Think outside the fox

In literature at least, the fox will come out on top in almost every brush with confrontation, finds Kate Green

- Kate Green

THE complicated, close and much-misunderstood relationship between fox and huntsman is adroitly captured in fiction by David Rook in T his 1970 novel The Belstone Fox. An abandoned cub, Tag, is brought up in hunt kennels before being released into the wild, where his cleverness in evading hounds engenders affection and respect from the huntsman who reared him. After many runs: "Tag had the devil in him the game had slowed down to the point where it had become boring, so now he was going to liven it up a little' and the fox leads the pack across a railway track with tragic, bloody results.

The huntsman, maddened by grief at the loss of his hounds, obsessively determines to catch Tag and, some members of the antihunting fraternity may be pleased to know, dies in the attempt; the fox and his hound protector, Merlin, soberly regard the man's prone body from a granite rock on Dartmoor. (The film The Fox and the Hound is a Disneyfied version of the tale, with Tag renamed Tod.)

The peerless naturalist writer and artist Denys Watkins-Pitchford (BB'), a schoolmaster and field sportsman, also captures that complex hunter-quarry dynamic in his evocative book Wild Lone: The Story of a Pytchley Fox (1938). BB's hero, Rufus, exemplifies both the 'survival of the fittest' principle by which wild species are preserved and the bitterly accepting 'Nature red in tooth and claw' line in Tennyson's grief poem In Memoriam. His Rufus is a ruthless, casual killer of wildlife, including hedgehogs, and domestic fowl, yet the heart of the hunting man rejoices as he evades the Pytchley Hunt time and time again: 'May the good earth keep you, now and for always. Good hunting, little red fox.'