A Befuddled Fox in the Road

About 5 PM today Jane and I had to go to the feed store in Descanso about 20 miles from here, to get more dog and cat food to tide us over until April 1^st. We stayed off the freeway and drove on the old road through sparsely inhabited country. Even the little community of Descanso is countrified with each house on very large wooded parcels; some separated by fields of newly grown green grass.

Just before we got to the feed store, a large old red barn, we saw a fox sitting in the middle of the road. I don't know what kind of fox he was, but he had red fur around his face and a long and large fluffy gray tail. He looked young and appeared to have been hit by a car, but he looked more dazed than hurt or frightened.

We stopped the car and I took off my jacket to use to throw over him in hopes of being able to pick him up, but when we approached him, he got up with some difficulty and moved back to the right side of the road. Although his hind legs didn't seem to be working right, and he didn't run, he managed to stay several steps ahead of us. He went under a barbed wire fence just out of reach, and lay down in a place where the grass was already crushed flat. He must have been lying there before he decided to cross the road.

We decided we didn't have much chance of catching him without causing him more injury, or us getting bitten, so we went on the last 200 feet to the feed store and told the nice lady there about the fox. She said he had been out there for hours and they hadn't been able to catch him or drive him away from the road where he would probably get hit by a car sooner or later. She said she would call the wild animal rescue people. I don't think that was going to work, because it was almost sundown, and even if the rescuers came, it would be very hard to catch him in the dark.

When we left to go home, Jane stopped the pickup where we had seen him, and the little fox was still where we had left him, so Jane put some dog food close to him. (We carry some in the back of the truck for stray animals) He didn't seem to recognize that it was something to eat, and got up and headed back across the road. This time we herded him so that he got all the way across and up the bank heading for some old sheds near the feed store.

We had to leave him there because Jane had to go back on line and work at her medical transcriptioning for a few more hours. I reminded myself how, with a little luck, nature does a pretty good job of healing without any human intervention. The little fox looked bright-eyed and healthy other than a bad rear end. We couldn't see any blood or abrasions, but he wasn't walking right and didn't run at all. We had to go and leave him to nature's mercies and the possible help from the lady in the feed store and the animal rescue people

An afterthought was that he was after the baby chicks and ducks that are sold at the feed store. We might have been aiding and abetting a would-be marauder, and if he gets caught in the act of killing baby chicks, he will likely be shot. Descanso isn't Disneyland, and all stories don't have happy endings.