But even dumb brutes can learn, and I have long since quit even violence, which I used to enjoy as a sport (but that passed when I realized that not everybody feels that way, and some people really want to hurt you).
Vengeance went the same way. It was fun to plot and to talk about, but the real thing required more time and energy than being saddled with a terminal disease, and not even the best vengeance ever paid the rent.
The english language is not crowded with words beginning with the letter "v" that suggest anything but trouble. After violence and vengeance, there is also vulgar, vicious, victim, vermin, vain, vacant, vile, vampire.... the list is long, with not a lot of smiles.
Right. And never mind these arcane drifts of language. We will leave them to villains and vissmongers like Edwin Newman and Robin MacNeil.
What are we talking about now is the hideos death in life of a red fox, considered by many experts to be one of the smartest beasts in nature.
But not for me. There is a whole nest of those vicious little red buggers about 200 yards across the field from my front porch, and I am now in the process of killing them. I got the big one a few days ago and the others have gone into hiding.
They went all to pieces when the old man finally returned from his last trip across the field. He was blind in both eyes and covered with a hard crust of feathers and peacock dung, and he was leaving a trail of blood from the stumps of his hind legs.
It was midafternoon and the carrion birds were just beginning to think about feeding, but they were not in any hurry. There is no lack of food around here. The peacocks eat well--even at 20 below--and so do all the scavengers. There is always plenty of wheat, cracked corn and French fries.
But not alot of meat, which is what they really like.... They will eat anything that bleeds, including their own kind, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. If one of them gets wounded, he will be quickly devoured by the others. They eat the eyes and entrails first, and then they get into the meat.
On any market survey with a "chic skale" from one to ten, the red fox will run about eight. He is a very stylish little animal, with a neo-valuable pelt and social cachet on the level of mean horses and fast dogs.
Even George Washington loved the red fox. He "spent many happy hours running foxhounds over the wooded areas of his Mount Vernon plantation."
On some farms they will settle for lesser prey, like the grey fox--one of the lower and uglier strains in the vulpes vulva family; it has eyes like warts and hair like the spines of a sea urchin, and a brain like a chicken on speed.
There is also the coyote, which is hunted or at least chased now and then by gangs of nouveau riche huntsmen in places like Vail and Palm Springs.... But it is not quite the same, because the coyote always wins.
He is not a vain little punk like the red fox, with its bitchy little temper and its pampered way of life.
The coyote is a mean, solitary meat eater who will eventually kill any dog who can follow it far enough.
But I have never had a problem with coyotes, although the valley is full of them. In 15 years of rentless coexistence, not even a rabid coyote has ever come up on my front porch and killed one of the family animals, or even chewed up one of the peacocks.
The red fox had a different attitude. He was arrogant and greedy and rude, and somewhere along the line he developed a taste for Salisbury steak. He also killed the family cat and took to roaming brazenly in the yard and even up on my porch in broad daylight, sniffing around the peacock cage.
The Hav-a-Hart trap is a heavy metal box about 4 feet long, with doors on both ends and a nice little food tray in the middle. When the animal gets far enough in to eat the Salisbury steak, both doors clang shut and lock firmly. escape is impossiple.
When I found the red fox in the cage I talked to him for a while as I prepared a mixture of feathers and peacock dung, which I then began shoveling through the bars and into the cage with him. The fox became hysterical as he trashed around in the mess, trying to bite off the end of the shovel.
Every once in a while I sprayed him with liquid glue and then a final shot of Mace in his eyes before I let him go.
He looked more like a raccoon than a fox at that point. The glue had set up quickly, producing a layered effect with the dung and the feathers. The beast dragged himself out of the cage, yapping and howling, and ran akwardly across the field in the general direction of his den in the briar patch.
On his way across the field, the hideous, stinking, half-blind, brain-shattered animal had to pass between two yearling peacocks who were pecking around in the grass for bugs, paying no attention to this thing that they didn't even recognize as a fox. I was stunned, howerver, to see the fox veer off his course and make a kind of staggering dumb-vicious pass at one of the birds. So I shot him from behind with a load of double-0 buckshot to help him on his way. The last time i saw him he was covered with blood and two huge red-tailed hawks were circling overhead preparing to take him into the food chain.
Hunter S. Thompson October 20, 1986