by Nina Burton
Around midnight I was woken by a screech. It seemed to come from the public lands, and it sounded dreadfully wild. It was followed by mewling cries. I sat up in my bunk. What was going on, out there in the darkness? Apparently, some drama was underway, one of those where separate lives become enmeshed as a result of life and death. Who had clashed this time? Presumably the fox was involved … but who else? Once silence was restored, my imagination took this sense of uncertainty and used it to paint ugly pictures in my mind.
When I returned to Stockholm, I began to read more about foxes. If I understood them better, I would perhaps also learn something about the evasive nature of wildness. But, in fact, what initially struck me as I read was how we humans have seen them. Foxes were vilified not only in fairy tales, fables and myths, but also in the Song of Songs in the Bible, which urged humans to capture the fox, that destroyer of vineyards. The fox was always described as cunning, even by Aristotle, who otherwise appreciated intelligence. Why? ‘Cunning’ suggests a hint of underhandedness, but surely foxes have never tried to hide the fact that they were after food. The thing people seemed to disdain most about them was apparently the untamed spirit that was beyond our control.
Of course foxes need to outfox us. How else can they survive? Countless fox hunts taught them to have multiple exits from their dens and to confuse their pursuers by backtracking or jumping into the water. Perhaps the hunt even honed their ability to find escape routes. In any case, today they live all over the Earth, from barren deserts to high mountaintops.
Their physical shape is an advantage in many situations. They can dig under or climb over various obstacles, and in uneven terrain the whiskers on their paws serve as sensors. On the hunt, their long, narrow bodies can run fast and far, or crawl forward in anticipation of a sudden attack. They often capture rodents with a move known as the ‘mousing pounce’, wherein the fox listens for movements under the ground for a few seconds, then leaps a metre into the air. By using its tail as a rudder, it can come down more or less on top of the rodent’s position. If the fox faces north it seems able to plot an exact course using the Earth’s magnetism.
Yet the fox’s primary strength seems to be its flexibility. Its diet is labelled as ‘opportunistic’. This, too, sounds unreliable. Why not look at it as a creative interplay with changing conditions? Surely foxes dream of plump hens, but it’s not as if chickens are their everyday fare. A fox must help itself when the opportunity arises and bury the excess for future days. The fox’s main food source is actually small rodents, and when these are scarce there are always worms, insects, cadavers, eggs, ground-dwelling birds, blueberries and blackberries. In an emergency even mushrooms, roots and some grasses will do, for foxes have the teeth of omnivores.
Their adaptability has brought them a number of advantages. Wolves need vast territories to hunt their prey in groups, and when human settlements encroached upon their wild domain they were pushed out. This was a double win for the fox, not only because wolves predate upon them – among houses they found many opportunities. It takes a few square kilometres of poor pine forest to provide sufficient food for a fox, but in a city neighbourhood they can live in the lap of luxury. Rubbish bins are gold mines, since people throw out an awful lot of food. Suburban yards have compost piles, fruits and berries, and there are fewer pesticides there than in the countryside. As an added bonus, hunting is forbidden in populated areas, and city-dwellers aren’t as fox-averse as rural folks.
It was during the urbanisation of the 1930s that people noticed foxes starting to move into English cities. By the end of the 20th century, Europe was home to hundreds of thousands of city foxes. Since a human environment had been created everywhere, with just a little nature sprinkled in here and there, many animals learned to survive in the dark corners of human settlements. It became increasingly common to see roe deer, hares, moose, beavers and wild boar on the outskirts of cities, until half of the animal species of the northern hemisphere could be found in populated areas.
Not that they were crowding us out. A thousand years ago, we and our livestock made up two per cent of all the mammals on Earth, but eventually those proportions were reversed. Since our own numbers doubled at regular intervals, we and our domesticated animals now represent more than 90 per cent of the world’s mammals. Besides humans, the greater part is made up of our billions of cows and pigs, plus a half billion dogs and a half billion cats. On the other hand, lions, king of the beasts, number under twenty thousand – nearly half of all wild animals have vanished in a short time.
