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There’s a fox who has decided my garden is hers. Mostly she’s down in it — moving along the edges, settling where she likes, treating the place as her own. Every so often she takes the top of the wall, a clean black silhouette against the last of the light, and instead of bolting she stops, turns, and looks straight back. Most foxes are gone the instant they’re spotted. This one stays.
This isn’t a sentence I ever expected to write. I was never anti-fox, exactly — but I wasn’t rolling out the welcome mat either. For a while I ran a little system of my own to dissuade them, to keep the garden politely fox-free; privately I thought of it as the “fuck off, foxes” project. Somewhere along the line I stood it down. Call it enlightenment, call it being quietly outlasted by a fox; either way I went from shooing them off to leaving the odd scrap out.
She’s a regular now — no name, just a shape I know. The garden is her safe base: a walled patch she can drop into, sit a while, and slip out of when she likes. She’s worked out my routine too, roughly when I come out, and on warm nights, when I set the projector going against the wall, she’s often there for it — down in the garden while a film flickers across the render, and up on the parapet now and then, padding along the top as if checking the programme.
She isn’t tame, and I wouldn’t want her to be. She’ll circle me — close, unhurried, one eye on me the whole way round — and it would be easy to take that for affection. But the garden is mostly just somewhere safe, and what I’ve apparently become is one of the more amiable humans on her nightly round. From a fox — and from someone who once rigged up a system to see her off — that’s a decent review.
So most evenings now there are three of us in the garden: me, a projector throwing a film onto the bricks, and a fox somewhere in the shadows who treats the place as a safe base, counts me among the friendlier stops on her route, and still hasn’t told me what she makes of the films.
