The Fox

Coming To Terms With A Weird & Wild Relationship

Years ago, maybe nearing almost a decade now, I had lived so close to a great waterfowl hunting area that I could jump in the canoe before or after work and consistently get dinner for that evening. That was, and always be, a privilege that I’ll never take for granted and even though I don’t live too far away from that spot right now, I also don’t get out there as much as I used to.

That’s what running a homestead will do to a hunter though. All the best times to be out in the woods and on the water slowly become designated for other affairs. Meat birds have to be dispatched and processed, along with meat rabbits now. Gardens - dare I say too many?! - need to be seeded or turned, maybe even built. Projects stack up as needed, ideas become new projects, old fence posts have to be replaced, repairs to coops and hutches demand attention. You know, all the things that make homesteading what it is; A full time part time job.

Anyway, about seven years ago when I still lived on the water and hunted all the time, I buried a lot of the carcasses of ducks and geese in the garden I had. It seemed like the right and good thing to do, until one November something began to dig those same carcasses up, and drag them all over our yard. I chalked it up to racoons until I started noticing the paw prints in the dirt, a clear indication that it was a fox that had, until then, went unseen.

I can’t remember how long after that it was, but one morning I was in the yard breaking down a couple Canada Geese when out of the woods across the road came, what I assumed to be, the fox that had been making those night time visits. It sat there in the ditch, watching what I was doing, seemingly unbothered by my presence and surely hoping to cash in on some scraps before they were covered in dirt.

Now, I don’t condone feeding wildlife, especially predators. You’re just asking for trouble if you do, but seeing as how this fox almost certainly would occasionally be eating ducks and rabbits and whatever else it could sneak up on, I figured that if I put the carcasses on the far corner of the property, at the very least the fox would clean them up.

There were things that I couldn’t have possibly known at the time. One was that this would be the beginning of a very unusual relationship with a wild animal that would continue for years. In fact it still hasn’t ended. Another was that foxes are exceptionally strong and can, in fact, lift a goose carcass right off of your property and onto the front lawn of your neighbors, causing all kinds of grief for you…

But, as they say, so it began.

That same winter, I returned from a winter stay at the hunting camp after a couple days of hunting Snowshoe Hares, and brought home three or four that needed to be butchered. I strung them up in the shed, turned on the propane heater, and got to work. As I finished one, I caught movement just outside the sliding doors of the shed, and there, about six feet away, was the fox. Again, sitting down, watching me, waiting for something to get tossed.

By now I knew a little more about it. In fact, “it” was actually a “her”, and she clearly had just arrived to our end of the island the year prior. Up until then we had never seen or heard any foxes. She wasn’t what I would call “bold”, and for years I never saw her act this way with any of the neighbors, either. I don’t know if it was because she had learned that our property was a good place to find things like duck wings and hare hearts from time to time, but as the next couple of years went on, things shifted into something else entirely.

Fast forward into the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic when everyone drank the Kool-aid, myself included. All of the sudden there was a lot of time to be spent, and nowhere except home to spend it. By now, “Scraps” (ya, that’s right, I named her…so what?) was around all the time. I would be outside doing something, sometimes just out on the lawn reading, and out she would come from the woods across the road. From there, she would wander across the lawn, sniff around the garden, and then come up to me to see what was going on.

Sometimes she would just lay down right near me and sleep. Especially if it was sunny out. I could get up and walk away and not only would she have no reaction at all to my movement, eventually she would come and try to find where I had gone. If a neighbor was walking down the road, Scraps would bolt into the woods and wait for them to leave, then cross the road and lay down again.

Scraps doesn’t seem like the sort of fox that has a particularly tough life, and though the “no direct feeding” policy remains as true today as it did over half a decade ago, I know for a fact that folks elsewhere feed her all kinds of shit now, which is sort of a bummer. It’s mostly a summertime thing, when weekenders come up and see the neighbourhood fox running around. They think that a hotdog wiener won’t hurt, but what I’ve never wanted was for this old girl to lean away from hunting and scavenging natural prey, and lean more toward human offerings.

Scraps, for the most part, is pretty lucky. There isn’t a real serious threat of her having to deal with coyotes on our island, and besides the occasional domestic dog that will give chase, she’s more or less free to roam without a whole lot of care.

Another added bonus is that since she began to hang around, issues with rodents has drastically dropped. Sure, there’s still the errant field mouse that gets in the walls during the depths of winter, but it’s pretty rare to see chipmunks, rats, squirrels or cottontails around anymore, most of which aren’t a bad thing to be missing.

A couple of years went by before we noticed that Scraps had hollowed out a space under our deck midway through February, and with each subsequent snowfall, she would excavate the entrance out again and again.

I had a pretty good idea of what this meant, and by late March our suspicions were confirmed when the faint vocalizations of what had to be kits, murmured from under the deck boards. By April, the kits would be out on the patio slabs, chasing each other and chewing on sticks until Scraps came back with food for them.

This happened every year for the next four years, and as I type this, we discovered two kits on easter weekend, sunning themselves in the warmth of the afternoon.

By this point, I could sit on the patio and read a book while both Scraps and her kits lounged around, sometimes walking across my boots or playing with the legs of the chair that I was sitting in. It was inevitable that, by June, the kits would be gone. They’d leave and go looking for territories of their own, some surviving, some not. Nature, they say, is like that.

But what baffled me was who exactly she was breeding with. Every now and then I would see another fox, whose coat was a little more pale, thicker, with a pronounced white patch under the neck. This fox was more wary, more cautious, never coming around while I was outside. Not to place gender unnecessarily, but based entirely on this fox’s build, I began to suspect that it was the father of the kits.

One year, during an unusual warm spell in December, I saw Scraps running up the road, acting strange. Looking toward the direction she was heading, I saw the other fox, at which point she reached it and started wagging her tail, and cowering submissively at its feet. The two then went up onto the neighbours’ lawn where they played and groomed each other for almost twenty minutes.

That’s him on the left.

Eventually, over the years, I’d catch a glimpse of him every now and then with the kits. He never does seem to come right up onto the patio like Scraps, and if we go outside, he’s gone. But regardless, it’s a fascinating dichotomy to witness, and the kits go absolutely bananas when he shows up.

One day though, it’ll all come to an end. Scraps is pretty old for a wild fox, and a limp in her right front leg seems to increase each year. Eventually we’ll realize that it’s been a couple of weeks, then a couple of months, since we last saw her, and all that will be left was the memory of the fox that became a neighbour.