Wednesday, March 28, 2018

I carry my camera almost always and take pictures endlessly but, until now,  I haven’t downloaded anything from the camera for a week or so, and that is because of what the camera saw….  I  dread looking at the photographs,   and am uncertain how I can get that sight off my mind without getting it off my camera and on somebody else's mind. 

      In any case, it happened that I was down by the chicken house when I heard the voices of our neighbor kids going up their long driveway toward the road  behind the corn crib where I could not see them. One of them was calling to Zoey, their St. Bernard rescue dos.
 
     When I came up the path Georgia, standing on the porch, told me that she saw the kids in   the middle of the road, and standing around something lying there.
         She called out “Are you allright?” No answer, just the kids talking fast, over and under one another as they went back up the drive to their house, calling Zoey  along.

            I went out to the road.

         Up close, the lump  on the road was a Grey Fox: larger than a Red Fox, smaller than a Coyote; grey, red, and brown with  face markings like an owl or a hawk:   beautiful and burst …split open, her naked foetal kits lying on and around her,
         
    I put the vixen and her   kits off to the side of the road where the Crows and Vultures that clean up around here will not block the highway.
  I am grateful that I did not have to go back to the house for my gun to put her out of my misery, as has happened  with deer, here at the level top of this hill where animals like to cross, from gully head to gully head, and people in cars, having gained the top of the hill, really get up to speed.


          

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