He lived all summer on the great man’s estate, the red fox, like a concubine. The sight of him taking the bait made the old gentleman tremble — his modest toilette at the fountain observed through binoculars, his unmolested naps near the gray rock where sunlight streamed through a dying birch.
Over and over the fox saw the old man hobble out and fill the meat bowl. His was a pungent, almost medical smell, that clung like a tendril to the complicated air of human places. At first each nerve objected. The fox saw two dogs at the bay window, watching, their coarse, domesticated faces full of eager malevolence, like ex-wives.
Then overnight the sumac turned red. The creeper suddenly blushed at its own rapaciousness. How hard the wind tried to pick the trees up but leaves only came away. That summer, like all the others, fled while the old man still wanted it, and the fox, too, vanished into the copper-colored undergrowth as into the magician’s sleeve.
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