The sensory presence of foxes is woven through my days and nights lately – sightings, sound, smells, evidence. It is the mating season and, being largely solitary creatures, they are advertising their presence to one another in a manner hard to ignore; in a way that carries across dark, silent miles or cuts through the fumes of urban traffic. Foxy scent markings – musky notes of singed fur, sandalwood, spice and hawthorn flowers – bring me up sharp at a hole in a hedge, by a gatepost or anywhere down the lane.
In snow, or in the creamy chalk soil that has washed out of gateways in recent storms, tracks give away encounters. Paw prints, narrower than a dog’s, that you can draw a kiss through without touching the pads, track slightly sideways, printing a straight, tacking running stitch across the land. Occasionally, tracks cross and run alongside one another for a while, or pool in a coming together.
Country foxes take care not to be seen and we take care not to mention when we do see them (though we are not immune to losing all our chickens either). Many are inevitably shot, called into range sometimes with an electronic fox caller that mimics the squeak of dying prey sounds, or are otherwise exposed by their own eyeshine in the sweep of a lamp from a vehicle at night. From my window at bedtime, I hear them track across miles in the dark, the dog foxes “woo-oo-ooing” at regular intervals, the vixens answering with a scream.
Waiting for my nieces at a foggy railway station in town, a familiar “woo-oo-oo” comes softly from a dimly lit alleyway. I employ the gamekeepers’ trick of “squeaking” in the fox and he comes in close and walks alongside me for a moment on the other side of a scrappy privet hedge. When there is a gap, he makes eye contact with little fear, as if to say: “Well? What?” Eventually, he saunters off, woo-ing as he goes, the white tip of his tail swinging like a low-slung cigarette walked smouldering into the night.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
