Read Little Foxes for Free Online Page A

the food. I’d have found it somewhere. I told you didn’t I? Have I ever let you down yet? Well, have I? Now they know where you are and I got to move you. That’s what your mother would do but I don’t know where I can move you to. There’s nowhere else round here for foxes ’cept the Wilderness. Can’t hardly take you home, can I? You must never, never come out again. They’re nasty out there, d’you understand, nasty. They’d shoot you soon as look at you.’ One of them, the one with the whitest muzzle, sat down on his face as if to stop him talking. ‘I’m beginning to think Aunty May’s right, you know. You do smell something rotten. Can’t see how ’cos you wash yourselves every five minutes. Still ’spect you think I smell pretty funny. Wonder what we do smell like, people I mean?’
    He stayed longer than ever that evening. He didn’t want to leave them alone at all; and when he did have to leave them at last he turned to give them a final warning, wagging his finger at them. ‘You ’member what I said, now,’ he said. ‘Stay here. Stay here and be good and I’ll be back tomorrow sometime. Corned beef, I promise. Dunno how, but corned beef it will be. But don’t you move out of the Wilderness, you understand?’ But the fox cubs were all busy washing themselves and hardly gave him a glance as he left them.
    Billy could not sleep that night. He lay on his back, hands under his head, and tried to think, but his thoughts were forever being interrupted by the rumble and roar of traffic from the motorway, by yowling cats, or by Aunty May turning over in her squeaking bed and coughing her dry smoker’s cough. It was the first warm night of the summer, and Billy discarded his blankets one by one until he was left only with his sheet. Even then he could not sleep. By morning he had still not worked out how he was going to find enough corned beef to feed his foxes; neither had he managed to think of a place where it would be safe enough to hide the cubs. But move them he knew he must, and quickly.
    He survived school that day only because Aunty May had unwittingly solved the problem of the corned beef for him. At breakfast she handed over his dinner money for the week. It wouldn’t be stealing, he thought, as he joined the cavalcade of children walking to school. It wasn’t as if he was taking from her any more than usual. He would spend it all on corned beef and go without school dinners for the week – just tell them at school that he would be going home for dinner. No one would know. Lots of children did it, after all.
    Throughout the dinner break there was a line of fox-watchers by the school fence, binoculars at the ready. But when after an hour nothing appeared, they soon gave up. By the time the bell went for afternoon lessons Billy found he was one of only a few left at the fence and he did not for one moment take his eye from the spot where the foxes had appeared the day before. He longed to run over to the Wilderness, crawl under the wire and be with them, to reassure them. More than once he thought he spotted some unnatural movement in the undergrowth beyond the wire and held his breath, fully expecting them to come out into the open. Forehead pressed against the school fence, he willed them to stay hidden, and they did.
    The appearance of the fox cubs was still the buzz of the school. There was talk of clandestine expeditions into the Wilderness to find them, talk of setting the dogs upon them. This only served to convince Billy that he had to act fast if he was to save them. By the time school finished that afternoon he still did not know what could be done. On the way home for tea he stopped at the shops to buy as much corned beef as his dinner money would allow. That problem at any rate he had solved, at least for the time being.
    He was into his second helping of baked beans and had scraped away all the beans off the toast as he always did, when Aunty May took the cigarette out of