The sensory presence of foxes is woven through my days and nights lately – sightings, sound, smells, evidence. It is the mating season and, being largely solitary creatures, they are advertising their presence to one another in a manner hard to ignore. Foxy scent markings – musky notes of singed fur, sandalwood, spice and hawthorn flowers – bring me up sharp at a hole in a hedge, by a gatepost or down the lane.
In snow, or in the creamy chalk soil that has washed out of gateways in recent storms, tracks give away encounters. Paw prints, narrower than a dog’s, track slightly sideways, printing a straight, tacking running stitch across the land. Occasionally, tracks cross and run alongside one another for a while, or pool in a coming together.…
