The lean red fox got up before dawn, and told his wife he’d been eyeing some chickens on a farm just down the hill. Every morning at sunlight, he said, they got up pecked around this big pasture looking for bugs. He was sure to get one. A sure thing. You better, she said, we have three pups to feed and we are all hungry and yesterday you just got squat, two mice and a rabbit, and how far will that go? We need a fat hen. The fox knew his wife was getting fed up with his excuses. She wanted some meat. She was sick of lying around the den listening to three hungry brats yowl and she had a temper. She was a Sicilian fox.

These hens are fat, the fox promised. They get meal and leftover pasta, oat bran, bread and cheese.

Several hours later, the fox returned, panting, shaken, and mortified.  He had a hard time speaking. “I don’t see any hens,” said his wife.

“I don’t have any,” he said. “You won’t believe what happened to me down there. I came creeping down the hill and the hens were there just as I expected. I went after the fattest one, got my teeth onto her feathers and her back and all of sudden this crazy monster donkey came charging over at me with his head down and his head low and he tried to bite me and stomp me,” he said.

“God,” said his wife, “how awful. And so you ran?”

“No,” he said. “I dropped the hen, then circled down and went after the other one,” but she ran under a fence and suddenly these four dogs – one of them was a monster, came roaring towards me and scaring the daylights out of me.”

“Horrible,” she said, “and so you ran home?”

“No,” he said, still panting and wishing he had stopped to drink some water. “I turned and ran down and under the gate and after this other strange chicken. She was tearing across the road heading for the meadow and I raced after and just about had her in my mouth – I had two mouthfuls of feathers – when this human came walking down the road with another huge dog and he started barking and growling, and I turned and the chicken was gone, down in the grass hiding.”

“Oh my Lord,” she said. “What a nightmare. So is that when you ran?”

“No,” he said, I crept back  up the hill, away from the crazy donkey and barking dogs, and then this big human came running out with a huge camera and started taking pictures and his wife came out and started calling out to the chickens. The place is a madhouse. There were three fat hens and I got my teeth into all of them, and didn’t catch a one. It was very frustrating.”

“But you’ll go back,” his wife said, not unsympathetically.

“Oh, sure, honey, sure. I might try the McEachron farm first. They only have an electric fence and two Llamas.”