4

FIRE

Fox

The Tube is a syringe, pushing a solution of bodies and electric air into the city’s limbs.

When you ooze out of Bethnal Green station, there’s a grimy brick building by the road with a tired sign: ‘Come unto me and I will give you rest.’

There’s a café round the corner. It used to be run by gentle, stammering, self-effacing Buddhists, and I used to regroup there over cheese and onion rolls after romantic routs. Now it’s full of shrill, carefully unshaven metrosexuals eating pine nuts. There’s a metallic noise which is either music or bad plumbing. Everyone’s thin, and no one’s enjoying being thin.

Outside that café, squeezed at both ends into calligraphic flourishes, was my first London fox scat, coruscating with purple beetles.

When I first came here it was a less brash, more confident place. People lived here because they did rather than because they should. There was no corrosive apartheid between the drinkers of ristretto and the eaters of pie and mash.

Back then I’d read a book and eat penne arrabbiata most nights down Globe Road, drain a carafe of rough Chianti and take a loop of the park before heading home. One warm October night, steering between drug dealers and copulating couples, I saw two foxes on the grass by the bandstand. They swung their heads smoothly over the ground like placid Hoovers, each swing marking a silver furrow in the dew. I crept closer. They took no notice. I crept very close: they raised their heads, saw that I wasn’t a dog or a car, and went back to their swinging. They were harvesting crane flies. The ground was thick with them. The crane flies were laying eggs. That takes time, and anyway, the damp stuck their wings to the grass like stamps in an album. The foxes just had to peel them off with their tongues and suck them up.

I got down on my knees beside the foxes and grazed. There seemed nothing barbarous about crushing bodies that were so slight, so dry and so still. A victim needs to have viscera to evoke visceral disgust. The crane flies were pinioned by the surface tension and didn’t move much. Think of a ticklish rice-paper garnish that turns to vanilla slime.

Half an hour later the foxes were still there, systematically working their patch under the sodium lighting, as I got stiffly up and walked home in a ruined suit.

It wasn’t the first time I had tried to be a fox. When I was nine my father arrived home, excited: ‘Look what’s in the back of the car. But be very careful.’

There, in black plastic bin liners, were two recently dead foxes – a dog and a vixen. Their lips were pulled back in a snarl. They looked angry to be dead. The vixen had swollen mammary glands. She had obviously been suckling cubs.

‘Don’t touch their teeth’, said my father. ‘They’ve been killed with strychnine.’

That’s not a nice way to die. A farmer had once delightedly told me what it did to moles, and I could understand the bitterness of that fixed smile. Very soon after taking the poison, probably planted on a dead lamb, they’d have felt tremors and rising nausea. The tremors would have towered up, powered up, and turned into convulsions. In a dark field in Derbyshire they’d have repeatedly arched and extended their backs almost until they snapped, and then, when their diaphragms finally gave up, they’d have turned blue and died in an asphyxial froth of blood and foam. They were terribly lovely. From then on I signed off all my letters with the head of a fox.

We went out to try to find the cubs. We lay for three nights under a tarpaulin downwind of a hole in a hill. I bought a chicken with my birthday money, disembowelled and dismembered it and spread it tantalisingly around near the entrance to the hole.

This was a time when I thought I could will anything. I willed the cubs to come out. I asked (not knowing who or what I was asking) to be possessed by those adult foxes so that I could know where the cubs were, or persuade them that it was safe to emerge.

We shivered and we willed. They never came. It was my first real disillusionment.

If I’d been in Japan, the fox spirits would have jumped at my invitation. There they don’t need to be asked in at all, let alone asked twice. Plenty of people in Japan are married, often unknowingly, and often satisfactorily, to eyelash-batting, stiletto-wearing fox spirits. It’s not always good, though, and fox exorcism is big business. In everyday life you’ve got to be careful that you’re not being beguiled by a fox. The danger’s greatest over the phone, when you can’t see the person you’re talking to (presumably Skype is making it tougher for spirit foxes), and telephonic conventions have developed to avert it. There are some human sounds that foxes can’t pronounce, such as moshi moshi. They’re part of the standard greeting. If your opposite number doesn’t use it, hang up.

But these Derbyshire foxes evidently took their metaphysics, like their rabbits, from the land, and the High Peak is part of the West. Here foxes are the definitive other: they won’t cross the species boundary except when, as demonic agents, they tunnel into the soul, making it foul with their stench and mixing their dung with the mess of bloody feathers from other plundered souls.

Foxes let in disillusionment. They also let in death. The house, my bedroom and the shed to which I and my skins and bottles of formalin had been banished were full of corpses. But I hadn’t really identified the corpses as dead. They were just little peninsulas of wilderness that reached gloriously behind our pebble-dashed walls; aids to living fully, unlike the people all around us in suburbia; nothing to do with extinction. They were silent and still, but that just meant that it was easier to study them than if they’d been slinking or flapping. It didn’t mean that they had stopped being, or that they represented a threat to me or to anyone I cared about.

That changed when I was eleven. Here is the entry in my nature diary:

February 2

Found dead fox (Vulpes vulpes crucigera) down on a large patch of grass in the Mayfield valley. It was in a bad state of decomposition and Rigor Mortis seemed fully developed in the limbs.* Strangely enough, this specimen had been very neatly skinned. The skull and everything else on the carcass was intact. There were many maggots on the carcass which were all dead, probably because of the cold night. We took from the body the skull (including the lower Jaws and teeth) and the bones of the tail. We took these home and boiled them to clean the unwanted matter off. We then bleached them in household bleach (chlorous).

A sketch map followed.

The prose is revealingly constipated. There’s plainly something missing. What’s missing is the soul-rattling shock I felt. This fox was dead in a way that the strychnine foxes had not been, and for a fox to be dead was really pretty serious. Apart from swifts, foxes were the most obviously alive things I knew. I’d watched them alongside lean, wired, taut dogs. Even when the dogs were racing hard, the foxes sauntered. The very best dogs slouch; foxes glide. If even foxes could be killed this emphatically, nothing was safe: not my parents, not my sister, and not me. The grave opened.

And then, as I was still standing there in that cold field, came another thought: This very, very dead fox is more alive than a correspondingly dead dog. So an ontological snobbery was born: a belief in a hierarchy of being. Some being was so mighty that it would survive even cardiac arrest. It made me an insufferable little shit for years. I’ve never recovered, and nor have several of the people who’ve had to put up with me.

But here’s the relevance for this book: I felt that if I wanted to be like a fox I could do it by, first of all, being very alive (which was a comfort), or by being splendidly dead (which is a rather stranger comfort).

