Taking nature as she comes — bushy tail, pointy teeth and all

C.W. Gusewelle is away this week. His regular column will return. In the meantime, here is one of his favorites.

Self-contained and businesslike as a constable on his rounds, a red fox trotted across our yard the other evening. By luck, I was looking down from the upstairs window at just that moment and saw him pass.

There long have been foxes denning along the creek beside the golf course several blocks away. And another family of them bringing off their litters of kits on a street where a friend lives.

But those are rock-ledged and foliaged places. Ours is just a regular city block, with houses in a row and mown yards adjoining. We’ve had opossums and raccoons in the storm sewers, and chipmunks in a crevice under the step, and rabbits in the flower garden.

Never a fox, though — not in the 20 years we’ve had the house.

First I saw a movement down through the screening leaves of the crab apple tree. Rabbit, my mind computed, because it was that hour, just before sundown, when our two regulars come out to graze.

Then he passed from under the tree and into clear view. No, a dog, my mind corrected itself. A handsome, reddish dog —same color as the hair of a girl I used to know. But something was undoglike about that bushy tail, flowing straight behind, tipped with black. A dog with a tail just like a fox. A foxish dog. No! Wait! That’s no dog at all!

Absolutely unexpected meetings with nature can addle you that way.

I called for my wife, and we rushed downstairs together to see if we could spy him again. But he’d trotted on out of sight. He could have been one of those from the creek by the golf course, we decided, because that was the general direction he was heading.

Maybe in this season of young ones to feed, they had cleaned out all the mice and rabbits in their usual territory and had found it necessary to expand their range.

Then we thought about our own rabbits, which we like having around to speak to when we go out at daylight to pick up the paper, or come in from somewhere late at night.

“Do you suppose he got them?” I wondered aloud.

I hadn’t noticed him carrying anything when he passed, but you never know. No rabbits were seen that night, or again the next morning. I suspected the worst.

But then, the more I thought about it, I began to be reconciled to taking nature as she comes, in all her sweetness and ferocity. If you get one, you get both. And after everything that’s been done to tame the land to man’s service, we’re lucky to have anything wild still sharing our beaten space.

I’d underestimated the rabbits, though. The next evening, our same two were back, chewing grass and flower leaves as if they hadn’t a worry in the world.

They know that the cats watching them from inside our screened windows are not allowed to roam. They know the bird dog asleep in his house is slow afoot. They know the tunnels through the flowers and the spaces under the board fence where only a rabbit can fit.

And when the fox comes only once in 20 years, there’s time enough to plan.

This story was originally published March 25, 2016 at 3:44 PM with the headline "Taking nature as she comes — bushy tail, pointy teeth and all."