SOPHIE THE SAND FOX

 

In the south of the country stretches an immense sea of sand. Like waves of the ocean, row after row of towering dunes roll to far beyond the horizon.  Between the mountains of soft golden sand lie silvery plains of hard sand crusted with salt.

This is the gold and silver kingdom of the sand creatures. And the princess of this realm was Sophie the Sand fox.

 

Sophie was still young, a beautiful vixen with very light cream coloured fur, enormous ears and a long bushy tail that ended in a pure white tip. She was born a couple of years ago and had left her mother and litter mates only the previous summer, when food had been hard to catch and each had to make their own way.

 

In the East the sky was becoming lighter. As the darkness receded, pearly pink and soft gold colours painted the sky and the heavy mist that lay over the soft dunes. As the light grew stronger, the mist became transparent, like the veils that cover the face of a beautiful dancer. This world had no limits and no sounds, light and colour filled it to overflowing.

As the golden disk of the sun rose over the eastern horizon, the mist started to lift, and revealed the treasure it had carried: diamond dew drops quivered on every bush and blade, drops of life-giving liquid, precious in this land without water.

A Desert skunk beetle stood on the sand, with its head low to the ground and its back sticking up. Dew had gathered on its shiny black carapace and was rolling down its body to its mouth, replenishing the moisture needed to survive another day.

A spider’s web hung like a diamond necklace between two tussocks of desert grass, luring insects into its embrace with the promise of water.

Through the receding mist a large shape became visible. A lone Sand gazelle walked slowly towards a stand of zahra that flowered with bright yellow flowers, now half crumpled under the weight of the morning dew. The gazelle started browsing the favoured plant, enjoying the cool taste of water on its tongue.

A Hoopoe lark hopped from the ground into a low bush and started to sing its praise to the new morning.

 

A slanting ray of sunshine penetrated into the burrow of Sophie, who stirred in her sleep and woke. She lay still for a little while longer, savouring the peace of the moment after a night of steady hunting. She did not have to get up, but she enjoyed spending a half hour in the sunshine before the heat became too strong. She emerged from her burrow, but only as far as its entrance and lay there looking at the view across the flat plain below her. Her burrow was dug into the lower slope of a sand dune, where the compacted sand was like a sand stone cliff, firm enough to give her protection. There were many of these burrows in this area, and she often switched from one to another, never staying long in one place.

Although she did not have many enemies in this remote place, moving around helped to keep her safe. But most of all, she needed to keep moving in order to find enough food to eat. Every night she covered long distances, running lightly across the sands as far as 20 kilometers in one night. She lived and hunted alone, but on her forays she came across other foxes once in a while and often she could hear their bird-like bark that carried far into the silent night.

Sophie yawned lazily, soaking up the warmth of the early morning sun, which she needed to keep her bones strong and her fur shiny. She stood up, then stretched her front legs as far as they could reach, wagging her bushy tail slowly. As she did so, her tummy showed round and bulging below her ribs. The babies inside her kicked at her sudden movement. Then she turned around and retreated into the cooler darkness of her burrow. She curled up, shutting the light away from her eyes by covering them with her tail and went to sleep.

 

The Sand gazelle had eaten his fill on the bushes and grasses at the dune’s edge. He avoided the bright green salt bushes that grew on the flat sabkha plain between the dunes. Although they looked very appetizing, he knew that eating them would make his stools thin and cause him to lose precious liquid from his body. Ignoring the harmful plants he walked to an outcrop of wind-eroded sand stone, which would provide a small sliver of shade throughout the long hot day. There he lay down to chew his cud.

 

The sun rose and started to burn, even in this early spring season.

The light shimmered on the silvery salt of the sabkha between the dunes, where a few camels were browsing the salt bushes, their hind legs stained with their liquid stool.

From a distance it looked as if their legs were ten feet tall, quivering stilts, standing in blue patches of water. But this was a mirage. There was no water in this desert, except for the brine that was stored in the globular leaves of the salt bushes.

 

In her den, Sophie was restless. She was having pains as the time of the birth of her babies drew near. She lay with flattened ears, at times groaning softly as wave after wave of pain hit her. The first cub appeared just as the sun was touching the desert horizon with an orange rim. The western sky was aflame with the fire of the dying sun, while opposite it was dark indigo turning into black. When the sliver of the moon rose Sophie was surrounded by three blind babies, suckling at her swollen teats with vigour.

