<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Vulpes vulpes<\/strong><\/p>\n It began with an old shoe placed at my front door. The following morning, the brogue was back on my doorstep. But there was another item too. A child\u2019s dummy, pale blue with a bear\u2019s face on the guard. 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. It was accepting the gifts yesterday that made him reveal himself today.\u00a0 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 \u2013 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. 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. After that, I left an egg daily.<\/p>\n Five weeks later, he brought me the greatest gift of all. That night I left out five eggs.<\/p>\n For several weeks, the family returned every evening. \u2028And each night I placed five eggs on my doorstep.<\/p>\n He left me one final present. His way of saying goodbye. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Harriet Worrell<\/strong> lives in Cheshire with her daughter and too many animals. She steals time to write; having recently finished an MG novel, which she\u2019s editing, and a work-in-progress YA novel that\u2019s near completion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18843"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18893,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18843\/revisions\/18893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA 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.
\nUnclaimed and wet from the rain, the brogue was still there when I returned at the end of the day.<\/p>\n
\nThe brogue, the dummy \u2013 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.
\nAs 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.<\/p>\n
\nLeft to right – brogue, dummy, brush.
\nI stepped carefully over them and pondered all day why I, of all the people on the street, had been chosen.<\/p>\n
\nAt 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.
\n\u201cUntil tomorrow,\u201d I said.
\nHe replied with a blink.<\/p>\n
\nAnd an egg on the doorstep.
\nIn the morning the egg was gone.<\/p>\n
\nStanding 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.<\/p>\n
\nA brown brogue, right, size 9. Scuffed at the toe, worn unevenly at the heel.<\/p>\n