Bog Myrtle & Peat

Home, Parish of Kirkgunzeon – 9/5/20

I find foxes wherever I go. They’re feeding cubs, and the work is a weighty ask. Clusters of their dull-minded young hole-up and wait to be fed, and the trial is never-ending. It draws them beyond the cover of darkness until I find foxes working in broad daylight, mousing and moving in the sun.

I watched a vixen carrying mice across the burn in a bundle like a beard below her chin. She must have had a dozen, each carefully picked and hanging by its end. I saw another with an adder, the head clipped off and the body limp as linguine. A fox can feed any number of cubs with snake-meat, if only they can learn to catch them. And there are young rabbits to be gathered, and eggs shipped from their nests and the slippery remains of a long-dead hen to recover from the midden at the back of the yard.

It’s all work, and I push against them where I can.