Brer Fox
Tigger in his blog (Tigger’s Wee-blog) the other day mentioned
‘his’ fox burying a bone. What clever animals they are.
My heart misses a beat when I see one trotting purposefully
across my garden and my blood chills when I hear them screaming in the small of
the night. The sobbing cry of the vixen as she calls for a mate or while mating
is other-worldly.
I know they are loathed by farmers and can understand their
vexation at the damage they cause, but still I admire their cunning, their
style, their elegance.
As a child I liked all the Uncle Remus tales, but one of my
favourites was Brer Fox and the Tar Baby. Later, I enjoyed Roald Dahl’s
Fantastic Mr Fox, which lauds the wit of the fox. (I wonder if that story has fallen prey to the prissy rewriters of
much-loved tales?)
Foxes feature in much children’s literature, frequently in
Aesop’s Fables, those pithy moral tales. The gingerbread man (Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t
catch me , I’m the gingerbread man) meets his end on the fox’s nose, and
Chicken Licken and his friends are fooled into entering Foxy Loxy’s den, never
to be seen again. The fox in Beatrix Potter’s book, The Tale of Mr Tod, does
battle with Tommy Brock the badger, using ‘dreadful bad language’. ‘Fox in Sox’
by Dr Seuss is another favourite with small children.
In song, there is 'The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night' sung by Bob Shane., and found on YouTube.
Basil Brush was a fox glove puppet and the star of a television programme for children. He spoke rather in the perceived manner of ‘a fox-hunting man’ and was given to atrocious jokes, always followed by his catchphrase, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Boom! Boom!’
Leicester City Football Club adopted Filbert Fox as their mascot
in 1992. Filbert is always to be seen on match days, dressed in blue, entertaining
the crowds and cheering on his team from the sidelines.
Reynard was the country nickname for a fox, deriving from
mediaeval English by way of the French ‘Renart’ and the Old German name ‘Reginhart’.
‘Tod’ is also from Middle English and is still used in Northern England and
Scotland as a name for the fox.
Foxes are believed to be largely nocturnal and yet there are
many well-documented stories of foxes sunning themselves on roofs or leaping
over walls and fences from one garden to another during daylight hours. My
next-door neighbour has a visiting fox that spends much of its time resting on
her lawn. We have nocturnal foxes and cubs regularly crossing our front garden.
They have well-defined paths and never seem to stay long, so I don’t know what
they’re looking for. Snails, maybe? They don’t come into the back garden since
we installed our cat enclosing fencing. One night, before the installation, we watched
a vixen teaching her cub to catch rats, but we have not, to date, managed to
photograph a fox. Must try harder!