✴ ✴

Foxes trickled up with the Pleistocene ice and then trickled down railway lines and canal fringes into the inner cities. They are Tories. Urban fox numbers correlate perfectly with blue rosettes. They like the gardens that come with affluence. Some commute – in both directions. Many (though not my East End foxes) have nice, leafy country houses and come to town, like the men in suits, for the rich, easy off-scourings of the city. Others choose to live and raise cubs under a lawyer’s shed by the Tube station, and to relax and get a breath of fresh air in the country.

The East End of London doesn’t vote Tory, despite the corporate laptops and the avocado foam, and the foxes here are hard pressed. There are shed-owning lawyers whose kids like to feed foxes, but they’re in small ghettos with polished floor-boards, walled in by towering concrete cabinets where the desperate are filed.

The humans here have small brains. Smaller, that is, than those of the wild men from whom they descend. They’ve shrunk about 10 per cent over the past 10,000 years. Since dogs faithfully follow their masters, their brains have shrunk too. Dog brains are about 25 per cent smaller than those of wolves – their immediate ancestor. Domestication makes everything shrivel.

We don’t know what effect inner-city living will have on foxes, but urban foxes have lost no length or weight. It’s not surprising. Even in the fat suburbs, where they could live off bird tables, hedgehog food and the interested benevolence of the middle class, they choose to hunt. Like us, they are built to be multivalent. It’s how they and we triumphed over heat, ice, drought and monoculturalists. Strenuous though it is for them – demanding a lot more ingenuity and energy than it takes simply to pick up pizza and lap up sweet-and-sour sauce – they’ve opted to listen, pounce, prospect and innovate. We haven’t. In a few generations we’ve turned into sclerosed super-specialists, each in a niche so tight that our limbs can’t stretch and our brains can’t turn. I bet foxes’ choices will keep their brains throbbingly big and keen and their legs like steel wire when we can’t hoist ourselves from the sofa.

✴ ✴

It’s easy enough to march to the urban fox’s beat. They are those most onomatopoeic of creatures: crepuscular. They live, by preference and as befits brilliant physiological generalists, along the mucky tideline where the night washes into the day. Here in the East End, though, there are no proper nights: just dirty days, and nights of scorching twilight. For these foxes the dusk is not the dimming of the light but the thinning of the traffic. Sound and tremble take over from photons. When the taxis have dropped off most of the bankers, out come the foxes. They forage over a big area here (probably getting on for half a square mile) and show the generic fox’s caching behaviour. They forage or hunt, then cache (usually burying, in an often rather messy, approximate way), and then continue to forage and hunt and cache before returning to cached food. It’s hard to bury under tarmac: my foxes shove food clumsily under pallets and cardboard boxes used to deliver wide-screen TVs. Then, the territory trawled, they select what they need (going for the most toothsome first) and head home.

The traffic dawn and the sun dawn more or less coincide. Trucks shudder down the Old Ford Road; Porsches purr off to Canary Wharf; buses rumble west to disgorge people into open-plan, air-conditioned comfort, with cooled-water dispensers. The foxes lick last night’s aloo gobi off their lips and curl up under the shed.

✴ ✴

The more respectably dressed you are, the harder it is to be a fox. No one has ever accused me of being respectably dressed, but even so I soon realised that I should be even more shabbily shambolic than usual. Someone in unstained trousers and an unripped jumper looks criminal if he’s raking through a herniated bin bag, but if you’re dirty, tired and slumped, no one minds. You’re translucent. People look through you. The grubbier you are, the more translucent you are. If you’re on all fours, sniffing at a sack, you’re invisible. Except to the authorities. And even there, sleeping is more offensive than doing.

I was shaken awake under the rhododendrons.

‘Afternoon, sir.’

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Can I help, at all, sir?’

‘No thanks. All’s fine.’

‘Can I ask what you’re doing, sir?’

‘Just having a little sleep, officer.’

‘I’m afraid you can’t sleep here, sir. You sure you’re OK, sir?’

‘Fine, thank you. And what’s the problem with sleeping here?’

‘It’s forbidden, as I’m sure you know. Trespassing. The owners can’t have people just sleeping.’

(Just sleeping?)

‘I can’t see that I’m interfering materially with the enjoyment of its title of a property management company registered in Panama.’

‘Are you trying to be clever, sir?’

I could think of no palatable answer to this. The policeman didn’t press me for one. He moved to another topic.

‘Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?’

‘You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and’ – I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential haemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill – ‘I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.’

This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out. For him, calves, ankles and concealment in an evergreen shrub meant perversion so deep that it should be measured in years inside. But I could see him struggling to identify the right pigeonhole for my depravity, and imagining the paperwork. Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to ‘bugger off home, sir’ – the italics were powerful on his lips – ‘and get a life.’

‘That’, I said, ‘is exactly what I’m trying to do.’

He looked paternalistically at me as I brushed the leaves off my jersey and walked home.

After that I cravenly slept under a groundsheet in my backyard.

✴ ✴

Foxes sometimes sleep on the central reservation of motorways. Three thousand vehicles an hour shriek past in oily vortices of dust, rubber, deodorant, vomit, electric muttering and what we’ve absurdly come to call power. I’ve slept on the verge of an A road myself, beneath a canopy of cow parsley and dock, wanting to be violated by noise and palpitation, and still being shocked by the unbrute brutality of the thrusting pistons. Even the most wanton wrenchings of the natural world – wild dogs in a tug of war with a baby gazelle, for instance – are tender and proper beside the violence of a bus or a train.

A fox can hear a squeaking vole 100 metres (109 yards) away and rooks winging across plough half a kilometre (a third of a mile) off. To lie ten metres (eleven yards) from a speeding van must be apocalyptic: like living inside a tornado. Even the sneezing, snoring, grumbling, humming, moaning, turning, deep night of the inner city is a cacophonous fairground.

It’s the fox’s plasticity that so daunts me. I can get an intellectual, or at least a poetical, grip on acute sensitivity in another animal. But acute sensitivity and intense toleration: that’s hard. And it’s not as if it is mere reluctant toleration for the sake of survival, as with the badgers who, because suitable habitats are hard to find, might put up with a rather suboptimal railway embankment. Foxes seem to enjoy being outrageous. They flaunt their thriving in conditions that are objectively wretched. They don’t want my loud, tree-hugging sermons on their behalf, and I feel not only miffed but mystified. They are the true citizens of the world. I’m not, and I rather resent them for bettering me. I also don’t understand how they do it, either physiologically or emotionally.

You’d expect a truly cosmopolitan creature to make some costly compromises: to give up some hearing in return for better eyes, or some smell for some sight. Surely generalists can’t be great specialists? But they are. I’m in awe.

✴ ✴

I hated the East End. ‘This place is an offence’, I wrote bitterly in a notebook.

It was built on water meadows as a refugee camp and is now a workhouse from which, because of poverty or wealth, few can afford to escape. Few would say these days that it’s home, and even fewer would say so gladly. Few people really live here at all. They beam their thoughts in from outer space, fly their food in from Thailand and their fripperies from China, and their furniture sails in a steel box from Sweden. I suppose that’s not really so far. We are, after all, made of star dust.