Accordingly, a movement called ‘Rewilding’ hopes to make parts of Europe wild again with support from the World Wildlife Fund. Fish need to roam our waterways with greater ease, and wild animals can find new territory on former agricultural lands. In fact, for each square kilometre of city there should be a natural area a hundred times larger, where food could be grown and waste treated, so it’s in everyone’s interest to make more space for nature.
I knew all of this. But how could I personally leave space for wild things? Could a fox be considered a freer variety of dog? It really didn’t ask for anything but to be left in peace in its territory. Perhaps it could even become a sort of guide? Foxes must be familiar with the natural world they so flexibly inhabit, and when they absorb every possibility they seem to see the way forward before it even exists.
In April I went back to the cottage again. I was accompanied by that springtime restlessness that is best cured by nature, and there was also the possibility that an excavator would turn up. I intended to do some work in the open storage shed as I waited for him, organising things left behind by my mother and the previous owners.
I’d seen, of course, how houses with three walls are different from those with four. In the case of the storage shed, one implication was that many creatures seemed to feel welcome there. Atop one cabinet was a plundered bird’s nest, and the stuffing had been scratched out on the arm of Mum’s old sofa. I suspected a cat in both cases. When I moved a framed picture that had been leaning against the wall, I found half a dozen little turds behind it. Was this the cat’s idea of tidiness?
To ward off further attacks on the sofa I placed a folding sun lounger on top of it, as an irritated marking of my territory. But when I returned the next day I was met by an incredible sight. On top of the lounger was another marker of territory, an equally irritated response. It was smelly and brown.
My mouth agape, I stared at the brazen little pile. This had gone too far! And what was the intended message? This was the territorial marking of a fox. Was the storage shed to be shared by a cat and a fox?
When I thought about it, they had certain things in common. Both are nocturnal, solitary hunters with sensitive whiskers, rough tongues and vertical pupils that allow them to see in poor light. Both can steal forth on tiptoe and arch their backs, and both like to wrap themselves in their tails when they sit or sleep. Both can use their paws to fish and play with the mice and voles they catch, and both are climbers – grey foxes can even retract their claws to keep them sharp, just like cats. Although foxes are members of the canine family, they have adapted to a similar ecological niche as cats.
Yet they live in very different worlds. Cats were the first animals that humans embraced for the sake of pleasure. Though they are mousers, they can’t be used as hunters or guards or shepherds as dogs can, and they always retain something of their wild nature. Indoors they might tear out the stuffing of furniture, and outdoors they kill tens of thousands of birds. Even so, we’re happy to forgive cats for all of this. After their nightly hunt they can relax on pillows and laps, plied with delicacies.
The opposite goes for foxes, even though they too catch mice. The specially trained dogs of English fox hunts are evidence of just how unsportingly they are hunted. I hated all hunting drives. They were a slap in the face to a superior English tradition: ‘you support the underdog’. If the fox was an underdog, I would be rooting fo
r it.
But this fox was certainly testing my patience. When I came out of the storage shed I saw something that had previously escaped me. Between the carpentry shed and the hill stood an old pine tree that had been forced to creep along the ground during tough winters. From its horizontal trunk grew moss and even a small spruce, and beneath this misalliance the pine bashfully crossed its roots. Amongst them I discovered a large hole.
It was a classic fox den. They are typically excavated under trees on slopes, and here the crawlspace of the carpentry shed had provided a secondary exit, free of charge. What’s more, all the treasures of the storage shed were right nearby, so this location must have had major advantages for the fox.