That night Sophie stayed with the cubs, licking them every time when they had nursed, to stimulate their tummies and to clean them after they had voided. Cleaning them was important, because it prevented predators from smelling them. For even inside the burrow the baby foxes were not safe from the prowling Monitor Lizards or their cousin the Red Fox.

 

All that night and the next day Sophie went without food. When the sun set on the second day she was weak with hunger. She crept out of the burrow before it was completely dark, hoping to catch one or two of the day-active sand lizards still foraging among the grasses. Swiftly she loped across the hard sand at the bottom of the sand dune. Her ears were pricked as she listened carefully for any soft rustle that would betray an animal movement. From the corner of her eye she saw a small lizard run with lightning speed for the cover of a stand of grass. She pounced on the bush with all fours, hoping to catch the reptile before it had a chance to disappear in its burrow. But even though she was very fast, the lizard was faster still. She had more luck with a large Darkling beetle that was out on an early stroll. With relish she crunched it with her strong jaws and sharp teeth.

 

The sabkha plain stretched for several hundreds of meters between the sand dunes, and most of the time Sophie stayed where the going was easy. But she knew that there was a larger plain on the other side of the large dune on her right. To get there she had to climb the sloping soft sand, which was still hot under her feet. As she struggled up the dune, she saw another early hunter, who was better adapted to this soft sand.

 

A Sand cat plodded uphill with less difficulty than Sophie, because his feet were covered with a thick pad of wiry hair, that prevented him from sinking into the sand and from burning his feet. Sophie knew him, having met him before. They were not friends, but avoided each other. They posed no danger to each other, but since they hunted in the same area for the same food, it was good hunting strategy not to stay close.

 

Sophie watched the cat as he flattened himself behind a small ripple in the dune, pressing his broad head with the low-set ears to the ground to hide behind the minimal cover. She did not wait to see what the cat was looking at, but turned tail and trotted away, following the sharp edge of the dune till she saw a small clump of very stunted ghaf trees down below. She started down the far slope of the dune, which was so steep that she lost her footing and slid down, throwing up a cloud of dust behind her. So much for the stealthy approach! Her uncontrolled slide down the dune startled a bird out of the small tree. On silent wings a Little owl swooped over the sand, towards its burrow in a sandstone outcrop nearby.  Before it disappeared into its burrow, it popped its head up to take a last look at Sophie with its serious large eyes.

 

Sophie crept around the trunks of the trees. As she had expected, here was food! A gecko bolted up a trunk and was quickly grabbed by Sophie’s flashing jaws. In a last ditch effort to save its life, the gecko shed its tail, which dropped to the ground and lay there twitching. Sophie was distracted by the moving appendage and the gecko made good its escape, leaving the fox only a tiny morsel on which to snack.

Fortunately, Sophie’s chosen hunting ground was well frequented by geckos. All the sand geckos were active at night and several of them were hunting between the leaf litter and grasses for ants, termites and beetles. Sophie managed to catch two, before she felt the need to return to her burrow to check on her babies. The climb back up the steep side of the dune was not easy, but there was no other way. Because the dunes are shaped by the wind, they are all more or less the same: a gently sloping side on the windward side and a steep slope on the other side.  Most animals preferred to travel along the sabkha plains between the dunes. Sophie’s efforts were well rewarded today: as she topped the dune she surprised a fat gerbil, far away from its burrow. With a swift jump she landed on top of the squealing rodent and killed him with a swift bite to the neck. She sat on her haunches to devour the prey, relishing the juicy meat, that quenched her thirst better than the dry beetles and skinny geckos had done. Replete with food she loped down dune to her burrow and with a contented sigh she lay down to feed her softly mewing babies.

 

The Sand cat had little difficulty traversing the slopes. He was a very small cat, weighing no more than a few pounds. But for a small animal he had an amazing appetite. Already he had managed to catch a large jerboa and some beetles, but still he needed more.

His large ears were especially well equipped to catch the smallest sounds, even those of small reptiles moving under the surface of the sand. One such creature was the Worm lizard. Four inches long, pink with blue-gray blotches, with a tiny mouth and pinpoint eyes, it resembled a fat earthworm. In fact it was neither a worm nor a lizard, but a special desert animal that survived by hunting grubs, ants and termites underground.

There he was safe from most predators, but not from the Sand cat with his sharp hearing. When he sensed something moving beneath his feet, he quickly dug with his paws and unearthed the Worm lizard, which made a welcome snack.