Though foxes are made of star dust too, and eat Thai chicken curry, they’re genuinely local. They know the taste of every square inch of concrete; they’ve looked from a range of about three inches at every spreading stain of lichen up to eighteen inches from the ground; they know that there’s a mouse nest under the porch at number 17A and bumblebees by the cedar wood decking at number 29B. They’ve watched the tedious adulteries of Mrs S, Mr K being carted off to die, and the psychosis of the M twins blossoming from petty backyard cruelties into much worse. They know the flight paths of jumbo jets and greylag geese. Under the shed they nestle among the oysters that gave the local Victorians typhoid. They walk around the area for nearly five miles a night, and they do it with everything switched on.

But they’re not around for long. Being an urban fox is an intense, dangerous business. Sixty per cent of London’s foxes die each year. Eighty-eight per cent of Oxford foxes die before their second birthday. They know bereavement. There’s only a 16 per cent chance that both animals of a fox pair that have raised cubs in their first reproductive year will survive for a second breeding season. They don’t just know the fact of bereavement; they feel it – apparently as I do, and they make similar sounds.

David Macdonald, who has conducted, from his base in Oxford, much of the most significant work on fox behaviour, kept pet foxes. (He commented that his landlady found his flat curiously hard to rent when he left it. Not everyone shares my, or his, taste for the smell of fox urine.) One of his vixens was caught in the flailing blades of a grass cutter. A leg dangled by a thread of tissue. Macdonald’s distraught wife picked her up. The vixen’s mate tried to pull the vixen away as she was carried to the car, and looked after the car as it drove down the path.

The next day the vixen’s sister picked up a mouthful of food at a cache and ran off with it, whimpering as foxes do when they’re giving food to cubs. She hadn’t called like that for over a year. She took the food to the grass hollow where, the night before, her sister had bled. She buried it beneath the bloodstained blades of grass.

This has the pathos of my own story, and it was this that made me more anthropomorphic about foxes than about any of my other animals. I felt more confident about reading them right than about the others.

✴ ✴

Foxes and dogs are very, very different. They’re in different genera. They parted company about 12 million years ago – a divergence reflected in the number of chromosomes: domestic dogs (evolved wolves) have seventy-eight pairs; red foxes thirty-four to thirty-eight pairs. You needn’t put your poodle on the pill if there’s a libidinous dog fox oiling around. And yet there’s something to be learned about foxes from looking at dogs.

Dogs are specialists in getting along with humans: they have been selected rigorously for it over the past 50,000 years or so. Foxes are not: evolution has nudged them in other, less placid, directions. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that foxes have at least the raw mental processing power of dogs. If that’s right, by seeing what dogs can do we can get some idea about the resources available to foxes.

Dogs are supreme copiers and bonders. They mimic human actions as well as a sixteen-month-old child, observe closely what humans are looking at or pointing to, read many human social cues and want to work with us.

Some dogs have capacious memories. One should be careful about drawing conclusions about normality from the spectacular tricks of savants, but the ends of a bell curve do indicate something about where the middle lies. So let’s consider a Border collie called Rico who appeared on German TV in 2001. He knew the names of two hundred toys, fetched them by name, and learned and remembered words as fast as a human toddler. When a new toy was placed among his old ones, he recognised it by a process which must have been something like: ‘I know the others, but I’ve never seen this: so this must be the new one.’ When he’d not seen the new toy for a month, he picked it out correctly in half his trials. The new name had become part of his lexicon: he seemed to slot new words into some Chomskyite template. Another dog, Betsy, tested in a Hungarian laboratory, had a vocabulary of more than three hundred words.

These capacities and tendencies have obvious emotional (there, I’ve used the word) corollaries.

Dogs suffer separation anxiety when parted from an owner to whom they are bonded. When the owner returns, they race out to greet them, jumping up and dancing; for all the world like a toddler reunited with its mother. Up on the Howden Moors in the Derbyshire Peak District, where I used to roam as a child, a sheepdog called Tip stayed with the body of his dead master for a desolate, dangerous fifteen weeks.

I can’t believe that foxes have used their available RAM in so radically different a way from dogs that these traits have no echoes at all in fox heads. We know that foxes have good memories: they recall, for weeks at a time, not only the location of cached food but also the particular food that is cached there – ‘There’s a bank vole to the left of the twisted oak; a field vole under the nettles,’ they say to themselves. We know that they have a significant vocabulary of their own, produced using a sophisticated suite of methods (at least twenty-eight groups of sounds, based on forty basic forms of sound production), and that the call of individual X is recognised as that of individual X rather than that of a generic fox: a monogamous captive male reacted to recordings only of his own mate.

These faculties in the fox translate just as inevitably into relationality as the corresponding faculties do in dogs. It’s just that the relation, as of course will be the norm with animals (the dog-man case is a highly unusual one), is with other foxes. Who, having heard Macdonald’s story of the mutilated vixen, could doubt it?

Here’s another of his. A tame dog fox got a thorn in his paw. Septicaemia set in. The dominant vixen of his group gave him food when he was ill. That’s very unusual: adult foxes are usually aggressively possessive about food.

No doubt this is reciprocal altruism. The vixen, at some level, expected a kickback in the event of her being ill. But that label doesn’t begin to mean that there isn’t a real emotional component. No doubt my love for my children and the sacrifices I make for them have at least a partial Darwinian explanation: I want them to bear my genes triumphantly on into posterity. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be genuinely distressed by their non-reproductive-potential-affecting injury, or that my devastation at their deaths wouldn’t go far, far beyond the distress caused by the mere trashing of my genetic aspirations.

I prefer the easy, obvious reading of Macdonald’s stories and of the lessons from the dogs. Foxes are relational, empathic creatures. And you can shout ‘Beatrix Potter’ as loudly as you like: I don’t care.

This relationality and empathy of fox X is, so far as we know, directed primarily towards other foxes with whom X shares an interest. That’s what Neo-Darwin says, and no doubt he’s right. But once you’ve got a capacity for relationality and empathy, it’s terribly difficult to keep it tidily in its box. It keeps spilling out over other evolutionarily irrelevant individuals and species. People give money to donkeys and to starving children from whom they’ll never get any benefit. They even give it secretly, denying themselves the chance of being applauded and favoured as a mensch. A Nazi with children of his own will find it harder to bayonet the children of others than one in whom relationality has never kindled.

This is what I told myself, on my knees next to the crane flies and the foxes. Those foxes have the ability to connect to me, and I to them. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t want to. There have been times (whole seconds at a time) when I’ve looked at foxes and they’ve looked at me (in a Yorkshire wood; on a Cornish cliff; in an orange grove near Haifa; on a beach in the Peloponnese), and I’ve thought: Yes! There’s a rudimentary language in which we can describe ourselves to the other, and the other to ourselves. We needn’t be as mutually inaccessible as Earth and the Baby Boom Galaxy.

