Red Fox

Roberts sets out to make Red Fox and the animal world around him more understandable and relatable to readers through the use of vivid, expressive detail and a thoroughly engaging story, and in doing so encourages awareness of the misunderstanding and cruelty which is sometimes involved in humanities relationship with wild animals.

Excerpt:

Chapter I.

"The price of his life"

Two voices, a mellow, bell-like baying and an excited yelping, came in chorus upon the air of the April dawn. The musical and irregularly blended cadence, now swelling, now diminishing, seemed a fit accompaniment to the tender, thin-washed colouring of the landscape which lay spread out under the gray and lilac lights of approaching sunrise. The level country, of mixed woodland and backwoods farm, still showed a few white patches here and there where the snow lingered in the deep hollows; but all over the long, wide southward-facing slope of the uplands, with their rough woods broken by occasional half-cleared, hillocky pastures, the spring was more advanced. Faint green films were beginning to show on the birch and poplar thickets, and over the pasture hillocks; and every maple hung forth a rosy veil that seemed to imitate the flush of morning.

[...]