vul•pine (vul ́ pīn)

We adopted eight laying hens from our friends when they moved to Thailand.  (Yah, Thailand!  I know!)  A few nights ago when I went out to shut the chicken coop door, I only counted seven.  But that's happened before, and on that other occasion I figured one of our hens was sleeping around, and I was right; by the following evening, there were 8 again.

Unfortunately, now there are only 7, officially.  And now we think we know why.

Our chickens do beautiful work.

Yesterday as I was preparing to back out of the garage, I glanced over my shoulder and my 9 year old, Ethel, was standing next to the car, mouth open, hand covering mouth, a shocked and terrified look on her face.

"What's the matter, Ethel?"

"Mom!  I've never seen chickens running so fast!"

Our fox looked a little like this guy.

When the other 7 of us hustled out of the car to look, we saw a large, beautiful adult fox staring back at us, in broad daylight, and looking tentative.  I assume he was debating.  Within just a few feet of him were several chubby, well-fed hens.  "Raw KFC!"  I bet he was thinking, and I could totally empathize with his craving, except for the raw part.  However, a few feet beyond the chickens was us--7 large humans, looking a lot like the Cullens from the Twilight saga, protecting their family members from the Volturi.  (I just wrote that sentence for my own entertainment.  Us?  Looking like the Cullens?!  hahahahahahahaha!)  He was trying to decide if the meal would be worth the risk of tangling with a bunch of humans.

I ran toward the fox, and he only hesitated for a second before turning tail and loping off into the tall meadow grass.  We were all stunned, and in awe.  Most of us had not ever seen a fox before, except in Disney movies.  It was a strange mixture of emotion, being impressed and maybe even moved by the fox while feeling the need to treat it like a feared invader.

I, for one, wasn't sure that he was a fox at all, and wondered if he might be a coyote.  After all, a fox wouldn't inspire the level of fear we all felt, would it?

Vulpine means "of or like a fox; cunning."

And speaking of fear levels, our congregation has been on red alert for about a week.  Charles is bishop of our congregation, which means that the buck stops with him on ward issues.  Last Saturday night, he received a phone call telling him that a sweet 80-something sister in our ward might, in the near future, be the next victim of an arsonist/thief.  The alleged perpetrator is a mentally unstable former ward member with a police record, who had allegedly broken into the neighboring town's meeting house, twice, and burned down the house of one friend and the barn of another friend from that neighboring congregation in the weeks before this phone call.  Everyone in the other ward seemed sure she was guilty of committing these crimes, though the police had yet to find a single piece of solid evidence to tie her to them.  In her latest alleged burglary, she had made off with the ward directory for our own congregation, igniting panic amongst the members.

In response to this fear, home teachers stayed up all night as guards, parked outside the 80-something's  home, the night of the warning phone call.  A family from the neighboring congregation slept every night for the prior month fully dressed, all in one room, even wearing shoes to bed, out of fear that they'd have to escape from their burning house in the middle of the night.  Another woman, whose name had been mentioned by the crazed woman during one phone call, packed up all her important papers and took them to a friend's basement for safekeeping against the day that her house would be burned down by this former acquaintance.  Our own Lola, 19 years old, didn't sleep a wink for days, freaked out by suspicious sounds and shadows moving outside.

I was worried that the neighboring congregation was on a witch hunt, and that they were trying to spread it to us.  You know the Arthur Miller play "The Crucible?" It all sounded a lot like a conversation from that play: "I distinctly heard the devil mention the name of Goody Proctor!"(all the townspeople now scream and cower in fear, as Goody Proctor is taken off to be hanged.) 

I decided to try to look up the alleged criminal woman on facebook, since I had learned her name.  To my surprise, her profile was available for public viewing.  And you know what?  She looked exactly like you would expect a married, conservative, midwestern, country-dwelling housewife to look.  She wasn't scary; her bespectacled face was almost comforting.  The photos of grandchildren posted on her profile made them look happy and well-adjusted.

A while later an acquaintance informed me that she's 55 years old and overweight.

How vulpine IS this matronly woman?

I am 40 years old, and in pretty good shape, yet my joints often hurt when I move after sitting for a while; I forget where I put things, and have a hard time keeping all life's details in my head.  How on earth is this lumpy 55-year-old Grandma managing to "Angelina Jolie" her way into people's homes--slithering through cut screens, digging through drywall into safes, setting fires so violent that there's no trace of their origin, and managing to do all of this without leaving the tiniest shard of evidence that she's been there?

No one knows yet.  But we may find out pretty soon.  She was arrested a couple of days ago, in the very act of burglarizing someone's house, or burning someone's house, the gossip has been unclear on this point.

I've got to stop blogging now.  It's time to shut the chicken coop for the night.  I'm hoping all 7 hens have made it safely in, and that our vulpine predator won't be bothering us for a while.