"Master Charlie"

Foxes.

The 4-legged type of the genus vulpes.

If you've ever watched All Creatures Great And Small, about the country vet in the Yorkshire Dales, you may be aware of Siegfried Farnon's term for a fox as "Master Charlie", hence the title of this post.  Some may think, what's the big deal? I see them every day in the city!  But that's a different type of fox.

Now, I don't remember seeing any during my childhood - not even by the roadside or flattened by traffic in the centre, so it was a bit of a magical experience to see my first one even if it was an urban fox - just after the Knightswood traffic lights on the Great Western Road in Glasgow on my way to my parent's house for Christmas in 1998, at about 5am.  At first glance in the streetlights as I approached at 30 mph I thought, jings, that's a big cat, but it's got a funny sort of profile - and  when it turned to look at my car, its eyes shone in the headlights like no cat's I've ever seen - it was this that told me it was a fox.  Wow, my mind was blown.

The next encounter - or sighting, I suppose, and in daylight for the first time - was of a pair, early one May morning in 2008 when I was out walking Loopus.  They slunk across the access road between each side of the racecourse's the hayfield some 200 meters away from us, and it was wonderful to see.

During the awesome cold winter of 2010, I'd see one occasionally crossing fields, and once at night I turned on the head torch to see if i could see Loopus and saw two eyes coming towards me in the dark, a good 400 metres away, so whistled him to "come", only for Loopus to turn around and come-to-heel but 40 metres from me.  The eyes in the distance disappeared, stage left...

We saw an urban fox in Edinburgh, too - on it's way home one October morning after a night on the bin-leftovers, no doubt.

When i started my new job in Midsomer Norton at the turn of the year, it was an unusual journey down where I didn't see a fox when south of Bristol, running off to the undergrowth in the brightness of the full beam headlights.

Once the firm and myself had moved to Bristol, it wasn't uncommon to see them, usually (in best Terry Pratchett's Gaspode the wonderdog style) enjoying the eat-all-you-can-from-the-bins-for-free of the city.

Tonight, however:  it's a harvest moon, and we've enough clear sky to enjoy it fully.  Unusually for a Friday night having travelled the 200-odd miles home to Yorkshire, I decided to take Loopus out for a walk in the moonlight, just because it was fantastic.  The whole walk was superb, I've missed doing this so much, but the highlight was really in the first few minutes, and the rest the icing on the cake.

We were less than 100 meters from the A1 underpass, and Loopus less than 10 meters in front of me when a dog-like animal half the size of Loopus bolted across the cyclepath in front of me.  Not an urban fox - a very wild (and bloody startled!) rural fox.

Master Charlie!