The first thing I do
when I arrive back at my house in the Czech Republic, even before I
unlock the door, is rub the muzzle of the fox door knocker. It is an old farmhouse on a hill called Liski Dira (Fox Hole in
Czech) and the house is just like a fox with its haunches buried into
the earth. As I lie in bed at night sometimes I can hear a vixen
calling in the orchards above. The village dogs respond with frantic
barking, but you can hear the fox laughing at them. “You have sold
your freedom for a bowl of meat,” she says. “I have the moon and
all the dark spaces in the forest.”
When I first bought the
house I didn’t see any foxes, perhaps I was too busy restoring the
house. I certainly wasn’t writing, although I had bought the house
as a writing retreat. One evening as a taxi brought me from the
station a fox crossed the road in the headlamp beam. “Liska,”
said the driver with a smile. The following day I walked down from
the woods with a basket of chanterelle mushrooms, called lisky
(foxes) in Czech. It had started raining as I picked them and now it
was sheeting down, so my head was bowed. Then I looked up and there
standing in the middle of the lane a few yards away was a large fox
looking straight at me. It contemplated me for a while and then
trotted off across the fields. When we lived in London we were used
to the brazen nature of town foxes, and even had a family of
them sharing the garden with our cat, but in the countryside foxes
are shy of humans. I told my Czech friend about the meetings with the
fox. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Foxes are lucky in this
country, just like black cats in England. No wonder the taxi driver
was pleased when a fox crossed your path. They are meant to be the
familiars of witches, you know.”
After that sighting,
the fox started to appear to me all the time and as it did so I began
to write again. It seemed the fox was now my familiar and a bringer
of words. Then during one stay in the house I didn’t see my fox at
all and yet I still managed to write. My husband was visiting from
the UK and as we stood in the back bedroom I commented on my fox’s
absence. He grinned and said “Zoe turn round and look out of the
window.” There, only a few feet away from us, my fox was strolling
through the orchard.
