The Fox

I exercise for a good chunk of time, which often is disturbed throughout, though it’s rare that I have to completely abort the movement. So, one weekend morning I find myself elliptical paddling and reading my book as I do during these lovely life luxuries.

I hear a loud bang that sounds like a gunshot…but I live in the suburbs and while there are hunters around, my neighborhood is not one of those places to find them in the midst of their hunting activities. Any other reason for shots fired outside my home would be the understated anomaly.

It was so sudden and out of nowhere that I dismissed it as what it was and inquired if my kids dropped something or questioning a large item crashing to the ground. The kids had no idea what I was talking about, and I assumed they were lying, but had no idea why they would. Whatever…no one was crying and the house was still standing.

I move along…because that’s what I do. The doorbell rings, and I battle the collective of mosquitoes on the other side of the door to see a rather disgruntled, quiet young police officer his six feet away.

There was an injured fox near the end of its life in our narrow woods just out front that lumbered closer to our home. The mysterious fallen item was, in fact, a gun shot where the officer ended the animal’s suffering…sort of. It ended up dying under our porch soon after it was shot.

But, a door ring is excitement in our parts, so I had a Warrior Queen under my feet as I’m opening the door. She felt compelled to ask the man questions that he probably couldn’t understand because four-year-olds live in their own conversational reality.

I missed some of what the officer said as I’m swatting mosquitoes and shushing the unshushable Warrior Queen. What I did gather is that the dying/soon to be deceased animal was “somewhere” under our porch and a call was made to some nebulous town agency to (hopefully) tend to it. At some weird point the door closes and I resume my exercise while Warrior Queen chatters about the events to her brother, inevitably miscommunicating the situation as she does best. This prompts Little Man to ask me for clarification. My life is in a constant state of providing my six-year-old gruesome details to every iota of anything I don’t want to discuss.

Mid teasing out of details, the door beckons me once again, but this time I have two children at my heel along with the mosquitoes. Our sky-scrapingly tall neighbor and the officer tried to no avail to remove the fox. Both of my kids are passionate about our neighbor. Once he is on their conversational radar, there will be commentary galore about him for a week, so as I’m trying to talk to the officer…with Little Man asking questions on top of me and Warrior Queen dictating inaccurate information about what is occurring (and, of course, the mosquitoes), I learn very little, but I’m confident that our neighbor will be the focus of child conversation for the next week.

At some point we were outside to play…away from the porch sheltering a certainly dead fox. My husband and I discussing what to do because it’s a weekend. Do these state agencies responsible for fox removal report on weekends, especially a Sunday? My husband managed to find the fox our neighbor and the officer could not among piles of leaves and dark. For better or worse, as we sat out under a clouded sky, the corpse of a shot fox with, apparently, mange was laying in the open to make it easier for town retrieval. Fortunately, the kids decided that in the moment they wouldn’t nurture their whims of independence and assertiveness, so we spent virtually no time keeping them away from the carcass.

My husband wanted to bag the animal and place it in the trash that would be taken the next day. I commented that there is possibly a special location housing wildlife that meet their ends in some fashion or another. It was in those lazy discussional moments that a town truck backed into our driveway. With a brief discussion fizzling into an awkward and uninspiring finish, the woman unceremoniously carried the fox to a tarp in the back of her truck. And, there concludes some of the most exciting bits of our home isolation since I returned from the hospital.