Geometric fox curled around a crescent moon

The fox came back last night, the one I wrote about, sitting out past the cairn with her nose lifted at the moon as if she had been asked a question and was deciding how to answer. Mr Pryce says she is only a vixen after the rabbits on the Hollin slopes, but I think she is keeping an appointment. She sits in the curve of the sky the way a cat folds itself into a basket, tail round her feet, and the moon is the ring of stone we set up on the ridge, all bevelled edges and dark facets where the light cannot reach.

I have been drawing her in the back of the survey book because the theodolite is no use after dark. I keep trying to make her soft and she will not have it. Every line wants to be a plane. Her ear is a triangle folded over another triangle, her back a set of slanted panels running from grey to nearly black, and her tail is a long blade that comes round to meet the edge of the moon. Pryce says a fox this angular would never catch a rabbit. I told him she does not need to catch anything. She only needs to be where the sky is cut.

Yesterday the chainman went missing in the fog on the far side of the valley, and we walked the lines for three hours calling his name. Near dawn I looked up and saw the moon had come clear of the cloud, a clean white crescent, and below it the vixen stood on the path, facing down the slope. She waited until I caught up. Then she turned towards the beck, and where she stopped there was Tom, sitting on a rock with his boots full of water, as calm as a man in church.

I do not think I shall tell Pryce the whole of it. Burn this letter if you like, but keep the drawing. I have pinned it above the fire where I can see it from the bed.

Your brother, Edwin