Vixen

This afternoon I went out walking along the river. Coming back uphill by the road, I looked ahead and saw a young fox loping easily across the road. Just behind her was a kit, small and caramel-colored, thickly furred, and anxious. He was so small that at first I thought he was a squirrel, with his long dense tail. When she got to the far side, he stalled, turned, and bolted back to where he’d started, a small bluff covered with brush. He ran into the bushes and started yapping, high little haphazard barks that sounded as though he hadn’t quite figured out where the noise came from. He was still back up in there, complaining, but the vixen turned around and went on across the road, down the hill into a brushy ravine on the other side.
I walked up the road past both of them, now hidden. I was surprised that she’d let him go back up the bluff alone, and at the top of the hill I turned around to look back. Nothing. But I heard some barks way down in the ravine. I waited, and after awhile the vixen appeared, with another kit.
The vixen was young and light-colored, slightly brindled. She was slim and lithe and pretty, a hard-working single mom with dinner to make, trying to get her naughty son to behave. She trotted across the road toward the bluff and turned to look at him. He skittered wildly along the edge of the road, like a dustrag with pointed ears.
The vixen stood waiting, and then a car came up from the river, roaring toward us, and both foxes retreated into the brush. We all waited until the noise died down, and then they emerged. The vixen trotted across the road again to get her son. Foxes are too cool ever to look anxious, but her tongue was hanging out. She looked a bit harried.
Back on the ravine side, the kit came out of the brush and she trotted again across the road away from him, turning to look at him. He went right up to the edge of the road and then stalled, turned and started skittering alongside it, headed toward me, yapping like a high-pitched banging door. Yap, yap, yap, yap, he yelled. MA! MA! MA! MA!
Mom stood waiting on the other side. Another car came by, and everyone hid.
A huge SUV drove up behind me, and I waved it down. The tinted window came down, a big guy in sunglasses at the wheel. “What’s going on?”
“A mother fox is trying to get her kit across the road. See her by the telephone pole? If you could wait a minute, maybe she’ll do it.”
Pretty soon there were three stopped cars, everyone watching that kit.
The mom saw we were all waiting for her, and she headed back to the ravine side again. Once there she turned and looked at her son, ready to cross back. The kit skittered nervously up to the edge of the road. We all stood waiting. He stuck his nose in the air. MA!
No-one moved.
He put one paw on the pavement.
No-one moved.
He spread his legs out wide and lowered his belly as though he were climbing onto a rocking boat, and, very slowly, legs splayed, he moved out onto that tricksy, swaying pavement.
No-one moved.
Yelling his head off, his belly flat on the road, his legs out like a crab’s, he scrabbled all the way across. The mom jumped up to meet him and the two of them vanished into the brush, headed for the bluff, that baby still flapping his mouth.
MA!