Once, when I was a child of seven or eight,
I turned a corner on a wooded path
And saw a fox a few feet from my face.
We stood stock still and took each other in:
Instinctively, I looked down at his paws;
He stared at me a moment, then he turned
And loped away downhill, between the trees,
Unhurried, but inexorably gone.

His paws had all been there, I'd counted them,
And so he couldn't be that fox, the fox
Some serious grown-up had described for me,
The one whose inadvertent paw had stepped
On steel that sprang shut, snap (the man had snapped
His fingers) just like this: he gripped my arm,
Then asked how brave I was. Could I have done
What that fox did? He'd gnawed the fur and flesh
Down to the bone, imagine how that hurt,
Then cracked the bone, chewed through the lot, and so
Escaped, leaving the keeper only this:
And here he'd slipped a paw into my hand,
Soft, small, and lifeless, with no blood on it.

There was another story I was told
Around that time, which in my mind belonged
With that hallucinatory, bad moment.
The village churchyard had an ancient grave
Whose slab had moved, so that a gap had opened
Through which the darkness showed. One moonless night
A group of scallywags had dared each other
To run and put a hand beneath the slab.
One had agreed, and, as the others waited
Crouched down beside the churchyard wall, they'd heard
A terror-stricken scream, and run off home.
The next day their companion was discovered:
When he had turned to join his friends, a branch
Had snagged his jersey's sleeve, as if a hand
Reached out to hold him, and his heart had stopped.

The fox then or the boy: which would I be?