In the midst of life we are in death

I make no apology for blipping another vulpine tragedy exactly a week after the first, it being such an extraordinary sight to behold. Only this time it is a lapine tragedy too: the fox has been mown down, not with his mate but alongside his very prey. He must have been carrying the rabbit triumphantly back to his den when he was hit by a car. The deaths of both predator and prey would have been instantaneous, the one by incurred by ruthless fang, the other by reckless wheel. The tragedy of it was heartrending.

In one of his best known poems, The Thought Fox , Ted Hughes (1930-98) compared the creative process to the elusive, nocturnal sighting of this furtive creature:

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Hughes' fox of the mind can never die. He explained that:
In some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go.