Vulpes vulpes
It began with an old shoe placed at my front door.
A brown brogue, left, size 9. Scuffed at the toe, worn unevenly at the heel. I placed it on the wall at the front of the house.
Unclaimed and wet from the rain, the brogue was still there when I returned at the end of the day.
The following morning, the brogue was back on my doorstep. But there was another item too. A child’s dummy, pale blue with a bear’s face on the guard.
The brogue, the dummy – they made no sense. I, a fifty-year-old bachelor, with a preference for Chukka boots and two size 11 feet, had no use for either.
As I carefully put them on the wall, I noticed something else. A tang in the air which was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
On the third morning, a new offering lay at my door beside the shoe and the dummy. A hairbrush, red and complete with blonde hair. Self-consciously, I stroked my bald head.
Left to right – brogue, dummy, brush.
I stepped carefully over them and pondered all day why I, of all the people on the street, had been chosen.
It was accepting the gifts yesterday that made him reveal himself today. He crept from the jungle that is my small front garden. Red-rust coat and pert ears atop an intelligent face. I dropped a heart-beat at his beauty. He looked at me with golden eyes before dropping his latest treasure on the ground. He nudged it with his nose and stepped back – a gesture that I understood to mean it was for me. A tennis ball. Bright green in its newness. Before I could thank him, he was gone.
At our next encounter, we exchanged gifts. For me, a Barbie doll with a missing leg. For him, a fresh organic egg which he took gently in his mouth.
“Until tomorrow,” I said.
He replied with a blink.
There was no tomorrow. Or the day after that. I worried I had offended him. I positioned his offerings on my window sill; brogue, dummy, tennis ball, doll. Left to right to meet with his approval.
And an egg on the doorstep.
In the morning the egg was gone.
After that, I left an egg daily.
Five weeks later, he brought me the greatest gift of all.
Standing in the back garden, I was charting the graceful manoeuvres of bats when a movement at ground level caught my eye. It was him, pushing through the shadows. A burst of frenzy erupting behind him morphed into three cubs. And there, sitting to one side with her tail tidied around her paws, the vixen.
That night I left out five eggs.
For several weeks, the family returned every evening. And each night I placed five eggs on my doorstep.
He left me one final present. His way of saying goodbye.
A brown brogue, right, size 9. Scuffed at the toe, worn unevenly at the heel.
Harriet Worrell lives in Cheshire with her daughter and too many animals. She steals time to write; having recently finished an MG novel, which she’s editing, and a work-in-progress YA novel that’s near completion.