THE FOXES

 And one day, who knows how it came about, there was peace between the foxes and chickens!

      The foxes could no longer eat the chickens! Who knows why, maybe the farmers had intervened…

      However, it was like, like…I don’t know why this was so! The chickens could happily scratch around here and there, and the foxes watched them with their snouts wide-open without so much as being able to touch a single egg!

      “Not even one egg!” said a fox who was being driven crazy by this.

      “Not even dead, can we touch a chicken,” a fox quietly repeated to a friend of hers.

      “Who knows when the end of the world will come, here in the countryside! We are foxes!” the third fox re-repeated to the first fox that was being driven crazy by this.

      The chickens happily fluttered round in the sunny spring grass right in front of the foxes, as if to provoke them.

      Everyone knows that chickens are chickens and are conceited! Knowing that the foxes couldn’t touch them, they would lay eggs and roll them around in the grass like billiard balls with their yellow claws!

      But the chickens didn’t know or understand how strange the world is! Because if they had known they would have stayed nice and quiet in the middle of the farmyard or the hen house, and the foxes wouldn’t have indulged in their fancies! Because, as the proverb goes: “Out of sight, out of mind!”

      It was now night, and an old fox that was having difficulty sleeping under a bush, was bouncing around in its sleep like a crazy ball!

      Who knows why she was jumping? Maybe she was thinking? And if she was, what was she planning to do?

     Morning came, and the old fox, who was the first up, angrily

bawled out:” Ah, you are rolling your eggs under our noses? Didn’t you know that as well as foxes, there are wolves as well and that wolves eat chickens? They certainly haven’t made any agreement with the farmers!”

      She called a fox over and told it this: “Toddle through the cyclamen wood where you will surely meet some wolves and…don’t say much! Later the farmers will know everything. Start off talking about this and that and that and this, but then just say that the foxes no longer like chickens, and that there are a lot of them here. During the day they happily scratch around in the grass so calmly, that it’s as if they are on their way to a party! Say no more, and then come straight back here.”

      Then the old fox, who gave the orders round there, instructed the foxes to browse the grass like goats do.

     “We must eat…” mumbled a fox.

     “Yes! Grass!”

     “But…”

     “Quiet. No fussing, just eat the grass like goats do.” So all the foxes started to eat the grass like goats, right under the nose of the wide-eyed farmers!

     “Are the farmers looking?”

     “Yes, yes!”

     “Ah they’re looking are they? Good, good: eat a lot of grass and show them that you have filled-up your bellies! Then they will never be able to say that we ate their damned chickens.”

     Then the wolves came and…

     …So this was how all the chickens came to be eaten! Because once a fox, always a fox, and he who knows one and does one more than the devil must never be teased!

     So the chickens were eaten, the wolves were skinned and the farmers were left to drown their sorrows and anger in their wine!