Skittery fox, it's ok, please come back.

About a month ago, a flurry of curious events occurred. For some reason I was up before 9 on a Monday without the significant help of my alarm phone. I had eaten a full breakfast, and instead of being lazy and poking about on the interweb, I actually was productively sketching new-might-happen-eventually designs, and thinking how much easier life would be if i had that unexplainable compulsion to obey societies limits on time. Suddenly my mother starts freaking out. Well freaking out might be a strong description, but after all with my views on mornings in general, any sort of excitement is pretty much freaking out.

A truely small animal is never visible from our house, who can see a squirrel in the midst of 3 feet re-seeding grass? I look closer and find myself staring at a fox, or maybe a coyote. It's cute, and for a bit i forget it's dangerous, it trots lightly and despite my hate for disney, i'm reminded of commercials for 'a fox's tale' and begin to revel it's bouncy footstep and bushy orange tale. Two minutes later it slinks under the grass and doesn't emerge.

I'm sit there thinking about the fox instead of sketching. Certainly there was wildlife in my old backyard. In Nebraska we had a whole family of ground squirels which dug so many burrows the ground sunk in extra-hollow areas when it rained heavily and every spring gave birth to about 9 babies which often didn't make it to august. And we had two different burrows of rabbits, who liked to fight over the little patches of natural bluegrass in the evenings. We had that crazy falcon who ate a blue jay once, but nothing as big or predatory as fox.

After that we didn't see it, and although I often did not wake up in time, mother, who is fond of morning gardening, said she only saw it once and our neighbors three dogs had scarred it with loud barking one day and she hadn't seen it since.

So the fox was forgotten until last week, when my neighbors were walking their dog and stoped to regale the early parts of their dog walk with my mother. Apparently said fox, was a girl fox, and girl fox had given birth to a little of baby foxes, which lived conveniantly in a small recess/ravine between the golf course up the hill and the grass field. Her dogs had barked at them, and the 5 of them went skittering back into the field for safety.

While the dogs had won this round, I couldn't help but wonder if there would be another round, one without four small fox pups, and an angry, revengful mother fox. The next day, neighbor put extra tall wire trelaces tied to her already tall fence, and started walking her dogs on the other side of the street.

And so the fox mystery is solved, though i wish, it was a little less dangerous, and less skittery, and would poke it's head out of the field every now and again so i could photograph her and her babies, which by now probably have adorably fluffy tails.