I was hauling out the bags o' trash the other night when I saw him. Short, red-haired, pointy face and nose. He was lurking around the house across the street, and then, suddenly, he took off in pursuit of a rabbit. No further details.
Suspect #1, the short red guy, looked like this to the sketch artist to whom I described him:
There used to be a sizable warren of foxes over near I-95, but when they widened that road so they could charge you extra to ride in a lane with fewer cars (which I have never done and never will, owing to my lifelong parsimony) those foxes and their friends and kinfolk moved up past the mall and into our neighborhoods. They are welcome; they give the place a rustic feel and, as omnivores, you never hear them complain about their food choices.
They do not attack people unless cornered, and even then, their main weapon is their keening howl and irritating panting. Although...I had a tough time convincing a woman of that back in the way. She had called 911 in the middle of the night and refused to take the operator seriously, so she wound up talking to me.
Her chief complaint was that a fox was walking down her street in one our county's toniest neighborhoods. I told her that walking down the street in the middle of the night was pretty much what a fox would do after a night out and that she had nothing to fear. Close the door, go back to bed, read "Town & Country" magazine awhile, and get some sleep, I urged.
"BUT! What if he gets in the house somehow and gets me and the children!"
I shouldn't have been this insouciant, but I said, "Ma'am, is it just barely possible that you're thinking of the Big Bad Wolf, huffing and puffing and blowing your house down? We've dealt with this before and Natural Resources says just leave him alone and you'll be fine."
At length she relented and we both went on with our lives. But I still wondered for a while if she still fretted about unprovoked fox attacks, or "UFAs" as they would be called if they ever happened.
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