The Fox Hunt

    I didn't quite believe it when I first heard someone say that the reason you have to keep your rubbish lids on your trash outside here is because otherwise, the foxes will rip your bags open.

    Right, I thought. That's a nice way of saying beware of the rats.

    Maybe it's because my last six months in the U.S. were, shall I say, rat-infested?

    After we sold our house in the suburbs (where there were no rats that I knew of), we moved downtown for six months until we left the States. It was great being downtown after the suburbs, lively, fun, all that, but putting our trash in the bin behind our building was not a highlight. Jokes circulated among residents that you could surprise a rat having dinner when you opened the lid. There was always a mad scampering when you went back there, which was gross. 

    So, yeah, sure, the foxes. Whatever. I'll be sure to keep the lid on tight.

    And then I met them. 

    I was looking out my kitchen window at my neighbor's garden downstairs (she's in the garden flat, we're in the top flat) when I saw him -- or her, I guess. Lying in a spot of sun on the top of her garden shed was a sleek auburn fox with black paws that looked painted on.

   Don't think I've actually ever seen a fox before, especially sleeping like a cat in the sun right in front of me. 

   And then not that long later, on a walk around my 'hood, I met another fox, sauntering around in an apartment complex off the main square here. Looked pretty at home.  

   I asked my downstairs neighbor, a tiny eighty-something Burmese woman who once ran a Buddhist center with her husband in Oxford (people are really interesting here), about the fox sleeping on top of her garden shed.

    She laughed and brought me back to show me a pile of tennis balls in her garden. 

   "He leaves these for me," she said, pointing to the heap of about a dozen identical green balls. "He collects these."