John Lewis-Stempel - The Wild Life of the Fox

John Lewis-Stempel is a writer and farmer. His books include the Sunday Times bestsellers The Running Hare and The Wood. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow. In 2016 he was Magazine Columnist of the Year for his column in Country Life. He lives in Herefordshire with his wife and two children.

The shepherd on his journey heard when nigh

His dog among the bushes barking high;

The ploughman ran and gave a hearty shout,

He found a weary fox and beat him out.

The ploughman laughed and would have ploughed him in

But the old shepherd took him for the skin.

He lay upon the furrow stretched for dead,

The old dog lay and licked the wounds that bled,

The ploughman beat him till his ribs would crack,

And then the shepherd slung him at his back;

And when he rested, to his dogs surprise,

The old fox started from his dead disguise;

And while the dog lay panting in the sedge

He up and snapt and bolted through the hedge.

He scampered to the bushes far away;

The shepherd called the ploughman to the fray;

The ploughman wished he had a gun to shoot.

The old dog barked and followed the pursuit.

The shepherd threw his hook and tottered past;

The ploughman ran but none could go so fast;

The woodman threw his faggot from the way

And ceased to chop and wondered at the fray.

But when he saw the dog and heard the cry

He threw his hatchet but the fox was bye.

The shepherd broke his hook and lost the skin;

He found a badger hole and bolted in.

They tried to dig, but, safe from dangers way,

He lived to chase the hounds another day.

John Clare (17931864)

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First published in Great Britain by Doubleday in 2020
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright John Lewis-Stempel, 2020

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design and illustrations by Beci Kelly/TW

ISBN: 978-1-473-56666-8

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For my father, not least because you bought me a fox (stuffed).

I WAS ALREADY LATE when I was crossing the hall, and the phone rang. Outside, the February light was going. A conversation which should have taken one minute, wrangled into twenty.

A fatal extra nineteen minutes. By the time I put down the receiver, opened the front door to walk to the orchard, it was too late. I knew it immediately. The evening air was as dull and dead as a turned-off TV screen.

But I hoped, as you do.

When I swung open the orchard gate, I was absolutely certain. But I hoped, as you do.

As I neared the little wooden chicken shed, there were none of the usual familiar, contented murmurings of chickens settling to sleep.

Until the very last moment, when I lifted the hut door, I hoped. But all four of the chickens, Light Sussex hens, had disappeared. On the strawed floor of the hut, displayed under torchlight like an art exhibit, was the corpse of Alfreda, my daughters pet Khaki Campbell duck. The blood on the back of Alfredas neck was still sticky-warm to the touch.

There is always a terrible, echoing emptiness when the fox comes to visit or, less euphemistically, slaughter. It is never believable and for a mad moment I probed the torch beam around the orchard, in case the four Henriettas as we call our Light Sussex had roosted in an apple tree. Up a pear tree. A cherry.

I carried on hoping, despite the tangible evidence of a duck cadaver. As you do.

My fault, of course, the death of our chickens and duck. I should have put down the phone earlier, been less concerned to satisfy some human insistence, done my job as poultry keeper. The fox was merely doing what foxes do: kill when the opportunity presents.

In that moment I despised the fox. Yet I admired her, too. The one time in the year I was late shutting in the fowl, she was there, killed five and took away four. To coin a phrase, I had been out-foxed.

*

Hate. Love.

Detestation. Admiration.

Livestock-killing pest. Noble hunter.

That night of the fox was only the latest of my encounters with the red fox, our largest land carnivore. I have had a lifetime of foxes. When I was a seven-year-old, a fox stole my pet bantam; the same year, I was put on the Masters horse on the Boxing Day meet at Rotherwas in Herefordshire, smelling his sloe-gin breath from the stirrup cup and feeling the greasy hair of the hounds; at around ten years of age I was blooded the ritual daubing that goes back to the time of James I, where blood is smeared on the faces of those who witness their first kill when riding to hounds. (Everything about the moment was a laughable accident: I had been stuck on a pony, which required someone to walk in front opening gates, never saw the fox, and was mistaken for the intended subject of the blooding.) Clinging to the side of a tractor cab, aged twelve, the farmhand and I saw a fox foam-flecked around the mouth from the exertion of fleeing the hounds. Poor bugger, said the farmhand, revving the tractor across the field and into the lane, just in time to block the hounds with the trailer full of cow muck. Even above the diesel din of the Ford County engine, we could hear the cursing of the hunt, the banging on the trailer with whip handles. The farmhand gave me a wink, and I gave him one back.