Even when those long seconds have passed, I’ve still been able to say to the fox: Listen – we’ve both got bodies, and they get wet as the clouds burst on their way up from the grey sea, and we’re both here! I am here! You are here!

I and thou!

Then it’s usually time to go to the pub.

✴ ✴

When I lived in the East End I’d often give the arrabbiata a miss and shuffle instead at night round the bins, rifling through the bags. A fox’s nose has no problem telling, through a thick layer of black plastic, whether there’s anything worth its while, but even thin plastic defeated mine. I had to open the bags up.

It was only the instinctive phobia of the saliva of my own species that made eating scraps unpleasant. I cheated. I sprinkled mixed spices on everything. That, absurdly, seemed to sterilise it, or at least personalise it and defuse the threat of the dribbling other.

At first I tried caching like foxes do. I gave it up in disgust when I returned to a cache of rice in a foil box and found three brown rats with their snouts in it like piglets round a trough. A proper fox would have had them for starters.

The takings were good but dull. If the East End is like the rest of the Western world, it throws away about a third of all the food it buys. There was no shortage of pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips and sausages. But not much else. In this most variegated of all English societies, everyone eats the same as everyone else, and the same all the time. Foxes, even here, do much better than the humans. They have pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips, sausages, field voles, bank voles, house mice, road casualties of all kinds, wild fruit in season and the air-freighted unwild, unseasonal fruit of South America and Africa, cockchafer grubs, noctuid moth caterpillars, beetles, rat-tailed maggots from the sewage outlets, earthworms, rabbits (wild and insecurely caged ones), slow, complacent birds, rubber bands, broken glass, KFC wrappers, grass to snare intestinal parasitic worms and induce therapeutic vomiting, and just about everything else. But, unfortunately, they’re not significant cat killers.

As I mooched round the bins I listened and I watched. I found in the houses and the flats what I found in the bags: uniformity. Everyone had a more or less identical cultural diet. One drizzling September night I stood on the pavement, eating an abandoned pie and looking through windows. I could tell from the flickering that seventy-three households were watching TV. Of those, sixty-four (sixty-four!), the coordinated flickering told me, were watching the same thing.

No fox ever looks at the same thing as another fox. Even when a family is curled up together, each fox either has its eyes shut, dreaming about chicken houses or a vole glut or an onion bhaji, or is looking out from a slightly different angle from every other fox, its understanding of what it’s seeing modulated by the slightly different precedence each gives to smell and hearing, with those in turn being conditioned by cement dust in the nose from snuffling round a building site, the angle of the ears, or parental instructions from cubhood.

We too have blocked noses and positions in space, but we’re such unsensory, unmindful creatures that they make no difference to us: we don’t notice them. We have acutely sensitive hands but handle the world with thick gloves and then, bored, blame it for lacking shape.

✴ ✴

I’d just about given up on London, but the foxes’ faith in it and the intensity of their commitment to it touched me and made me think again. I suspected that if I could get as close to it as they were I’d see it properly, and therefore learn to love it. To hate anything is exhausting. I hoped that the foxes could help me to rest.

When I lived here I was almost anaesthetic. Like the accursed in the psalm, I had eyes but could not see, a nose but could not smell, hands but could not feel, and ears but could not hear. I was constantly being told that this was where it was all happening; where the real business of life was done. Sometimes I could dimly sense that something was happening, but it seemed distant, blurred and muffled, as if I were looking down from a great height through cloudy seawater.

Then, still blind, deaf and anosmic, I started to follow the foxes. Eventually they took my collar between their teeth and swam with me to four islands. On those islands my senses functioned. I could feel and describe things there. The rest of the Atlantean world of the East End remained submerged. If I’d stayed longer and persevered with the foxes, they might have shown me more islands, or perhaps even dived down with me, or raised the rest of Atlantis so that I could buy and taste beer in it, or run over its hills and feel it under my feet.

I never got anywhere other than the islands, and never really understood what made the East End tick. Perhaps the genius loci lies deep in the troughs between my islands, forever out of my reach. Yet in describing my islands to myself I mapped an archipelago, and an archipelago has a taste of its own: it can be a nation of which one can be fond.

I wanted most of all to feel fond. I was so tired of resenting. If I’d thought that fondness for a place was different from understanding the foxes that inhabit the place, I’d have wanted the fondness more than the understanding. But the conviction that they weren’t different had grown with every sniff and crawl and bin-bag raid.

It wasn’t that I experienced something on the islands that was better than anaesthesia elsewhere but not as good as normal experience. Not at all. I became convinced that the foxes saw, smelt and heard the real thing, and that on the islands to which they took me I was experiencing the real thing too. The foxes gave me their eyes, ears, noses and feet. But only on the islands.

The foxes were the real East Enders. They inhabited the place in a way that, without their help, I could not, and in a way that reflected what the place itself was. I lived there in a way that reflected me, or my view of the place. I walked round with a mirror in front of me, describing myself into a notebook and calling it nature writing.

If you look into a fox’s eyes, you get no reflection of yourself. They have vertical pupils, which deny gratification to the human narcissist. Now jump to the other side of the fox’s eye and look out through it at a pool of vomited curry, or a hedgehog, or a stream of four-by-fours on the school run. You’ll similarly get no reflection of yourself. You’ll see the things themselves, or a better approximation to the things than you’d get with your own drearily self-referential eyes. Eyes are meant to be sensory receptors. In the fox’s head they are. We make them cognitive, and ruin them. This is not because a fox has less consciousness and hence there is less to intrude between its retina and its mental model of that hedgehog, but because its consciousness is less contaminated with toxic self and presumption.

None of the fox islands was visible from more than two feet above the ground. One could be seen only with the nose.

These are the islands:

Island 1

There are lots of shops that sell everything, deep into the night. They smell of ghee, soap, cardamom, coriander and lighter fuel. The owners never ever die or get excited. In an alleyway beside one of these there was a pile of crates, stamped with customs ink from Barbados, Bangladesh and some little piles of Pacific rock. It was soft, sweet, damp and alcoholic under the crates. I floated on a raft of fermenting fruit. The wasps were too pissed to sting me when I rolled on them.

I lay on my belly, because foxes normally do. There was a wall a couple of feet ahead of me. Damp had edged up the first foot. The rest of the wall, which climbed up to the billowing net-curtain sails of a taxi firm’s masthead, was dry as toast, and as interesting. But next to the ground there was writhing wonderment: silver slug tracery; trundling woodlice, swimming through air as baby trilobites rowed through the Cambrian soup; centipedes armoured in bronze plates, snaking like a file of legionnaires with shields over their heads towards a tower of hairy Goths; lichens flowering the way that scabs would flower if William Morris directed skin healing; moss like armpit hair.

