"Do you hear the babies?" he asks with a grin.
"Nope," I reply. "They must be sleeping."
Yesterday as the woods were quietly slipping into evening, I discovered that another family is living with us at Sanctuary. Yes, right here under our front porch. But I am not surprised.
There have been things going bump in the night.
And there is an odor. Not like the time a skunk sprayed under the porch after The Flood and the workmen told me the only way to get rid of it would be to crawl under there and scrub. Which I declined to do, opting to just let nature take its course.
This odor may not be skunk, but it is decidedly animal in nature.
Then one evening as dusk lingered I caught a glimpse of movement out the window. So she has babies! I think. 'She' being the lovely gray fox currently hanging out in our woods. The Stinky Things That Go Bump In The Night Mystery has been solved. Just call me Nancy Drew.
For the next week or so you would have caught me peeking out windows regularly, so intense was the craving for a glimpse of four balls of fuzzy gray fur. The Asset christened them Huey, Dewey, Louie and Runt. Today Tree Master is taking care of our big double-trunked black oak that has been laying on the ground, one trunk pointing east and the other pointing west like some kind of giant compass, for weeks. His crew is also pruning and trimming the four giant oaks that surround our buildings, hopefully forestalling future problems.
Later, as the crew finishes chipping the piles of downed wood and splitting the compass tree into firewood, Tree Master joins me on the front porch. He advises me to fix the entry hole under the porch and I say I will soon as the babies leave. And we swap fox stories. He tells me he was bitten by a fox as a kid. His father ordered him to go get the shotgun and kill that exact fox and bring it back for examination. But he couldn't find it.
"Did you have to have to have fourteen shots in the stomach?" I ask.
"I don't know if it was fourteen, but it was a lot," he replies.
This was the most dreaded thing in our family when I was a child, the thing that gave me nightmares on the days when I had so much as touched a stray cat. I love all things living. But my dad had this thing about rabies, and he drilled it into us from little on not to approach or touch any animal, living or dead, that was not one of our pets.
"You will have to go to the doctor and have fourteen shots in your stomach," was his mantra. I couldn't even look at a dead mouse without worrying that I had gotten too close and might need those fourteen shots in my little tummy.
I stare in awe at Tree Master as if he is a campfire story come to life.
"You are the only person I know who actually had to have those shots," I say. "When I got older I thought it might have been something my dad made up to scare us."
"Nope," he says. "It was real."
We walk up to where the young men are splitting the last of the logs. One is behind the wheel of the big truck towing the wood chipper. He is calculating which route to take out of our property. I tell him it is fine if he goes all the way around the back to avoid the other trucks parked randomly on driveways. He gets set to go, and I go up to his window.
"On the way, could you take out as many weeds as possible?" I ask. He grins.
"Like maybe driving in an 'S' pattern?" he replies, and we all laugh.
