Buffalo, frog and fox

I don't know how this watermarked print of buffalo ended up in my allotment shed. Behind the glass, somehow, seed casings, the sky stained by rain. It's been in the shed since the children were little, perhaps I brought it from the house, unable to throw it away. The flat, distant background is unlike any of the places I've seen buffalo - in the Kruger National Park, in woodland. And those were different buffalo, perhaps, with a harder, lumpier head, less graceful curve of the horns.

But the stain, the seeds, the reflection in the glass and the dust on the glass, all seem to lift the trio of buffalo into a more heavenly dimension, so this is no longer a print but a collaboration between the original painter, the printmaker, the framer, time and circumstance.

Likewise, the print made by a fox on the allotment in our days of snow - a series of hyphens by the plum tree drawing the line between me and it, night and day, between life in houses and life outside.

And it leads me to the memory of a sunny evening when a young fox sat down on the path and I carried on weeding, talking to it as I would to a child.

But doesn't every encounter with a fox build into a story that compels you to describe its skinny, careful legs, its big white tipped tail, its athlete's leap over the wall?

I think of the cub that fell into the window well, its mother's screams, the cat's astonishment as it ran towards the back door, hid behind the fridge, how Justine and I strained to release it at 3am because she'd also been woken by the vixen's distress, how I hope it found her when it ran back into the night.

I think of the older cub, shivering in the same window well all night until I heard its scratching and managed to cover it with a blanket. It was so cold, it let me carry it to the cemetery without any fear, let me put it down between gravestones in the tall grass behind my house and it almost didn't want to give up the warmth of the blanket. I had to shake a corner of it to encourage it away from the night anticipating its death.

And in a pond to the other side of Rob's plot, on a sunny false spring afternoon, a survivor of the snow and ice dragged itself up from the bottom for a little warmth.

I look past it to the pale and splayed shapes of the dead and bloated, trapped under thick ice and wonder how it survived. Watermarks, a pile of logs, a pink blanket printed with paw marks...our signs of life.