A crack in a box from Lesotho half-framed a bathroom window, and the woman in the bathroom was lovely and the man was not. Why would she stay? But that was not a fox thought. If I lowered my head there was a cauliflower, green with mould and bonny as a horse chestnut in May.

There were worms in the raft; fat, pickled worms with thick saddles like the thick wedding rings of the emphatically faithful. A fox would have sucked them through its teeth like spaghetti: each is worth 2½ calories – 1/240 of the 600-calorie-per-day requirement of an adult fox. Although most foxes eat some earthworms, it seems that some are worm specialists, to judge by the soil and worm chaetae in their dung. It’s a safe, lazy way to earn a living: like being a probate lawyer.

Island 2

In the park there’s a place where concrete meets tarmac. The concrete has broken where the winter has hardened water into wedges. There’s a lush tree of cracks. Flash floods, invisible to us but tumultuous wild water to greenfly, have filled the cracks with soil, full of ascarid eggs from unbagged dog shit near the playground. Wind, shoveled by the wing mirrors of cement lorries and white vans, has seeded the soil with grass and bravely straggling ragwort whose ancestors probably killed a horse or two in Kent.

If you walk on this boundary with bare feet, you’ll know that the concrete is as hard and sharply pitted as a cheese grater. It doesn’t welcome anything. The sun leaves it as fast as it can go. The tarmac, though, is warm and spongy, even in the cold. When it’s hot it sends up tar tendrils to grab your feet. They leave tattoos, like black thread veins, on your soles.

Foxes have absurdly sensitive feet. These city foxes, used to pounding the roads for eight hours a night, have pads that feel like velvet which has had milk poured over it and then been put in the oven overnight to get a fragile crust. Their feet, like their faces, extend beyond the fur line: there are small, stiff hairs on the carpus which are buried in a buzzing hive of nerves. When the biologist Huw Lloyd lightly touched these hairs on a young fox sleeping in front of his fire, the fox, without waking, snatched back its foot. Those hairs are stroked lustfully by the grass in any country wilder than a well-managed sports field. Imagine your nostrils being shafted enjoyably with face-high thistles as you walk. That’s a fox’s progress through a spring wood.

It seems a bit much. They really don’t need to be so good. Clumping, club-footed ungulates, their nerve endings locked up in horn boxes, dance perfectly satisfactorily over rough ground and along mountain ledges. You’d expect natural selection to be more parsimonious in dispensing its favours to foxes.

Island 3

We think of small trees as going straight up from the ground and then getting wider like mushrooms or narrower like carrots. They don’t. Even the slenderest tree has a big, wide underground life. The parts up in the light are just kitchens for making food.

If you lie on the ground you’ll eventually know this. I watched one tree for about three hours before noticing. It had sloping shoulders, hinting at a pale body beneath the paving.

The tree had prised up the stiff skin of the yard and then, tired, slumped on to the fence, pulled down by the weight of its head as a drunk’s head is pulled on to a table by the weight of a head full of beer. Ants, beetles and earwigs, each in their own rigidly observed carriageways, poured over the shoulders – streams of iridescent water with legs. They were going to eat dead stuff, or live stuff: it’s always one or the other. The boundary between the two isn’t very clear.

I couldn’t gallop between trees on my hands and knees in the East End. There aren’t enough trees. But I’ve done it as best I can in plenty of other places. The real fox’s-eye view of trees is when you’re sledging fast downhill through woodland. Foxes have, like most predators, frontally positioned eyes. They’d have had more or less the same view of the beetles as I had, but I’d have been able to identify the tree species at a running speed sooner than the foxes. For them the trees would have been dark columns that would have come at them with that lurching, not-quite-anticipatable violence that you know best when you’re driving one of those fake motorbikes in an amusement arcade. Computer simulation of driving or riding doesn’t feel like driving or riding, but it’s useful for making you feel like a fox.

I tried to run like a fox at the tree in the yard. I skinned my knees, and the woman in the house next door pulled back her curtain and asked nervously if I was all right.

Island 4

I turned over an old slice of pizza with my nose. It was lying in a backyard. I don’t know how it had escaped the rats and the birds and the foxes. It had lasted long enough to have soaked up the weather of a couple of weeks. There had been no rain for a week, but it was damp. There was a luxurious green fur over the pepperoni. There were human tooth marks on one side, and the fur was thinner there: presumably the streptococci of which human kisses are a concentrated solution compete viciously with the mould. The underside was a metro system, its tunnels already packed, like a rush hour station, with jostling weevils. Black beetles (which I always think are too downright mechanical to need food – which is a demand of flesh) were there directing the crowds.

But it was the smell that got me. There were physical smell strata in the slice: at the top there was still metallic tomato and the fat of unhappy pigs, shaken up with spores (which don’t smell at all of death, though they should). At the bottom there was pasty, yeasty creepingness. The tomato and the metro were separated by about an inch (it was a deep-pan pizza) and a fortnight. But – and this was the point – I got them both in a single sniffing millisecond.

Smell telescopes and packages history. The pizza was a trivial example. Sniff a lump of Precambrian schist and you might get a couple of billion years of sensation delivered all at once to your neurological door. The sensation, in that case, will be faint: most of the scent molecules will have been reassigned to other bodies and structures, and those that remain are wrapped tightly in a sort of archaic cling film.

As a fox trots down the Bethnal Green Road, it takes with every breath an instantaneous transect through the past five or fifty or five hundred years. And it lives in those years, rather than on the tarmac and between the bins. Time, squashed tightly by olfaction, is the fox’s real geography.

The piece of pizza wasn’t substantial enough to be an island itself. It was a signpost – a floating piece of fresh wood that said that an island wasn’t far off. The island from which it came was a tree stump, crumbling and spongy, next to a ruptured bin bag. Like litmus, it had soaked up the run-off from the bag, and like litmus it declared the real nature of the bag and the bag’s ancestors. The declaration was in the smell, and the nature was historical and anthropological and commercial and depraved and careless and anxious and just about all the other adjectives there are. And I got it all at once.

I think it had been a lime tree, but its own name had been chewed by the rain and the wasps and washed out by curry bleeding from the bag. Because it was porous, it was a safe and capacious bank of the memory of things. Perhaps it was planted a century ago, for no reason that the planners would have been able to explain: there wasn’t language then for motives like ‘feeding the wild heart beating inside the black jacket’. And it died about half a century later, when its varicose roots were hacked up because they made next door’s yard too interesting.

When it died, it started to accumulate scent. When it was alive it had mostly smelt of itself.

I moved the bag and slept by the tree for a couple of nights, with my nose in one of its armpits.

