Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal

“Things are going to change around here since they moved in,” Andy Jost said.

“You saw him?” Fred Haisch asked.

Andy nodded.

Fred and Andy are my neighbors. Years ago when I first moved to Evoraburg, they and Andy’s three boys put their backs into assisting me in converting the old schoolhouse into an office. “Nobody should do a hard task alone,” Fred remarked at the time. Conversation, many hands, and Louise Haisch’s noon meals, served in the shade of an oak tree, lightened the work. The Jost boys are now gone. Noah, the oldest, is married to Barbara Haisch. That and four grandchildren bind Fred and Andy. They work well together, doing more than what is necessary, like two competitors in a foot race, but they are pleasant about it. Last week they repainted the interior and made a few minor repairs. 

Fred tilted back in his chair. “When did you see the todd?”

“Footprints around the barn and hen house,” Andy replied.

“Who is Todd? A new neighbor?” I asked.

“An unwelcome neighbor. A fox. Mattie Clive says a vixen built a den over by the orchard.”

 “I saw a sign out by the road to slow down for foxes,” I said.

“Mattie is protective for all the wrong reasons,” Fred said. “The vixen will have her litter soon. She probably mated in February if Mattie saw her hanging around her den.”

Rubbing his hands close to the woodburning stove, Andy said, “There’ll be a lot of destruction.”

Nobody seemed to have any more to say about the foxes.  My thoughts turned to a few years back, when I lived in Tennessee.

It was a bright, hot August day. After mowing, I parked the tractor and was crossing from the tractor and tool shed towards the house when my neighbor at the time, Owen Owsley, waved me over to his yard. From where he stood, he could watch me work, often making my business his own. When I stood before him, he bluntly asked if I had seen the fox running through the yard. I told him that I hadn’t. He looked at me point blank. “I saw it darting through your yard. Yeah, there was a fox,” he said, taking himself seriously and brushing aside what he took as my indifference. After thinking it over, curiosity got the better of me. I walked away from Owsley.

I would have a cup of coffee on the back porch early mornings and later at twilight. Settled in the chair, I would watch the birds pecking at the seed in the feeder, squabbling blue jays, house finches, sparrows and cardinals. A Robin pecked in the lawn. Crows put in appearances when slices of bread were tossed into the yard. Deer would graze on the soy in the back pasture, or the bales of alfalfa and sacks of corn dumped in the yard near a tree line in the autumn and winter months to keep them from the fenced kitchen garden and bushes. In the spring, two mallards would come into the yard. At times, the drake perched on the roof’s peak, while the hen nestled beneath a maple tree where he would later join her. In the evenings I would hear coyotes howling.

One September morning as the dawn spread golden light across the field glistening on the jeweled necklace of dew, I spotted a coyote hiding in the soy near the edge of the lawn. We ignored one another until he, or she, grew bored waiting, then wandered off. As was their habit, a few rabbits came into the yard to feast on the grass and patches of clover. One rabbit emerged daily from beneath the porch, returning to its cool shade when done grazing. I called him Bartel. I had checked in his absence to be certain there was no burrow to discover, he had only wallowed in the dirt. His warren was somewhere nearby.

Coming into the backyard, I noticed something by the clothes line. It was Bartel. I looked down at his ripped and bloody body. Grief choked, I went to the shed for a shovel, then buried him in a flower bed. Tulips were planted on his grave in October.

After Bartel’s death, a noticeable change occurred in the balance of nature. Rabbits and mallards disappeared. Fawns, usually seen after birth between May and June, also vanished. The woodchuck that tried to scale or dig beneath the garden fence was gone. There were fewer songbirds, gamebirds. It seemed that only the coyotes and foxes remained.

Leaning towards me, Fred asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Foxes in the peaceable kingdom.”

“They tend to disrupt things,” Fred said.

Andy nodded. “Can’t say for the better.”