I myself could not think of a worse place. Not only could this den destabilise the pine, it was at the very door of the carpentry shed, and no one wants wild animals about their feet when they’re going in to enjoy all their well-organised tools. It was true, I had been expecting an excavator, but not this one! And, of course, the fox was allowed on the property, but couldn’t it stay a little further away? Now I would have to block off the hole once the fox had left for the night. There was no risk of it being trapped inside, given the extra exit.
It was already getting dark when I returned to plan the eviction. From a distance I could see something moving around by the storage shed and wondered if it was the cat or the fox. But when I approached, what I saw instead were two dark little bundles dashing in opposite directions. One vanished into a corner of the shed and the other darted down into the den. They were fox cubs.
Our encounter unleashed two distinct reactions. One of the cubs gazed out curiously from its corner, while the other anxiously remained in its hiding spot. I myself backed towards the cottage, because I had reacted just as wildly as the foxes.
In his tale The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has a fox explain the advent of a friendship. Neither party must take command, and slowly but surely they may win each other’s trust. If the prince sat a little closer each day, the fox would be tamed.
Apparently, friendship between humans and foxes is not unheard of. In the early 2000s, a sixteen-thousand-year-old grave was discovered in the Middle East; the man inside lay close to a fox. Archaeologists were taken aback. Graves that contained dogs alongside humans were four thousand years younger. Could a fox have been sufficiently important that much earlier? Important enough to become a companion even into death? Was it because we humans had been just as wild as the fox at that time with our hunter-gatherer lives?
I wasn’t interested in taming the fox at the cottage. Once I found out it had been fed by some neighbours I understood why it wasn’t shy of people, but I didn’t want to give it food or a name. What interested me was the fox’s independence. It wasn’t looking for a master; it simply obeyed its own will, and that of life.
A few million years ago, the canine family had branched off into the wolf-like Canis and the fox-like Vulpes. The domesticated dog is descended from the Canis side. Domestication may have begun when some wolves were attracted to leftovers from slaughter near sites inhabited by humans, and those who were unafraid got more to eat and had more young as a result. In turn they began to see humans as a resource, and eventually their offspring could be tamed. Since wolves are pack animals, they have a rigid hierarchy where alpha males are never challenged, so even a human could take the position of a leader with a single wolf. That done, any number of Canis varieties ensued. St Bernards and poodles, hunting dogs and watchdogs, bloodhounds and shepherds – each one, down to the tiniest lap dog, has wolf genes.
Foxes, on the other hand, sustain themselves mostly on small rodents that can’t be hunted in packs, and the tiny morsels an attentive fox can find won’t feed a whole group. Does that mean that foxes couldn’t be tamed? This question was posed in the 1950s by the Russian researcher Dmitry Belyayev, who developed it into an experiment. He wanted to find out if the domestication of wolves could be replicated in Siberian silver foxes.
The experiment was conducted at a fur farm where cages holding a few thousand silver foxes stood in echoey metal barns. It was no wonder that these animals were aggressive; to approach them one needed protective gloves a centimetre thick. Belyayev’s plan was to have his assistant Lyudmila Trut breed the least aggressive foxes with each other, and then breed the gentlest of their offspring. Once breeding had selected for certain features of tame dogs, the transformation was quick.
A mental change in the silver foxes appeared in what was truly an astonishingly short time. After six generations, the cubs began to wag their tails when Lyudmila appeared. They even licked her hands and lay on their backs so she could scratch them. In the eighth generation, they retained not only their puppy-like trust and playfulness, but also developed some external puppy features. Their noses grew blunter, their ears drooped a little and their tails developed a curve.
There were also hormonal differences. The experiment foxes had higher levels of serotonin in their blood than foxes in an untamed control group, indicating that they had become less aggressive. It was later confirmed in a less-pleasant experiment that these changes existed on the genetic level. Foetuses from calm female foxes were transplanted into aggressive females, and once born the cubs sought out humans, even though their untamed foster mothers punished them for it.
