The Little Foxes

Many years ago, knocking around in my pickup truck, I came upon some abandoned garden allotments that seem once to have been a part of an abandoned apartment complex.  The fencing had long since been removed, and heavy equipment had been driven around the place, ripping up some cinder blocks and railroad ties used for making raised tomato beds and leaving the detritus, along with some bent and ruined Home Depot metal garden stakes, in an ugly pile.  One memory of the garden remained: a straggly Concord grape vine broken and desiccated in its main branch, but still sustaining five or six scrappy colonies of green where smaller branches had fallen to the ground and taken root.  I cut the umbilical cords on the most promising of these, dug it out by the roots, and took it home.  From that propagation I now have in my yard at least a dozen vines, two of them huge and arboreal, the others more or less trellised,  Sometimes my granddaughters and I make grape jelly, though in recent years it’s been all about the wild raspberries, and the birds usually get the grapes.

Now there is a verse in the Song of Songs (2:15) that has had a certain significance in my academic work.  In the King James Version it is this: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”  In medieval Christian exegesis the “vineyard” was widely taken to be an allegorical representation of the Church.  The little foxes spoiling the vines were therefore a figure of the heretics who troubled the Church.  So widely was this allegory accepted that various actual “heretics” started tocall themselves “the little foxes”.  I would occasionally mention this curiosity in lectures.  But of course the danger of concentrating on an allegorical sense is that the literal sense may be forgotten entirely.

Our back yard is something of a wondrous menagerie, which is one of the reasons it so delights young children.  Rare is the summer day in which one does not see deer, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs—all in addition to birds in abundance and variety.  This year, since I have had temporarily to abandon cultivating my vegetable garden at the bottom, animal life is more abundant and more bold than ever.  The “garden” itself, of course, is rapidly reverting to Stage Two Jersey Jungle.  And on the adjoining open common ground new bird and animal life is becoming more abundant.  On a couple of occasions a small flock of wild turkeys have paraded past the gap in the liminal stone walls.  And foxes, of which there have always seemed to be at least one happy family,  now seem more numerous.  Indeed, one can rarely walk about the Common Ground without spotting a fox.  We now suspect that a foxy family has taken up residence on our own property, or very near it.

The other day Joan called me to the windows at the back.  Look, there is a fox walking along the stone wall!  And so, indeed, there was.  The wall is quite a long ways off, and the fox was obviously still a juvenile, but there was no mistaking the pert manner and the ramrod horizontality of the tail that is so characteristic of a fox on the run,  But the attitude of this critter was more like a fox on a runway—at a fashion show.  This fox was walking along the top of my stone wall as though it were I-9.  Later on I spotted an adult fox on the open lawn at the bottom of my neighbor’s contiguous property.  There is a memorial bench about seventy-five yards out into the Common Ground.  I sometimes sit on it, and look up from there to the back of my wall; this big fox was simply sitting there, Fido-like, looking back at me.  Later still, I finally got the gumption to bushwhack my way into the temporarily abandoned garden to reclaim a couple of tools.  There I found a mysterious shallow pit, apparent evidence of some barely begun or abandoned mining operation.  But even then I didn’t put it all together.

What I am calling the “garden” is pretty well fenced in against deer, and for decorative purposes I have some of my grapevines trellised against its upper reaches, with the leafing tendrils beginning at about five feet from the ground.  On one side, where the wire fencing comes close to the abutment of the stone wall, the vines are already heavily fruited with still very under-ripe grapes.  Well, a couple of days ago we looked out to see that our young fox was not simply promenading along a wall.  He (or she) was standing on it, using it as a ladder to get at such of the green grapes as were reachable from the corner of the wall abutment.  The little foxes spoil the vines!  I was able to confirm this later by an on-site investigation, which revealed evidence of a few ravished green clusters.  In a flash of further biblical insight, I grasped also the meaning of the small-scale mining operating in the fallow tomato patch: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests…”  But it was from an ancient secular writer that I took my comfort: Æsop.  I couldn’t really resent the vulpine foraging.  Those must have been very sour grapes!