The fox and the cat

Tonight, while I was on the phone to Mirinda, the dogs went ballistic. They barked and ran around, making a hell of a noise. This, in itself, is not that strange.

They often bark when the Crazies’ dogs are in their back garden and, at the moment, Dave & Gail are looking after them so they get more opportunity to harass the poodles. But this is not what the problem was.

I realised I could hear the unmistakeable high pitched barking of a fox just outside so I went over to the bedroom window and looked out into the street. In the middle of the road, spotlit by the street lights, was a fox, sitting and barking. It was pretty strange…surreal even.

We sometimes see foxes in our street as they live in the park and we see them in the park quite often but I’ve never seen one sit in our road and bark.

I followed it’s gaze and discovered what it was barking at. The Crazies have a ginger cat as well as the three dogs and it was sitting by the wheel of a car parked next door. It was this cat that the fox was talking to. It wasn’t very far away and was just sitting nonchalantly (as cats do), seemingly ignoring the fox.

Of course, all the time the barking was going on, Carmen and Day-z were trying to attack it from the closed lounge room window. This made the fox bark at the cat, then look across at the poodles…which it couldn’t see behind the brick wall that runs across the front garden.

As if by some inexplicable signal, the cat started moving around the car and then, swiftly dashed under it. The fox then approached the car trying to work out where the cat had gone. It was too big to get under the car so, when the fox finally spotted the cat, there wasn’t a lot it could do about it. Then the fox suddenly looked up, froze, then turned tail and ran off up into the park.

I looked further down the road to see what had caused the fox to flee. I figured it was a car approaching but no, it was Fiona from across the road returning from work (I assume, given she was wearing a dress rather than her customary jeans) and striding up to her house.

She went straight into her house and probably didn’t even see the fox.

What the problem with the fox was is anyone’s guess unless it wanted to mate with the ginger cat. Whatever the reason, it was seriously bizarre. And it really upset the poodles.