DSH perfumes Foxy shimmers with the deep golds of summer’s change to autumn, with the glow of beeswaxed-wood in firelight, a whiff of Calvados and ginger nut biscuits,  the crackle of sleeping in a pile of sun-warmed bracken, and the easy elegance of a fox stretching as it emerges from its earth.

It’s been a pleasure to wear Foxy as the winter draws in, and frost shimmers on straggled grass stripped to greyscale by early morning moonlight, and the foxes move like memories in the shadows of the church. They are barely glimpsed now that the complicated politics of precedence have shuffled the territorial borders and the almost-grown cubs have moved on.

Missing the joy of the abundant company of my curious tangle of summer foxes, I spend hours waiting, reading in a nest of fake fur blankets while the cat sleeps in a topological tangle, her paws flexing gently against my palm. Some nights there is no trace but a clean plate, mud in the water bowl, a little digging by the mouse house. But others, there is a shimmer of movement at the window, a scrape of claws on stone, and I clamber onto the sofa back to open the window to receive my visitor. Holding out my hand I get a bump of greeting, nose against knuckles. And then the fox eats, gathering up food with delicate snips of the teeth and sitting to chew, to look around, constantly aware of every sound.

Of course, of course, I have longed to stroke them, bury my fingers in their fur as it has turned from thistledown fuzz to a thick pelt, but I do not touch them. I have been sniffed, nibbled, licked, patted, nudged, and bumped, but I do not touch them. Even when it means sitting on my hands so I don’t reach out. So I breathe the night air, and –not the “sharp hot stink” of Ted Hughes’s thought fox, nor the surprising clean cat, fresh grass and violets scent of young cubs– but the warm earth and spiced animal aroma of these beautiful creatures and marvel at this year of foxes.

My sample was a much-appreciated gift from Dawn.

Originally posted 13 November 2019