How to Save a Fox

Hello everyone

The cool air of an Irish springtime is my walking compannion these days. I have

made the journey home, crossing the Atlantic and landing into an Ireland clouded in mist.

Yet, today, the sun creeped from behind the clouds and spring has washed across

the land - Spring giddiness as Rumi called it.

I walked along the royal canal this morning and with my thoughts

meandering a robin bellowed its morning song and brought me back to the

present. There’s irises pushing up out of the ground at the foot of the waterfall and

those scattered primroses along the canal walk are popping their heads up again.

So, something is certainly stirring. What a change from Guatemala where the

temperature gage was creeping up and the last leaves were drying and falling from

the trees. Two seasons and a culture orientated around the life cycle of corn. But

here I am in the land of cows, enormous amounts of cows, too many in

fairness. I do empathise with the farmers, small ones at least, they take a lot of flack, but nobody can possibly

argue that we haven’t overdid it on our herd numbers. A glancing read of the

recent Biodiversity report is a sorry legacy of the damage it is all doing to our rivers

etc.

I digress,

I want to begin with a thank you to everyone who has subscribed and is enjoying

my posts these last weeks. The House of Oaks and Owls is finding its feet, so I

hope you have enjoyed the output sofar. All the talk these days is about finding

one’s ‘niche’. Thankfully, I stumbled upon a Substack post recently in which a seasoned

writer gave some tips. One of which was, don’t fret about finding your

niche, none of us is a niche, write about everything, she said, write about what

interests you, write until you exhaust it all and then see what is still demanding

your attention and write about that. Hats off to that advise. I’ll continue to let this all

take it’s own course.

For now I continue to follow the inspiration of the Irish flora and fauna, and today I

have the fox in my thoughts-Madra Rua or Sionnach in the Irish tongue

Now, there is a divisive animal. At least in the farming community. I live in an old

Irish farmhouse on the southwest coast of Cork between the towns of Kinsale and

Clonakilty. Each day my landlords parents Frank and Teresa, who live down the

laneway, will be out and about, feeding the chickens or looking out across the

fields at the cattle grazing. Every so often Teresa will wake up to find her chickens

gone.

They take the news badly, especially poor Teresa who loves her chickens. Frank

will come by to tell the news and with his massive hands clasped behind his back

and a slight lean forward towards the ground he will look out towards the marsh by

Harbour View beach and say it was the fox, without fail he will mention that there is a

‘nesht’ of them there. He would say ‘nesht’ with undisguised disdain and a stubborn

resignation, and each time I’d look out at the stand of

gorse bushes in the middle of the marsh-the only cover-and imagine the family of

foxes in there. Sure enough, I‘ve often seen a fox stroll across the road and up the

fields and sometimes at night you hear their wailing banshee cries as two rivals

meet each other. But I never told Frank the story of when I saved a fox…

Late one night, driving west towards Bantry, I did something I’ve done several times before, that is pull over to take a poor fox off the road so I could give him a more respectful resting place than a roadside ditch. This time I sensed something different. This fox was lying in the middle of the road, something was amiss - he was still breathing. I hadn’t planned for this. I knew how to gather a dead fox up and bring it to a forest, but not how to gather a living one up and take it into my van.

I wrapped him in a blanket as he looked at me through one eye, breathing heavily through the pain of the glancing blow from a car that recently passed. He was awake but badly concussed and unable to move a muscle. He saw me as a threat but he had no choice but to trust me.

Finding a vet at midnight who is willing to see a wild animal is no easy task. I rang every number in Clonakilty town and convinced one poor man to come out and open his clinic. We lay the fox on the table. He’s a young male he said, and strong. He will either recover or he may have brain damage that hewon’t recover from and thus not be able to survive alone. It will be three days till we know. Can you look after him till then? he asked me. Yes, I said, and he gave the fox two injections, one for the concussion and one full of B vitamins to speed his recovery.

For the next three days I spoon fed the fox with tinned tuna and syringed water into his mouth. He lay in an out shed, and dispite his condition still attempted to escape. I’d find him collapsed on the ground just metres from the entrance each morning.

Three days past and the fox was improving. Now I needed help. I located a dog cage and rang the only wild animal recovery centre in the country - Animal Magic in county Limerick. They agreed to take the fox. So I drove the fox there that weekend and pulled up at the gate. A large man came to greet me, arms like a bear, a serious look on his face and he led me through a series of sheds, each humming to the sound of wild animals and birds inside.

Here’s where your fox will stay he told me, and he swung open the gate to a small enclosure where one other old male fox was slinking inside. Company helps them recover better. It’s coming into Winter time he said so it’s better we keep him till spring. Do you want to pick him up again then and return him to where you found him? If he survives that is.

I had hoped he would say this and I told him I would. That Winter I went to Thailand for six weeks and early again in March, having returned, I rang the center to ask for an update. He has fully recovered they told me, you can pick him up. So I returned to find a young fox in his full strength once again. Whether or not he recognized me I don’t know, but it took all the strength of that man to pin him down and get him back in the cage. There was no mistaking that this was a wild animal in our hands. And so I drove south and out the country road from Clonakilty to a friend’s land, close to where I originally found the fox.

It was time to release him. I opened the cage, but he didn't move. He just sat there watching us and looking towards the hedgerow. I walked back to the cage and shuck it a little. He creeped outside, taking slow tentative steps, then he darted at speed, a fox again, dashing into the wild, but not without stopping one last time, just before disappearing he glanced back towards me and caught my eye., as if to say goodbye.

And he was gone.