After this, the researchers wanted to find out if the very gentlest of cubs would be able to handle living with Lyudmila. This was a step further than training foxes to be trusting. If it worked, it would be a true domestication, which comes from the Latin domus, ‘house’, and is applied only to animals kept within walls or fences. At first, the cub that was brought into Lyudmila’s house didn’t want anything to do with domesticated life. Separated from its siblings and closed up in a house, it seemed to lose its will to live and refused to eat. When it finally gave in, it sought shelter in its mistress’s bed.
And with that, silver foxes had been domesticated through selective breeding. They were later sold for a thousand dollars apiece, for many people thought it was exciting to keep an exotic pet. The foxes were trained to sit up on command; they were shampooed and fluffed with hairdryers; they lay on their backs to be scratched while they whined and wagged their tails. Yet something still separated them from tame dogs. They were still so independent that they were a bit difficult to handle.
Were the domesticated foxes happier than their foremothers? Since they lived in a state of eternal puppyhood, they no longer had to be responsible for their own lives, and the risks that come with freedom were gone. But perhaps something else was lost.
I had once seen a fox led straight across a public square, and it tugged creepingly at its lead, trying to avoid all the curious eyes. It still had that wild shyness. And I had seen a film of tame foxes chasing each other around a living room like hyperactive children, for freedom wasn’t the only thing they lacked in houses. There they had neither the challenges nor the varied stimuli that foxes live with in the forest. We seek enrichment through sports, games and other safe sensations, but boredom is unfamiliar to wild animals because their lives are always at stake. And they’ll do anything to survive. Meanwhile, more and more money is spent these days on anti-depressants for pets.
My encounter with the fox cubs immediately changed my view of the den by the carpentry shed. What I saw unfolding before me now was the culmination of a family saga. Foxes mate in the winter so that the cubs are born into the possibilities of spring. Even bonded pairs begin their courtship with playful invitations. The female challenges the male by lying on her back or nudging him with her rear, only to act teasingly unavailable a moment later. When she’s finally ready, they are inseparable for a long time, and their mating is so vociferous that humans have been known to mistake their wailing shrieks for assault. What I had heard on that night in January, then, was wild mating calls, and while I had been picturing a terrifying drama the foxes were probably already curled up together in a swe
et pile.
They stick together even after the cubs are born, although they hunt for themselves and split up the parenting duties. It was the female who had to prepare a nest where she could birth the cubs and then stay with them, as baby foxes live dangerously. Since they were dependent on her for milk, warmth and defence, the male had to bring her food, but he was not allowed inside. If he showed up late she might yip for him, so he too had a rough time of it.
In other words, the fox family needed their den, so I would let them stay. They would also remain undisturbed for the time being, since no excavator showed up this time either – but now I was grateful for it. As for me, I had to go back to Stockholm for a while, so it would be some time before I returned to the property.
And then I tried to be as discreet as possible. It’s been said that foxes can hear a clock ticking at a distance of thirty metres, so in the evening I stuck to watching for the fox family through the window. In the muted spring light, the bog moss glowed pale among the pines, and a meditative atmosphere settled around me. I didn’t see any foxes, but the nature they lived in was imprinted on me. Perhaps getting a glimpse of the wild was to open oneself to something unexpected, rather like in poetry? With that thought, I drifted off to sleep.
I awoke at dawn to a thumping sound. When I looked out of the window, a roe deer was tearing leaves from a redcurrant bush so that its boughs struck the wall. I sneaked out to the steps and suddenly went stiff. Right before me stood a fox, who was unaware of both me and the roe deer. It was looking for birds in the birch.
The sight was totally confounding. Surely birds in flight couldn’t be easy prey, and what’s more I had thought the fox was a large creature, grizzled with grey. But here it was, small and red. The fact that it turned out to be the male also turned my assumptions on their head, because male foxes are typically larger than females. If any creatures challenged the human desire for neat categories, it was foxes. Sometimes they were catlike, sometimes doglike, and they were consistently unpredictable.