It must have been some time in the 1980’s that I first discovered we had foxes living on the empty building site next to our Maadi apartment block.
At that time, the site was not actually empty; it was full of wooden scaffolding poles and iron bars and other suchlike things. All this stuff was guarded by two men who took it in turns to sleep in a makeshift hut at night and sit around outside on the pavement in the daytime.
It was one evening at dusk that I first noticed what I took to be a dog sitting on the seven-foot wall round the site. When it jumped down and joined another one already there, I realized they had bushy fox tails and large pointed ears.
After a few minutes these were joined by a vixen and her five young cubs, who had emerged from a hole closer to our building.
I went indoors and found our binoculars, which although not infra-red night glasses were great at showing up things in the dark. They were just right for watching from the fifth floor, and I could see the animals very clearly.
By the time I returned, another somewhat larger and scruffier adult had joined the others. This I took to be the father of the family, who in the ensuing weeks only looked in occasionally.
The young adults I took to be last year’s female siblings who came each evening to help groom and play with the pups. As in most families, there was one youngster with a disobedient streak, a little smaller than the rest and always slower to obey the adults’ yapped commands to hide under a pile of wood. This was not because he or she was stupid, but more adventurous and inquisitive than the rest of them. This one had a lighter patch just under the tail, and “Patch is what I named it.
When the guard – be it the nice or the nasty one – rattled the gate to come into the enclosure of an evening, the mother’s warning cry sent everyone into hiding. The animals seemed to know which man was on duty and were less alarmed by the older gentler one. This gentle man knew perfectly well they were there and they even dared to drink from his bucket of water in his presence.
Watching the play and grooming that went on; I was touched by the way the older siblings treated the young ones. With one paw they would hold a youngster on the ground on its back and give it a good going over with their teeth, finishing off with a thorough all-over licking. Once groomed, there followed a few minutes of roly-poly mock fights.
A good deal later, when few people were about and it was really dark, and the traffic had almost stopped (in those days there wasn’t that much anyway) the siblings would put their strategy to work. They both got up on the wall and one would jump down into the middle of the road and utter its characteristic yapping cry.
This brought all the dogs in the Arab quarter from over the railway line, with a hysterical cacophony of frenzied barking, and within seconds, they were in full cry up the road after the decoy sibling. When they had all disappeared after her the second sibling, would make for the Arab quarter, now devoid of dogs, to appear 10 or 15 minutes later with a fat duck or a couple of chickens for the family’s supper.
Never able to sleep much, I spent hours watching the antics of the babies and the family devotion of the older ones. I loved to see the young ones climbing a few feet up on the wood stacks and jumping down playfully on the backs of the adults, and then rolling with them in mock fights.
They were always less boisterous and emitted fewer yelps and yaps when the grumpy guard was on duty. The siblings would leave at dawn before he awoke in the hut, but would wait until the gentle one was actually coming out of the hut before they left. As he stretched and yawned, the vixen would call her young ones into the earth, Patch being the last to obey, of course.
I wasn’t around when the grumpy guard did the dreadful thing. He buried that little family alive, filling in the ‘earth’ and blocking their way out with soil and rocks and stones.
Years later, I wondered whether if I dug there I would find their poor little bones. From time to time, even now, I still scan the area hoping another fox family might have moved in, but the only living things down there are rats now. I still miss that family.
