Silver on rust, fur flecked with time, an old vixen, not so wise, but wise enough, wise enough to survive several lives, filling her den with her wily pups time and again, some timid, some bold, all hungry then gone, an old vixen, lies down in the grass and closes her eyes.
A day and a night and already the flies are hatching, filling the air in the shape of the fox, a living halo, excited, humming, too rich to last.
The birds find them, some hungry for the flies for their eggs, others hungry for the fox, for its fur for their nests, yet others hungry for the other birds. Sparrows take flies, crows take eyes, starlings stand nearby, gawkers in a crowd. An opportunistic sparrow hawk takes a starling, and the smaller birds flee. The crows don’t, not at first, not until the red kites turn up, four of them, squabbling over the old girl, or what is left of her, tearing her apart, two carrying a haunch between them until they are mobbed by gulls, nervous of their nearby nests, and they scatter, dropping the flesh and bone to the ground below where it becomes meal for the rats.
A night and a day and all that’s left are the crows, their heavy hoods making them look like executioners, pecking at the last shreds of failing flesh.
All that’s left? Not quite. A fox, young, slick, bin-fed, glides through the grass with the grace of a ghost, pounces, catches the crow by the wing as it takes flight not quite too late, not quite soon enough. The crow flaps, the fox adjusts its grip too much and the crow escapes, fluttering just out of reach, but broken too, it just doesn’t know it yet.
The fox stares at the crow, atop its perch. The fox calculates. It can get up there, easy it can. But by the time it does, the crow will be gone. Too much effort. There are bins to raid. It sniffs the bones on the ground around it. There’a familiarity there, on the edge of s snatch of fur missed by the birds, a memory of a memory of a tongue washing the fur a generation or two back. It shakes itself free of memory. Bins to raid.