That nose went through three stages. First, it smelt an old tree and moulded the scent into the shape of a cadaver. Then the nose laid out the scent and (it’s a big, sharp nose) began to dissect. It cut out a slice of diesel, perhaps from the mid-1970s, and put that in a bowl for later inspection. Then the nose went back, picked up a length of storm, blown in from Russia at the time of the Suez Crisis, and laid it alongside. With those out of the way, it speeded up: last month’s menstrual blood, a brave crack at cheering up a nursery, an overambitious and unpopular attempt at a Vietnamese culinary classic, some evidently successful attempts at safe sex. And beans. So many beans. All laid out in the bowl.

The nose roved round the bowl from item to item, proud of its dissection.

And then, very slowly, it began to know that it is murder to dissect. It reassembled the pieces. It got again what it had got in the first, unexamined sniff: the whole bowl at once; a century in a moment.

That, I think, is how a fox does it. But it inhabits a much longer period in a moment than I can, and inhabits that period far more fully. Yes, it focuses on the things it’s particularly interested in, as I lock on to one alluring picture in a new gallery. But it sweeps the millennia in an instant, as my eye sweeps the gallery. From the millennia the fox alights on last week’s chops or the last minute’s vole, but the scan is complete.

Only noses can travel in time quite like this. Our eyes and ears travel too, but we don’t recognise it, because light and sound are fast. We see the light from stars that are centuries old, and the light is mixed on the palette of our retina with light that is tiny fractions of a nanosecond old from the nearby chip shop. We use the mixture to paint a picture of the world that we call reality. In fact, reality’s a cocktail of sometimes radically different times, shaken and profoundly stirred by the Self.

So those were my islands: a fruit raft, the edge of some concrete, a tree and a stump. Foxes took me there.

As a matter of mere aesthetics I preferred the fox view to my view from the bus or from my study. It was prettier and much more interesting. As a matter of cartography I came to think that the fox view of the East End was more accurate than mine: it took into account more information. It saw both more minutely and more widely. It saw the hairs on ants’ legs and, in a moment-to-moment orgy of olfactory holism, everything that had been spilt, ejaculated, cooked and grown since the creation of the world. So there.

The foxes showed me a London that was old and deep enough to live in and be kind about. They negotiated an uneasy peace between me and the East End, and indeed between me and other squalid, wretched, broken human places. It was a great gift.

But I’d got to know only islands, not whole landscapes. The city squirmed mistily below the waters between them. For my metaphorically aquatic foxes there is no mistiness.

✴ ✴

Time travel isn’t just poetry. Foxes use it for hunting. If a vole squeaks from any point to one side of a fox’s midline, the sound hits the fox’s eardrums at slightly different times and at slightly different intensities. A bit of basic trigonometry, a lot of experience and a lot of wasted pounces, and the brain will have a rough fix. Although it’s more difficult (as evolution, on behalf of pure-toned prey species, has noted), even a continuous, pure-toned moan can be located: a different part of the wave reaches each ear at a particular time – a crest might smash into the right and a trough into the left. The discrepancies locate the squeaker or the moaner. But only up to a point. If the fox keeps its head still, the sound will be localised not to one dot in space but to a graceful curved plane, starting at the moan and ending over the fox’s head. In its killing leap, the fox can’t chop every point along that plane. It has to do better, and it does, in two ways.

First, it moves its head or its ears. The plane linking the moan to the fox moves, but the moan doesn’t. By comparing the original plane with the new one, the fox can narrow the possibilities. Several ear swivellings or head swings later, there will be almost enough confidence to justify that costly spring. But there’s another astonishing refinement.

To appreciate how astonishing this is, go out to the most disgusting park you know and watch dogs defaecating. On a normal day they prefer to defaecate with their bodies aligned along the north-south axis. That’s when the earth’s magnetic field is calm. It’s not always calm: there are storms and squalls as the molten rock we’re all surfing on churns around. But, given a quiet day in Hades, our dogs’ bowels are tethered to the centre of the world.

We don’t know if foxes do this, but it’s likely. They’re certainly tuned to the earth’s magnetic field. They very significantly prefer to leap in a north-easterly direction on to those small mammals, and are much more likely to kill if they do. There’s a death in 73 per cent of north-easterly jumps, in 60 per cent of south-westerly jumps (at 180 degrees to the preferred direction) and in only 18 per cent of jumps in other directions.

What they’re doing (and it’s the only known instance – so far – of animals doing this) is using the field to calculate distance rather than position or direction. That’s rather important. Many things confound distance finding in the fox’s normal habitat. The speed of sound varies with air temperature and humidity, skewing those trigonometrical calculations. Sound slaloms between grass stems, bounces off twigs, insinuates into the ground and frolics off in the wind. On well-trodden vole paths there’s rarely a telltale sway of grass, and if there is, a breeze will cover the tracks. Over- or undershooting is wasteful: there may well not be a chance to regroup and refire.

So the fox jumps at a fixed angle to the magnetic field (ideally 20 degrees off magnetic north). It knows the angle of the sound reaching its ears. Where the magnetic line and the sound line meet, there meat will be. Remember how the Dambusters knew when to drop the bouncing bombs on the Ruhr dams? When the two spotlights met on the surface of the water, they knew that they were the right distance from the wall, and they pressed the release button. That’s what foxes do, but one spotlight is sound and the other is magnetic, and the release is an explosive unfolding of hamstrings and about a hundred or so other muscles filled with blood, lymph and hunger.

What might it be like to take one’s bearings so literally from the earth? I fix sounds like foxes do, moving my head. But to feel north-westerliness in your water? That would give every step a context – a relatedness to everything else. It would make me a true citizen of the world, rather than of the patch I happen to be fouling at the time.

Once I sat in a pub listening to some old ladies talking about how the world was going downhill. Young people, of course, weren’t what they used to be. But in an interesting respect. It wasn’t that they were idle, unwashed, promiscuous, disrespectful or intoxicated – although they were. It was that they were overly sensitive to magnetic fields.

‘They think, you know, that churches and that are all stuck along magnetic lines. Joined to old hills and the like.’

‘They don’t!’

‘They do. Let me tell you. They say that there are lines of power all over the country and that people in the olden days used to know about them, and built things on them.’

‘They never!’

‘They do. Wonder if I’m on one now. Me bum’s tingling.’

And so it went on: bums and then breasts tingled; shapeless pants were mockingly electrified; the feng shui of mantelpiece junk from Benidorm was evaluated. It cackled into the night as I bought narcotic beer I hadn’t thought I’d need, and tried to knuckle down to Greenmantle.

Their despised grandchildren were right; ask any fox, bushman, squatting dog or just about anyone before the dark dawn of modernity. Magnetism, along with burial and planting, anchors humans to the planet. We are alphabetic fridge magnets: our only hope of spelling something coherent is to hang on. To be unmagnetic in the Upper Palaeolithic was to be blind and footless. You wouldn’t know, properly, or intimately, where you were. And hence why and who you were.

