A fox cub was lying on the kitchen floor...

The back door was open, it was midday, I was sitting in my chair in the dining room. I had eaten lunch and was wondering whether to have a ten minute nap.

So I settled back into the chair watching the clouds floating past the window, and a bullfinch eating the apple buds in the garden.

I heard a funny little noise behind me in the kitchen, something like a postcard falling off the mantlepiece.

I started to drift off but then another little sound came. Maybe the breeze was stirring the calendar hanging on the back of the door.

Still no action from your scribe. The chair, with its blue tartan rug I wind around my legs on really cold winter days, felt deep and yielding, the bullfinch had flown away full bellied and the clouds had become soporific.

The breeze such as it was by now was playing with the pages of butterflies on the calendar.

It was just enough to keep me awake.

Now the odd thing is that I normally watch my back carefully, having spent hundreds of nights on guard during service in the military in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Cyprus. I have to see what is behind me or what might be about in the dead ground.

But there I was with my back to the door, and what I suddenly realised was a presence behind me.

Too late the hair on the back of my skull began to tingle and I arose silently and reached for the huge old iron poker my father had used in his study when writing Tarka the Otter, made for him by the Braunton blacksmith.

Creeping silently across the stone floor laid over a century ago for the head gamekeeper who among others had cleaned the guns here for the kings of both England and Spain, I was soon staring in disbelief at my visitor.

A fox cub was lying on the kitchen floor staring at its reflection in a long mirror which fills the cupboard door panels. Patches on the glass showed where it had just been dabbing its nose at the identical creature.

It had then given up trying to make friends and was going to have a short nap, for its eyes were half closing. Then it saw me, tried to flee but its pads slipped on the tiles and it fell over.

Then it had vanished.

This was a wild animal, not an urban fox, part of a litter from an earth quarter of a mile away.

Why had it not identified human scents as dangerous? It must surely have known it was in the lair of its old enemy.