A fox!
I was talking with my colleague, who’s hunkered down in Beijing. When do you think people will be back
to work? Will they all be working from
home? So, you think it will be
determined city by city? Fortunately, he
was doing some talking when I saw a flash of color about on hundred yards off,
somewhere near the trail.
I put the phone
down and let him speak and took a look through the binoculars but couldn’t see
anything definitive. It’ didn’t
matter. Shortly thereafter a tawny fox
about a meter-long pranced right up out of the brush, now only thirty yards
off. Every morning I’ve been tossing
sunflower seeds out on the lawn down below where I work and there are a half a
dozen squirrels who come and dine along with a few sparrows. This had attracted a hawk a few days
back. And now it had appeared on the
radar of this orange fox.
He darted up
quickly and I reached for my phone and tried to catch a few photos. The squirrels scattered in every direction,
looking for whatever trees they could find.
The fox paused right below my porch, now less than ten meters away and
then ran right in front of me. Alas, my
powers with the iPhone camera were clearly wanting, when I reviewed a while
later. But it wasn’t hard to imagine
just how terrifying an animal the fox would be if it were two to three times as
large as you, yourself. Any older
squirrel with a bad foot or lame paw would quickly become fox food.
I was glad to see
him, in part, as I’d been told by my neighbor that what I’d identified as a
fisher the other day was really just a fox.
But there’s no way. The two
animals are completely different. Both
Jimi Hendrix and Pu Songling talk about foxy female spirts, but it’s hard to
imagine that wily little critter anthropomorphizing into a woman of
desire. Must have been the lonely
candlelight for old Pu. My fox looked a
bit ratty. And now, down before me three deer look likes ships of the desert,
legs folded beneath them after a long session of grazing on my winter grass.
Sunday,
02/02/19
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