The footprints of a fox

I don’t know why but the drive home from Sidmouth in Devon to Ringwood where we live was hard so we had to have a couple of breaks.

   Somewhere between Bridport and Dorchester we pulled into a layby. I left Heather in the car while I got out to stretch my legs and get some much needed fresh air. There was a high hedge which was encroaching with its brambles and wild rose bushes over the narrow concrete path next to where the car had parked. Beyond the hedge was an open field and in the very far distance a feint outline of Poundbury, or “Poundland” as we call when we drive by, on the western edge of Dorchester.

   As I walked and stretched I noticed that the hedge was laden with ripe blackberries. I did think of picking some to take home for breakfast the next morning. Michaelmas Day was less than two weeks away on 29th September. It is about this time of year that the Devil wanders the earth and spoils all of the berries in the hedgerows to mark the end of the growing and harvesting season. That is why blackberries can look ripe and luscious one day ready to have with ice cream or with breakfast cereal. Then, the next they are shrivelled and good for nothing. Even the birds won’t touch them once they have been turned by the saliva of Satan himself as some would have it.

   These berries had not been spoiled by the Devil.

   The further I walked the more I thought “What a disgrace”, “No wonder the environment is in such a mess” and “How can people do this?”. The more I looked the more I saw of the litter people had left behind. Drinks cans, plastic bottles, food wraps and packaging from a nearby fast food restaurant. It got worse the further I walked on. There was no visible  litter bin that people could use, if they could be bothered, for litter. That is still no excuse to leave rubbish anywhere. Take it home. Further on, the hedge was bedecked with some strips of toilet paper blowing in the wind and clearly showing circumstantial evidence of use that would be admissible, in hermetically sealed evidence bags of course, in court.  

   Even though the berries hung ripe at my eye level and were ready for the picking I decided that they had already been ruined, not by the Devil, and left them.

   When the concrete for the path was laid countless years ago the workers who laid it didn’t bother to cover it before they finished for the day. Near the car was a set of fox footprints still as clear and as sharply defined as the day it walked across the concrete on one of its nocturnal forays. Near the footprints and in the hedge was a tunnel barely big enough for descendants and relatives of that first fox to pass through. The ground in the tunnel was so dry, hard and overgrown with short cropped grass and weeds the foxes of today could never leave footprints.