It was four o’clock in the late summer morning, still full dark now that the nights were stretching again but greying a little towards dawn. From outside, I heard a noise I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t tell if it came from the garden or beyond. It was too puzzling to ignore, and then there was another. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep. I looked out, cautiously.

There is a patch of grass beside the house through which a footpath runs to another street. It is backed by a burn running through a deep ditch overgrown with nettles and brambles, and a line of hawthorn trees, and it is lit by two streetlamps bright as searchlights. In the full glare of one of the lamps, three young foxes were playing – jumping, biting, chasing each other. They were in superb condition, unlike the shabby rake-thin adult we had seen in a car park the week before, with its worn and scabby coat, its air of exhausted indifference. These were full of adolescent energy, jumping out of their bones with more strength and vitality than they knew what to do with. Two of them stretched up on their hindlegs, balancing against each other like March-mad hares. The third, typical tag-along younger brother, circled aimlessly around them, trying to join in, and finding himself ignored, rushed off to the burn after an enticing smell, and galloped back, as if trying to persuade the others to chase him. One of them half-heartedly cuffed him and went back to his game. He found something else to chase, a vole-run, or an adventurous mouse. This time the others followed him down to the burn, along behind the back fence, and then they streaked away down the road through the estate towards the wooded hill. 

Urban foxes are not uncommon here on this new estate. We hear them at night, and we often catch glimpses of one in the headlights as we drive home after dark, and I know there are areas where they are simply a nuisance – knocking over bins and attacking pets. But watching this group of young wild creatures trying the world and their new freedom out for size, completely unconscious of human watchers, felt special, and when I talk about it, it is with an enormous sense of privilege. This uninhibited exuberance is something humans don’t often get to see, and without the streetlamps and the shelter of my bedroom window I wouldn’t have got to see it at all. 

A fox is an ambivalent creature. It stalks across cushions and wallpaper in the cosy cottage pictures on Instagram but it also comes up in the folk horror and goblincore pages, alongside skulls and toadstools. In folklore, the fox is the original outlaw, and everyone’s hand is against him, and yet, like Robin Hood, he remains popular – a ruthless chicken killer, wily trickster, bold audacious thief, low life vermin, but also beguiling, handsome charmer. Mr Fox is the villain of the English version of the Bluebeard folktale, a rich and charismatic gentleman with a very familiar response to being confronted with his crime:

          It is not so, and it was not so, 

          and God forbid it should be so

 – and a castle full of slaughtered maidens. In Ireland, the Sly Bold Reynardine may be a code for the ‘raparees’, guerilla fighters against the regime of William of Orange, but the versions that survive feature a romantic nobleman who entices a young lady to run away with him to his ‘dream castle’ on the mountains of Pomeroy. No version of this has a happy ending, but where the parlour version has her slip and fall to her death in a storm: 

          A pale drowned bride met Reynardine

          On the mountains of Pomeroy

the version I learned makes him a cross between a werewolf and Count Dracula. 

          Through sun and moon she followed him,

          his teeth did brightly shine,

          He’s led her over the mountains,

          that sly bold Reynardine.

It’s not for nothing that a popular bye-name for a dog fox is ‘Tod’ – death. 

In Scandinavia there is a fox-woman forest spirit called Huldra, ‘the hidden’, who can be kindly, and even flirtatious or cruel and vengeful. She is very beautiful but can be recognised by the fox tail glimpsed beneath her skirt. She will teach wanderers the secrets of the forest and guide them away from danger, if treated well, but lead them astray or kill them if they are rough or intrusive – much like our own fairy folk of legend, she exudes the sense that human presence in these liminal spaces is a trespass, and it could even be dangerous. You have to speak to her in euphemisms – ‘the hem of your petticoat is showing’, or, like the wandering fairy you glimpse at the market, pretend you haven’t seen her at all.

It’s quite significant that one of the euphemisms used so as not to offend fairy people is ‘the good neighbours’, because when I first heard the noises, I would have guessed neighbours rather than foxes, and my first instinct was not to look out, and not to draw attention to myself. Noises after midnight usually means boys going home after parties and all-night video game sessions, hanging out away from adult supervision with their illicit experimental alcohol, sometimes singing or fighting, sometimes chucking their cast-away burger wrappers and cans over the fence, occasionally being sick on someone’s doorstep. Once someone played chap-and-run around the estate at half-past eleven, and twice hopeful apprentice burglars tried the front door. Mostly I try to be sympathetic – the adolescent is a nocturnal beast, nowhere to go in the holidays, not allowed in pubs and under constant suspicion on the streets. But there’s no denying they can be tricky – noisy, destructive, untidy, always eating, and they don’t handle criticism and authority well. If my night-time visitors thought I might clype on them it could have meant months of graffiti and petty vandalism. 

We don’t attach much sense of privilege about seeing the nocturnal games of my human neighbours, though they are harmless enough, if noisy and untidy. They need, as all young creatures do, space to test their strength and get the measure of the world they live in, and, like foxes in some places, they will meet with unkindness enough as they do it. It seems a shame that their strangeness, their energy and random attempts to fit in with the rest of us don’t meet with the same tolerance and attention as wildlife watchers give foxes, but they lack the gilding of the exotic, and they represent more of a threat. They’re big and they’re strong, and they hint at a future that will go on without us, a world where we might have to cede control, and reckon with our vulnerability, our transience, our fundamental irrelevance. Sly bold Reynardine is the shadow-stalker of our subconscious, our unspoken confrontations with life, sex and death, and it doesn’t hurt to be wary of all his manifestations. But oh, those fiery leaping foxes, playing in the dark before dawn of a midsummer day, weren’t they a joy!

Header Image Credit: Elizabeth Rimmer