Fox trot

Busy afternoon yesterday dismantling the garden for the season. A handful of nights below twenty degrees had finally freeze-blasted most of the stalwarts last week. Goodbye, nicotiana...goodbye, borage...goodbye, petunias...goodbye, sweet peas. As I was going about my chores, a crazy, angry chorus of caws interrupted the sunny afternoon. A mob of crows in high dudgeon was in angry pursuit of a red fox. It ran for its life, coming within mere feet of our back yard, and traversed half the perimeter of the neighboring athletic fields before disappearing into wooded protection. How cool! I thought at first—a red fox, in broad daylight. And then, a shiver of foreboding, remembering the fox as the favored avatar of evil spirits in Korean ghost stories from my childhood. But, then again, no less an authority than the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources reports that the red fox's "favorite dish is the cottontail rabbit". So—yo, Renard! Right this way—rabbit buffet!

Comments

[avril]

The killing frost has come late here, too. Strange to see the cosmos still blooming away and I have had the luxury of bouquets of them in late fall. Time now for seed catalogues and dreaming by the fire about spring...

[Don]

Isn't there a D.H. Lawrence story about a couple of ladies and a guy on a farm after WWI where a fox at the edge of the woods plays a brooding omen?

Yes, this is the goodbye time for the garden. Mine already started looking like the Addams Family yard, but there were still some flowers blooming on. It's all gone now, and soon the foilage will retreat into a flatness, and the ground will harden and I will be inside.

As much as I love fall, I hate this part of it.

[Robert the Llama Butcher]

My annuals are all gone, but some of the perennials are still game - no killer frost here yet.

Alas, don't get your hopes up about the fox. We have lots of them around my house and they don't seem to do a damn' thing about Sauron's Wraith Rabbits. Slackers.

BTW, I've read that one can properly describe a flock of those black caw-mongers as "a murder of crows." I've always thought that was kinda cool.

[Chan S.]

Avril, it seems that it was just yesterday that I was reading your post on sowing the cosmos seeds...even this long season has come and gone in a flash.

Don, I have not read it, but Google tells me that the D. H. Lawrence book is "The Fox" (most appropriately!). I am trying my level best to become better at accepting the change of seasons, but basically I would give myself about a C- as to my attitude about winter.

Robert, I like "a murder of crows"!--believe you me, murder was on their minds. If the foxes don't take care of business, the crows can have at 'em.

[Don]

Oh, yeah. That's right. I think it is in the Norton's Anthology of British Literature, circa mid 1970s. I had to read it for an English class. That's been a while.

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