The day after Hercules disappeared and the fox was seen rolling near the rooster's feathers, we saw the the fox again. The kids were eating their breakfast. I had gone upstairs for something. My oldest daughter came racing up the stairs to announce that, "That fox is out there again!"
He was not in the same location as the day before, but further up the ridge and farther from our house, but he was in the middle of the hay field and he was clearly eating something. I snapped a few pictures from the master bathroom upstairs and from the dining room, in part because I have a small zoom lens on my camera and wanted to see if I could tell what he was eating, and partly from habit.
As he ate, turkey vultures soared and glided high over him and my children smudged the windows in order to gawk at him. He took his time, starting by standing over whatever it was and tearing it apart, and ending by sitting down with his back to the house, hunched up and munching.
I kept thinking that I was seeing feathers, but he was awfully far away. Maybe I was imagining things. It was painful to watch him eat, even though his back was toward the house most of the time, because this time as I watched him, I wasn't just marveling at the wild thing so close. I wasn't spellbound by the unusualness or by his strange beauty.
As the saying goes, I felt like my face was being rubbed in it, and I was mad about having to imprison my hens in chew-proof hardware cloth 24/7. Also, this time my children were thinking about a dead rooster being torn apart, and they weren't happy to see him either. So I felt badly also because of their indignant voices and sad faces.
When he was through, the fox trotted to the same "island of trees" in the hay field that he had disappeared into the day before. He didn't do any rolling in the grass or scratching this time. But he did lick his chops repeatedly (in seeming satisfaction.) And he did glance right at me before ducking into the copse of trees, as if to "thumb his nose" at me on his way by.
My head was full of questions. Had he killed the rooster for fun when he wasn't hungry and stashed him until the next morning? It was possible. Foxes have been known to do that. He couldn't have left his kill in the field or the turkey vultures and other vermin would have scavenged his leftovers. But why would he drag the carcass out into the open to eat it? Was he eating something else? Would we be seeing him regularly now?
That very day my oldest son started clearing the bushes beneath the poplar trees where we had seen the fox retreat both days. He worked hard and fast, turning an oasis for wildlife into stumps and stacks of brush. He labored for an hour here and there for several days in thorny bushes and even during light rains, and I let him.
Usually, I don't like clearing. I hate killing living things, even vegetation. But the fact that multiple coyotes could lurk so close to the kids, whose swing set was so near, disturbed me. The fact that dear, turkey, and squirrels also shelter there, means that it is probably crawling with ticks. And on at least one occasion, a stranger's truck had made the long trip up our driveway, turned around, and then paused for a long while out of sight behind those bushes doing who knows what before leaving. Also, the bushes were encroaching upon the hayfield. We lost more and more hay to them every year. It was even difficult to mow between them and the board fence last year.
Besides, the boy needed it. I think it was a way for him to deal with his grief, to hack away at the limbs of invasive species (autumn olives, Russian olives, and multi-flora roses) that grab his sleeves and tear his skin as he passes them on the mower. He's seen a lot of death in his short life... cats crushed under garage doors, cats so recently run over by vehicles that their tails were still twitching... Upon returning from vacation, years ago when he was still quite small, he ran to visit the chickens right away. He found one of our two hens dead from dehydration and overheating because the person we had arranged to let them out and feed them had neglected to do so while we were gone. During a game of hide-and-seek three years back he had found the young goat, Suzie Cubed, hanging dead from the high hay rack mounted on the stall wall. In some freak accident, she had managed to jump into it and to get her neck stuck between the bars as she struggled to get back out so that she broke her neck. And these are just some of the things I know about and remember. Rural life can be rough, the poor boy!
Speaking of rough, I didn't venture out to see the remains of the fox's meal this time. I'm not that morbid. If it was Hercules, it was. And if it wasn't, it wasn't. The realities of farm living are hard on me sometimes too.
