Calypso(36)

The following night we ate chicken at the table on the patio outside my office. It was dusk, and just as we finished there was Carol. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is that you never see her coming. Rather, she simply appears. When she reached a distance of six feet or so, I threw her the bones off my plate. “What are you doing?” Hugh hissed as she commenced eating them.

Here we go, I thought.

Once a week during this past summer I’d stay awake all night, tying up loose ends. I liked the way I was left feeling at dawn—not tired but just the opposite: speedy, almost, and brilliant. Not long after the chicken dinner, I was working at my outdoor table when, at around four a.m., Carol showed up. We had no meat in the refrigerator, but she waited while I found some cheese and opened a tin of sardines.



Foxes often bury their food, saving it for later. I thought that meant a day or two, but apparently there’s nothing they consider too spoiled. Rotten is acceptable, as is putrid. Since we met Carol, our backyard has become a graveyard for pork chops and beef jerky and raw chicken legs. “What’s this?” Hugh demanded not long ago. He was on his knees in a flower bed, a trowel in one hand and what looked like a desiccated thumb in the other.

I squinted in his direction. “Um, half a hot dog?”

He was furious. “What are you doing? Foxes don’t want junk like this. Hot dogs are disgusting.”

“Not to someone who eats maggots,” I said.

He claims that I’m manipulating Carol. “That’s you, the puppet master. It’s the same way you are with people—constantly trying to buy them.”

He’s under the impression that the occasional chicken carcass is enough, that anything else will “spoil” Carol—will, in fact, endanger her. “Believe me, she was just fine before you came along.”

But was she? Really? It’s a hard life out there for a fox. Yes, there are rabbits and birds around, but they don’t surrender easily. According to the websites I’ve visited, Carol’s diet consists mainly of beetles and worms. There’s an occasional mouse, and insect larvae, maybe some roadkill—just awful-tasting stuff.

“And I’m willing to bet that all those same websites advise against feeding wild animals,” Hugh said.

“Well, not all of them,” I told him.

They do discourage hand-feeding, not because you’ll be bitten but because, once tame, the fox is likely to approach your neighbor, who may not be as receptive to his or her company as you are. I can see how that might be a problem in America, where everyone has a gun, but in England, what are you going to do, stab Carol to death? Good luck getting that close, because the only person she really trusts is me.

You should see the way she follows me to the garden bench, almost as if she were a dog but at the same time catlike, nimble, her tail straight out and bobbing slightly as she walks. Then she’ll lie on the grass at my feet, her paws crossed, and look at me for a second before turning away. Carol’s uncomfortable making eye contact—a shame, as hers have the brilliance of freshly minted pennies. From nose to tail her coloring is remarkable: the burnt orange fading to what looks like a white bib protecting her chest, then darkening from rust to black on her front legs, which resemble spent matchsticks. Because I give her only the best ground beef and free-range chicken, her coat is full, not mangy like those other foxes’. Carol has come as close as two inches from my hand, but I have to look away as she approaches. Again, it’s the eye-contact thing.

In pictures she looks like a stuffed animal. And, oh, I show them to everyone. “Have you seen my fox? No? Hold on while I get my phone…” In my favorite photograph she’s outside the kitchen door. It’s around seven in the evening, still light, and you can see her perfectly, just sitting there. It’s actually Hugh who took the picture, so the expression on her face says, “Yes, but where’s David?”

The response to my photos is wonderment tinged with envy: “How come I don’t have a Carol?” Unless, of course, the person I’m speaking to is small-minded. A lot of small-minded people out where we live raise chickens.

“Horrible, brutal things, foxes,” they say. “Once one gets into the henhouse it’ll kill everything in sight, just for the hell of it.”

The charge was repeated in the comments section of a YouTube video I watched one night about a vixen named Tammy that was hit by a car and healed by a veterinarian, who later released her back into the wild. “I know how much people love to save wildlife, but how would you feel if a fox killed your chickens or turkey?” someone named Pat Stokes asked.

To this a man responded, “My chickens are cunts.”

I don’t know if this made him pro-fox or if he was just stating the facts.



If I had to bad-mouth Carol, my one complaint would be her sense of humor. “You are so-o-o-o-o serious,” I often tell her. I’d add that she never grows any more comfortable in my presence. She seems to me very English in her awkwardness.

“Then stop making her uncomfortable,” Hugh says. He thinks that, instead of feeding her on the patio outside my office, I should leave her food in the field and let her eat it on her own time.

The first problem with that suggestion is slugs. I thought I knew them from my youth in Raleigh, but the slugs of North America are nothing compared to their British cousins. They’re like walruses in Sussex—long and fat from eating everything Hugh tries to grow that the rabbits and deer happen to miss. I’ve seen them feast on the viscous bodies of their stepped-on relatives, so when something decent is presented, pork shoulder, say, or a fresh lamb kidney, they go wild. And we must have—no exaggeration—at least twelve million slugs on our two-acre property. Galveston the hedgehog keeps their numbers down, as do two toads, Lane and Courtney, but it’s a losing battle.