The snow fell in April, swirling in the soft spring breezes before coating the greening grass. Winter was breaking. Though the air was chill, the sun’s soft angles spoke of what was to come.
An Angus cow licked her newborn in the hill pasture. Robins sang in the black cherries. Trout anglers moseyed along country lanes to their favorite holes.
No one seemed to be thinking of the great chills of January and the tropical swelter of July. The banal, sweet time was coming. The dogwoods would be in bloom. The Forsythias were already casting their diminutive yellow plumes, and a few redbuds were showing theirs.
And the meadow fox nursed her new litter. They were whelped a den dug at the base of a fallen oak. Four little gray foxes whined and whimpered over her swollen mammaries. Three were little vixens, and one was stout little dog fox that strongly resembled her father, who had been removed with a night hunter’s bullet on a distant November night.
Her new mate was a young fox, but over the late winter, he had become a maestro at running the country lanes for wily old cottontails. He had knew how to punch hard into the coverts of greenbrier and multiflora rose and force the hard holding rabbit into the open for a winter coursing.
But now that he had a mate and kits to feed, he was forced to try other avenues. He was hunting for five now, and he begun testing out his techniques as an arboreal hunter.
He had learned to climb up high in then canopy and raid fox and gray squirrel dreys. In late winter, the squirrels would have their young in those dreys, and they were quite tasty and nutritious for a fox family.
He also raided every songbird nest he could find. But only now, as the sun began to work its way back to shining high at this latitude that the birds were laying enough eggs to be worth the trouble.
But as his young grew, he needed more eggs and more meat. When they were three weeks and sucking their mother really hard, he began his nightly egg hunt. It was a warm day in late April, and some of the hen turkeys had taken to brooding their nests in the undergrowth.
One old hen laid her speckled eggs along a cottontail lane. She didn’t seem to care that these lanes sometimes filled with predators. She’d fought off her fair share of raccoons, skunks, and opossums. She knew that they really didn’t want to deal with a mad dinosaur mama with sharp claws and a piercing beak.
Even a fell boar raccoon would back down from her defense, and she knew that she had this power. So she sat smugly upon her eggs, almost daring some beast of the field to molest her brood.
On this warm day in April, the meadow fox’s mate went on an daylight raid. His mate needed food, and his babes needed milk. He thought of darting along a well-known stand of autumn olive, where the towhees nest, but as he slunk along the trail, his nose caught wind of many eggs, big eggs, and they were lying out on the ground!
He changed his approach and began a jovial saunter towards the egg scent. He smelled a turkey, but his youthful inexperience led him to assume that these were stochastic variables. He just knew there eggs and they were on the ground and they were going to be good food.
He came within ten feet of the nesting turkey hen. She clucked a warning from her nest. The fox thought it odd for a turkey to be clucking from such a thick covert. He cocked his head at the sound, turning his prick ears to catch the source of the sound.
He stood there for 90 seconds or so. Then he began his jovial jaunt towards the egg scent. He made no more than four or five steps forward before the covert exploded with angry feathers.
The great turkey hen was upon the fox. Her thick claws tore at his side and her sharp beak hammered him hard.
So surprised was the fox by this development, that he screeched and then ran. The dinosaur mama held tight on his tail as he raced down the cottontail raid.
Then she turned and strutted back with the cautious calm of an Old West gunslinger. One could almost see her blowing the smoke off her pistol as she strolled out of town.
So that nest raid failed, but all was not doomed for the fox family. That night, many young, quite naive cottontails filled the lanes. The dog fox could catch several of them through the night. This supply of naive young rabbits would go on through the summer. No more would he have to climb trees and raid birds nests for survival. His family’s hunger would be sated on the tenderest of rabbit meat.
And so the young foxes grew up in the soft days of spring. They were weaned on regurgitated rabbit, and they played like kitten-dogs in the sun shine.
These were the rosy days of childhood. All made possible by a enterprising father, who wasn’t afraid to try raiding new sources of prey.
Read more about the saga of these gray foxes’
great story – I can just see that turkey hen!