WE were asked to sort out some rabbits over the weekend in country where the habitat favours the indigenous residents, not the hunter! When you see nice large fields surrounded by bramble-filled woods your heart tends to sink a little, as the rabbits are always well spread out beneath the brambles.

Hedgerow ferreting is always a lot easier when it comes to locating the rabbits, as without acres of woodland from which to choose their abodes, the hedgerow rabbits are forced to live only in the hedge bottoms.

It was slow going yesterday, with a rabbit from one warren, then one more from the next and so on.

This will be another of those ‘work in progress’ situations, nibbling away at the rabbit population a little at a time, but the area did remind me of a day many years ago when we’d been asked to sort out some foxes that were taking a farmer’s chickens from right under his nose!

Why I thought of this day I have no idea, as that land was far from trees of any kind. I think it was more of a linking of memories from bygone days, when one memory brings to the surface another, albeit through the most tenuous of links. A dog’s name mentioned, the subject of chickens or similar.

On this particular foxing day we had walked for miles along bare dykes on the fens, troubled only by the gale force winds that threatened to upend us into the murky and fragrant waters in the dyke bottoms. 

It is not always easy to find an occupied earth on such land, though the tell-tale spoil of recent digging can sometimes be glimpsed from a 100 metres away. Other holes, long established, carry no such spoil and are often passed over unnoticed as you search far ahead for an earth in the distance.

In those days it was reasonably safe to allow a terrier to run loose along the dykesides as the chances of falling over a badger sett were about a million to one. Alas, this is no longer the case as these creatures have spread and multiplied beyond all reason over recent years.

Old 'Midge,' my original 'Midge,' found the hole, though even she missed it on the first pass, spinning round as some faint scent caught her nostrils and back-tracking to a rabbit-sized opening in the side of the dyke.

There were no pad marks nor any foxy smell on the bare earth ‘landing pad’ outside the hole but 'Midge' had already squeezed her way into the darkness and disappeared, and the lurchers were doing their  best to follow.

I pulled them away and we stood in the howling wind, well back from the hole, straining our ears in a vain attempt to catch the sound of a baying terrier.

One-holers such as these don’t always offer a bolt and although 'Midge' wasn’t a hard dog as such, it was seldom that she allowed a fox to push its way past her. However, we had no idea if a circular tube had been created in the depths of this earth, something not uncommon in these parts.

If the terrier was on the tail of the fox as it crept round a circular tube then it was quite likely that we would indeed be blessed with a bolt, as although the digging wasn’t hard on this ground, the locator showed the dog at over six feet when one of our party decided to see where she was.

I crept to the hole on hands and knees and pushed my head hard against the entrance. I could faintly hear that familiar steady bay, though only faintly, obviously round a corner in the depths of the earth.

'Midge' was obviously facing the toothy end of her fox, and from now on it would be a war of attrition.

“Bolt” says the terrier. “Shan’t” says the fox in return. “Go away you irritating little dog!” replies the fox. “You better bolt or I’ll come and get you” threatens the terrier, though in Midge’s case this was just a load of hot air. As I said, she was no hard dog; tenacious, but not hard in the sense that she would have ever tried to kill her fox.

But things were moving now, and I could hear the grunting snap and whining roar from the fox as it menaced the terrier, and the baying went up an octave or two as the terrier received a nip, then settled back down again to that steady, almost monotonous barking.

This was getting us nowhere but we were always loathe to dig if we thought that the terrier hadn’t driven the fox to a stop-end. We decided to start digging anyway, as often the vibration of the spades on earth was enough to persuade a stubborn fox to remove itself from their vicinity.

Sure enough, after only a couple of spits the locator showed that the terrier was on the move again and I scurried back from the hole a few metres, hunching down against the side of the dyke in an attempt to blend in with the weeds and thistles, hands firmly holding the collars of the two lurchers who were of course fully aware of what was about to happen.

I was, and still am, impressed at the speed at which a fox can exit a seemingly mouse-sized hole, and even more impressed when that fox proves to be a larger than standard specimen.

As is so often the case, this fox exited at speed, threw itself across the dyke and cunningly slipped along the dyke wall, using every morsel of vegetation to hide its progress.

The lurchers were slipped and one crossed the dyke to cover the far side whilst the other ploughed straight through the weeds on the line of the fox.It was all over in less time than it has taken me to write the last two paragraphs, though in my memory time seems to stand still when re-viewing such events.

In reality the time elapsed was less than one minute, from the time the fox bolted to the time we fished the carcass out of the mud in the dyke bottom accompanied by two equally sodden lurchers.

All that waiting for less than one minute’s action for the lurchers, but another job well done and another chicken killer accounted for.