Foxy

On the way home from my soccer game last Thursday I saw a fox. It ran in front of my car in Golden Gate Park. OK. It wasn’t after my soccer game. It was after I went to the bar after my soccer game. But I really did see it. I called a few people on the team to tell them I’d seen a fox and they all believed me this time. About a year ago I was the last to leave the soccer field because I was making a phone call or something and when I drove up to the stop sign a coyote crossed the street. It poked it’s head into a bunch of gofer holes then ran off. There is no mistaking a coyote for a dog but when I called one of my teammates at the bar to tell him about it I could tell he didn’t believe me. He passed on the word to others at the bar but I could tell they didn’t believe me either. About a week after that the headline in the SF Chronicle was, “Coyotes in Golden Gate Park!”

When I was a kid I grew up in Stinson Beach on a ranch. We were the last house on the hill before you went into the forest. There was a fox and a wolf we would see periodically. Probably the last fox and the last wolf in the area. When my brother, the neighbor kids and I would be playing we would get that feeling that someone was watching us and when we looked up there would be the fox or the wolf staring at us. Someone eventually shot the wolf but I’m not sure what happened to the fox. He just stopped making an appearance eventually. We also saw Mountain Lions once in a while. I don’t know why they didn’t eat us. We would wonder up the hill and into the woods and we would be gone all day. Cannon was 7, I was 5 and Case and Virgil were only 3. It could have only been the numbers that kept them away. Or maybe the hand-me-downs we wore. Or maybe they were just curious like we were.