Or so I wrote, self-righteously and adolescently, in my beer-stained notebook. I was no more magnetic than the women. My ancestors, just as much as theirs, had hacked off their own feet and put out their own eyes sometime in the past thousand years. But at least I didn’t think it made them or me better.

Perhaps I’m overstating things. When a fox uses the angle of 20 degrees off magnetic north for efficient killing, it’s not doing it any more transcendentally than a ping-pong player turning her wrist for maximum topspin. But not less transcendentally either. Which makes me conclude, on balance, that I’m not overstating. For the connection between a world-class ping-pong player and the table is surely a wondrous thing. For me, the table is a piece of wood. For the player it’s a stage on which extraordinary things can happen; a frame on which embroidery of unique beauty can be woven. That’s only possible because of the connection between the player and the table.

So the whole world, for unmagnetic me, is as far below what it might be as a few planks of wood are below a table used for an international table tennis tournament. Foxes play ping-pong all day and all night.

✴ ✴

The churchyards and canal banks of this part of the East End were too tidy. There were voles there, but I needed longer grass to hunt them. I needed to swim breaststroke through the grass until I found their paths, which are chlorophyll cloisters. Then I could stand and hover over them like a hunting kestrel.

Foxes can leap up to three metres (ten feet) horizontally, from a standing start, in order to pinion a vole. (That’s like me jumping about eight metres, or twenty-six feet.) They jump high too – perhaps to get a better view of the hunting field, just as a human deer stalker climbs to a high point to scope the ground – though the fox has a specific target on its auditory and magnetic screens and just needs some fine tuning for the final approach.

There was no need to jump high when I was vole hunting. My eyes were naturally far above the zenith of the most athletic fox’s leap. My ears were useless. Mice (and probably voles) can squeak at a wide variety of frequencies, from those audible to my ears to well into what we call the ultrasonic range. Foxes do much better than me at the high frequencies. They perform best at around 3,500 cycles per second, which is where I do well too (human ears are most sensitive at around 1,000 to 3,500 hertz, but are amazing audiological all-rounders: they can locate sounds accurately in more than 90 per cent of cases between 900 and 14,000 hertz, and even at 34,000 hertz – well beyond the range of even the youngest of us – they get it right around two-thirds of the time).

The fox’s technique is thus: reconnoitre (know where the vole cloisters are); listen for a squeak; move head and/or ears to get a cross bearing; supplement if necessary by listening for a lower-frequency and thus more accessible noise, like the rustling of a dry leaf; fix magnetic distance; jump; make a minute visual correction; kill.

My technique was: reconnoitre; stand astride the cloister; watch for a grass blade moving or listen for a rustle; drop suddenly and hopefully, landing with my face in a pile of vole dung; miss; brush myself off; try pointlessly to explain myself to the group of concerned citizens clustered anxiously nearby; make off before police arrive.

I’ve spent hours doing this. It became an obsession. I never got near, and I never got better. About five times out of several hundred leaps I saw my prey – sidling arrogantly, mockingly away. One of them actually turned round. You wouldn’t have thought that, anatomically, a vole could sneer. But it can. I know.

The life of small mammals is written in Morse: dots and dashes. They dash between the dots. They pause, trembling, between the dashes – so more of a semicolon than a dot – to conduct a detailed assessment of the situation.

I’ve just come back from watching shrews on the riverbank. They rush for a couple of seconds; wait for three; rush for two; wait for three; and so on. And in the waits they are wondering how to make it across the next foot of leaf litter, and perhaps (it’s not such a big step) whether they’ll make it.

Most predators become their prey, or at least adopt their prey’s rhythm. But foxes don’t do that. There’s no staccato in a fox. They manage to be themselves more than any other animal I know. They make no concession to the prey or the place. A fox from the churning gut of a city lives about as long as one from a beech wood or a mountain. It’ll insist on needlessly hunting and won’t die of coronary artery disease. It’ll carry on being foxy, whereas thoroughly urbanised humans are in danger of not being optimally human.

The urban fox’s foxiness is all the more spectacular because they spend so much of their time badly injured – by vehicles, of course. It’s a consequence of their confident foxiness: why should they run from such strange predators? The road is their home: why should they move? Rumble and light don’t impress them into fear or flight.

A heroic experiment demonstrated just how much pain is stirred into the mix of bristling alarm and poised command that is the brief but dazzling life of a city fox. The hero scraped up more than 300 dead foxes from the streets of London and laid them out for the flies. Several months later, and probably many friends lighter, he could see that 27.5 per cent of them had healed fractures – most of them, no doubt, from hurtling lumps of steel propelled by decomposed plants from carboniferous forests.

We can’t know how foxes cope mentally with the disruption of their bodies, but I’ve seen lots of dogs look, puzzled, at the splintered ends of bone coming out of their legs. They soon start licking the ends, as they’d lick a new puppy. They deal with the mystery of one bloody thing erupting out of their bodies as they deal with other bloody eruptions. They welcome it into the air.

I’ve looked at the splintered ends of my bones. I didn’t welcome them. Tubes sprayed blood into my eyes until, unbidden, the tubes pinched themselves off. We’re always and only kept alive by unbidden things. Put a heart cell on to a glass slide, and it’ll keep contracting in time to the baton of a dead conductor who never even knew he was conducting.

Foxes aren’t just run down by vehicles: they’re run down by time too. Thirty-five per cent of London foxes have spondylosis deformans – a deforming fusion of their joints – most commonly in their spines. Sixty-five per cent of foxes in their third year of life have arthritis in their spines; all of the few who survive to the grand old age of six do. When they walk along fence tops like teenage Olympic Romanians on the beam, or blast from a hedge on to a wood pigeon, or seep like mercury up to a rabbit, they’re doing it with a back so bad that, were they office workers, it would have them signed permanently off work. They must look forward to lying under the shed during the day, and must see the approaching of the night with the same resigned dread with which a man more committed to his office than to his crippling sciatica hears the morning alarm.

✴ ✴

Beneath the roof of my den, for day after long, long day, I dozed, hot, shivering, fitful: never right. The view I commanded was the view that a fox under the shed would have had. I had no sky. At this low altitude, horizontal perspectives are steep: a drain-pipe funnelled the world fast into a vanishing point. Vertical perspectives, though, are sickening. Once your eyes are raised from the ground there is only wall. We live in a well: light drips in from the top through an invisible mesh of cloud and fumes.

We don’t know much about the colour perception of foxes, but it’s likely that they are red-green colour-blind. Here, though, it doesn’t make much difference. These humans, thinking that flowers are vulgarly overdone, have opted for grey – or at least that’s what the prevailing westerlies and the drip-fed sun disdainfully make of their pastels after a season.

When a fox, after playing with its vole for a while, as my children roll their peas round the plate, snips off its head, the blood is just a darker shade of grey on the grey grass.

I wallowed incontinently under that groundsheet, chapped and stinking; watching and listening.

