in the same place they had been the day before. What was going on? As nature always says, “More later.”
