The Fox Murderer
“You’re saying we have a license to kill?” Wilbur the Alpaca Farmer asked the animal control officer. “You want us to shoot that fox?”
“Yeah, if you could,” the ACO nodded. “The fat lady down the road is worried about her little cats and dogs getting eaten.”
“I betcha that’s the son-of-a-bitch who killed my roosters.” Wilbur shook his head and pointed at me. “We’re gonna get that bastard.”
He and the ACO laughed. Even though it was against the law to fire a gun within Eastport’s city limits, nobody seemed to be thinking of that particular ordinance. Wilbur wanted a dead fox. I was pretty sure, however, that a raccoon or weasel or fisher cat or Wilbur’s son Junior was to blame for beheading the two golden cocks and drinking their blood.
•••
She was the “two o’clock fox,” because she always strolled across the east meadow during my post-lunch marijuana cigarette. She’d trot along the alpaca pasture, headed for the rocky beach or the scraggle of dying spruce directly below Wilbur’s fortress of a house. She was not a villain or an enemy. But because I worked for Wilbur, I did what he told me to do.
On an overcast June day, when the two o’clock fox approached, I grabbed the .22 from the barn and raised the rifle to my shoulder.
•••
Twenty years earlier, while I was a sailor in the U.S. Coast Guard fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Haitian Refugees, I was qualified to use a .45, a 9mm Beretta, a double-barrel shotgun, an M-16 and an M-2 machine gun. My Coastie comrades would say the safest place to stand on the shooting range was in front of my target, because of my lousy aim. Ultimately, thankfully, my qualifications disappeared. Except for the M-16. For some reason, I was allowed to carry that dangerous weapon.
•••
The fox, casually meandering down a gentle slope, was in my sights. Maybe 100 yards away. I squeezed the trigger. And missed by a mile.
The animal bolted for the shore. No use firing again. Not gonna hit a fleeing fox, that’s for sure. Rifle in hand, I sprinted up and over the hill by Wilbur’s fort, to a ledge at the edge of the pines. Panting, I tried to catch my breath. Given the terrain, there was a 50-50 chance the fox would pass in front of me. If I was lucky, I’d get another shot.
Suddenly, she emerged from the thicket to cautiously cross the tiny meadow. She had no way of knowing the sniper was in wait, ready for the kill. Shot sighted and lined up. Quick deep breath. Exhale half and hold. That’s what they taught me back in my sailor days. And squeeze, don’t pull.
I fired and missed by another mile. The fox laughed as she darted into the forest. I pulled the trigger again. And again.
What the hell was I doing? Firing into the brush was crazy. And then a flash of horror hit me. Wilbur’s closest neighbor, a retired woman from Virginia, had just moved into her summer house, a mere 500 feet away from where I stood. Directly in the path of my bullets. I ran towards the woman’s home.
•••
If I had been more rational, I would have realized there was not a chance in hell that a random shot from a .22 would make it out of the forest, let alone over Wilbur’s illegal waterfront dump and the little cove and through the lady’s stockade fence, window and skull.
But I obviously wasn’t rational. Otherwise I would have ignored the insane commands of a lunatic zillionaire. My employment situation was getting nuttier by the day. I was supposed to be tending alpacas, pigs and chickens, not taking pot shots at a fox. Or working on construction projects without building permits. Or covering up for his relationships with his sweet Passamaquoddy mistress and/or his daffy new gal-pal from southern Maine who was starting to make herself comfortable on the farm when his wife wasn’t around.
And now, because of my job, I’d misfired in a lame attempt to murder a harmless wild animal and ended up killing an innocent civilian oldster instead
Bad thoughts continued until I reached the western edge of Wilbur’s land. From there, I had a good look at her house. None of the windows on the eastern side seemed to have bullet holes. A wave of relief washed over me. She wasn’t dead. Then I felt super-guilty for the stupid move. I knew better than to shoot so wildly into the woods.
•••
A couple days before I left to spend some time with my dying mother in western Massachusetts, Wilbur told me to set up a trio of borrowed Havahart traps. Following the instructions I found online, I didn’t handle the traps directly to avoid leaving a human scent, and wired in a piece of rotten chicken for bait. I placed the rigs along the fox run. Then I left Maine and practically forgot about the farm. Sweetgrass, already overworked with veggie garden chores, would take on extra responsibilities until I returned.
•••
On the phone, Sweetgrass sobbed heavily. She’d been walking through the woods and came upon one of the traps. It had captured a beautiful fox who hissed, snarled and shit as she approached. Sweetgrass didn’t know what to do. As a sensitive, gentle being, always in touch with the natural world, she wanted to open the trap and release the beast. But she didn’t know how to work the mechanism. And she was scared, not knowing how the animal — crouched in the rear of the cage looking frightened and fierce simultaneously — would react to sudden freedom.
So she had run to where Wilbur’s carpenter cousins were putting the finishing touches on a new barn. This building, a mere 100 feet from the high-water mark of Cobscook Bay, was built to house the male alpacas downstairs, with a rental loft upstairs for tourists and other ne’er-do-wells. The carpenters didn’t want to deal with an angry critter either. So they called Wilbur.
•••
Wilbur had no problem killing the fox. He and a pal threw a blanket over the trap and lifted the rig into the back of the Gator, then drove to the water’s edge on the rocky beach. The tide was halfway to high. Wilbur unceremoniously dumped and dragged the jail cell into the rising sea. Then he went home, leaving the poor creature to drown in her watery prison.
Starting June 30, Crash Barry’s weekly look at the seamy side of Maine life, “The Crash Report,” will appear in the Portland Daily Sun.