My watching wasn’t so unlike the fox’s. At short ranges in the day its visual acuity is more or less as good as mine, but its eyes need rather more tickling than mine to become interested.

Cones rather than rods dominate the central area of its retina, and cones are much better at detecting movement than at recognising shapes. A baby rabbit well within the fox’s field of vision at noon is likely to be safe as long as it stays still. A man with a gun, raising himself slowly, slowly, slowly on his arms, will be likely, even when he’s silhouetted against the skyline, to kill that daytime fox. The silhouette will (not imperceptibly, but unperceived) become part of the background noise in the fox’s brain; it’s filtered out, leaving attention only for new eruptions of sound.

My daytime eyes are better at shapes than the fox’s, and my brain is also more interested in them. Though the boredom of the days was crushing, there was more entertainment for me than for the fox. I didn’t need a beetle or a fast-swinging shadow, though they were appreciated. I could make do with a pine cone, a frill of lichen or the Corinthian fluting of an iron dustbin.

My round pupils were made for wonder; for invasion by the world; for allowing takeover by all comers. It’s only my brain, made timid and conservative by the past few millennia, that checks the credentials of everyone at the door, letting in only the familiar and unthreatening.

A fox presumably puts fewer cognitive obstacles in the way of the world. It’s governed more by the physics of its pupils. At night they’re round, as mine always are: then it needs all the clues the woods and the streets can offer. In the day they’re more sceptical and discriminating: upright slits, like erect sentries, which are much better at keeping light out. They work with the eyelids to titrate exactly the optimal amount of visible world.

The fox and I heard some of the same things: we both heard punches landing (the fox would have wondered if there’d be a corpse for supper); and people being hysterically cheerful on the radio; and disembodied chopping, grinding, grating, rumbling, whirring and pinging. All of this was interesting to me; almost none of it to the fox. For her, nothing much above her head was worth attention. She’d evolved so as not to fear aerial predation (the most powerful eagle isn’t much threat), and the occasional deadly blast from the bedroom window of a farmhouse isn’t so significant as to nudge evolution towards dread of a thunderous sky god. So she would have noted and immediately discarded (with the sort of mindfulness at which I’ve worked, cross-legged, cramped and unsuccessfully, for years) the soft crackling of poplars (you only hear the cracks after a couple of hours), the myocardial thump of a power shower, the scrappy scratch and trill of starlings in the house’s voice box under the eaves.

For her, though, the stir of dry leaves by the compost heap, which was for me a nibbling, was like sharp fingernails scraping down a drum held hard against the ear. Her attention would move from the general (or the general below five feet) to the leaves, just as the attention of one of those accomplished meditators clicks back and locks on to the breath.

✴ ✴

I did most of my foxery before I had small cubs. It seemed fun at the time. Now it would be even more fun, and I’d see a lot more. They’d peel the scales off my eyes, and there would be vertical pupils beneath. Human children are more like fox cubs than they’re like anything else. Mine even cache like foxes (there are little piles of Haribos behind books and under carpets), and for the same reasons (small stomachs and an apocalyptic imagination that subliminally tells them, against all the evidence, that there won’t be food tomorrow).

Their memory for the caches seems to be about as good and as bad as the fox’s:

‘Where did you leave those sweeties?’

Weeks 1 and 2: ‘Behind the Lego bucket.’

Week 3: ‘Behind the Lego bucket? I think. Or perhaps by the penis gourds?’

Week 4: ‘What sweeties? Please: what sweeties?’

When they had to excavate, though, the memory was buried more safely in their heads. We buried cans of beans and tomatoes up on Exmoor, and though they were a lot less interesting than sweeties, the children remembered the locations perfectly three months later – though their ability to remember which can was where was down to fox/sweetie level in a fortnight.

I don’t want them to change. They have nothing that they don’t need to live properly, and lack nothing. In that too they’re like foxes. I fear their evolution – fear particularly that it will be assimilation into a less intimate world; a world in which sensitivity is impossible.

I fear that too for the red foxes of the inner city, although there is encouragingly little sign of it. If it were going to happen, there might well be signs of it already. Genetics and evolution, coupled together, make a fast and powerful machine. But the foxes are still at risk. When, for a mere forty generations, traits of friendliness to humans were artificially selected in silver foxes, those cold, snarling pots of poison barked, wagged their tails, whimpered cravenly when humans walked towards them and licked human hands.

May God or Darwin protect my children from comparable breeding.

✴ ✴

I hate cats. Really hate them. This isn’t the dispassionate distaste that everyone who likes birds, small mammals and relationality should have. It’s elemental, wholly disproportionate to the damage they do and getting worse by the year.

Nobody really likes cats as cats. They’re intrinsically unlikeable: vain, cold and cruel. To like a cat, you’ve got to turn it into something that it plainly isn’t. You have to dress it up as a lover, a postmistress or an old school chum. Cats are at their best in the hands of a really bad taxidermist.

I don’t wish them ill: I just unwish them. I’m religiously committed to the removal of their reproductive apparatus. It’s very disappointing that only 0.4 per cent of Oxford urban fox scats contain cat fur – and probably most of that is from road-killed cats.

The smell of cat urine enrages me. I don’t know which came first – hatred of cats or hatred of their urine – and now I can’t disentangle the two. But when a tomcat sprayed the ground-sheet which was the roof of my fox den, terrible things happened to my head.

I put a chicken leg on the sheet and wriggled underneath. It wasn’t long before I felt the cat climb up my back. The chicken was on my shoulder. I wanted to smash that insolent composure. I waited until I knew the cat would have his teeth in the leg, and then erupted skywards with a Vesuvian roar. There was a gratifying screech, and the cat shot up and off with neuroses that would be immune to all the veterinary CBT money could buy.

I chased him across the yard, to the end of what we laughingly called the garden. He jumped over some planks. So did I. He cleared a flowerpot. So did I. He leapt on to a fence and ran along it. So did I. He did so with balletic elegance. I did not.

I fell between a wall and a shed, slumped, panting and swearing. I was there for a minute. I looked up into vertical pupils in a sharp red head, six feet away. The chicken leg drooped out of one corner of her mouth, for all the world like a cheroot. She held my gaze: it was certainly her holding mine, not me holding hers. Then, when she chose, she let me go and strolled to the corner of the yard and out through a door that wasn’t there.

✴ ✴

Foxes gave London back to me for a while. They would have given me more if I’d asked. But it seemed unfair to press them. They had other things to do in the few smoothly bristling seasons that the statistics allowed them. I had nothing to give them. They didn’t need me, my domestic waste, my sympathy or my fantasies of wild companionship. That needlessness, and the memory of smiling eyes above a chicken cheroot, gave me the only confidence I have that it’s all going to be all right.

Endnote

* I was plainly wrong about the rigor mortis. The dead maggots indicated that rigor mortis must have passed off long before.