 

Rounding some bushes he stopped in his tracks as he heard a strange noise. It was a rustling sound, as if two rough surfaces were being rubbed together. He looked around carefully and saw a small snake coiled up, ready to strike. The Sand cat was not in the least intimidated. He was an expert at killing vipers and this young viper was just the kind of snack he craved. He approached the snake carefully and hit it very quickly with its powerful paw. The snake crumpled in a heap, and had no time to recover, before the cat had hit it again, and again, and again...

When the snake lay stunned and motionless, the cat finished it off quickly and started to eat it at leisure, taking his time to clean himself thoroughly afterwards.

 

The next day was a Friday. The animals of the desert knew this day of the week because there was always more chance of cars driving along the sabkha and across the dunes. This time there was a convoy of three four-wheel drive cars that wound its way between the salt bushes. The cars stopped frequently, with the people getting out and pointing in various directions, writing busily on notepads and taking readings from a small machine that they held in their hands. This GPS device could pinpoint a person’s exact location by sending electronic beams to three or four different satellites as they sped on their courses high above the earth. It was a more precise way of navigating these seas of sands than the way in which it had been done for many, many ages by the travelling bedu, who looked at the stars to know where they were.

 

The animals of Sophie’s sabkha stayed in their hiding places and the people thought the desert was empty and uninhabited.  They were setting out the course for a car rally that was to take place a few weeks later. But the animals did not know that and had no idea about the disruption that would take place in their lives.

 

The next day the winds started to blow. A cold shamal blew from the north-east, gaining in strength by the minute. Plumes of sand smoked from the top of the dunes. The tracks of the cars were soon covered by sand. As the sands lifted higher and higher into the air, the light of the sun was blotted out and an untimely dusk settled on the land. The camels in the sabkha turned their backs to the wind, closed their nostrils and lowered their heavy eyelashes. In this way they were little troubled by the dust, that threatened to suffocate all that lived.

 

The winds blew for almost two days, and Sophie could not hunt. The suckling babies took nourishment from her and she became thin and exceedingly hungry. As soon as the wind died down she slipped out of her burrow, even though the night had not yet fallen. There was no time to waste, for she knew that the winds would be followed by the rains that were bearing down on her home in dark rolling clouds. Quickly she darted between the salt bushes on the plain to the opposite dune. There she foraged between the sedges until she found a large arta bush. The bush was aflame with its dark red hairy seedpods, which she liked to eat. Other animals also favoured the bush and she managed to catch a

a fat jird that was munching on the seeds. The jird was quite a meal and she wolfed part of it down right away. One large piece she carried back to her den, just reaching there when the heavens opened and the rain came down in ice-cold sheets of water. Her burrow was well located just a bit up a low sand stone cliff and angled upward, so that the cosy nursery could not flood.

 

Other animals were not so lucky. Some geckos and lizards died in their burrows that night, while a Monitor lizard spent the night in the pelting rain, because his burrow had flooded. When morning dawned, the sabkha between the dunes was transformed into a lake. The sand of the dunes was now dark orange, and as the sun slowly dried the sands, the tops became lighter yellow. The water on the flat plain could not sink away easily, for underneath the surface of the sand was a layer of salt crystals that prevented the water from draining. The lake attracted a number of birds that would normally not land in these arid wastes. Most numerous were the Sand grouse, who drank the water, and soaked it up into their breast feathers to take back to their nest for their young. They arrived in pairs and small flocks, filling the air with the noise of their whirring wings and excited chatter.

A Stone curlew came in the night, giving its lonely call. In the morning only its distinctive footprints were proof that it had really been there. 

 

A few days later a miracle occurred.

 

The water of the flood-lake started to ripple with life. Along the edges a mass of small wriggling creatures congregated. They were Tadpole shrimps, whose eggs had lain for many, many years in the sand, waiting for just such a downpour as had just occurred to burst into life.  Within a few days they had grown to their adult size of seven centimeters.

Sophie had never seen them before and she approached the edge of the water cautiously, sniffing the air and peering into the rippling water to see what it was that caused this disturbance. She hit the water with a paw and splashed some on the sand, causing a few of the strange looking creatures to land upside down beneath a bush. After another thorough sniff she decided that it would be possible to eat them. She was delighted by this new easily procured food.

Throughout the day Sophie and many other of the desert animals came to the water to drink and eat of the unexpected bonanza that the hundreds of Tadpole shrimps provided.  The shrimps themselves were very busy for they had to complete their entire life cycle in the few short weeks that the pool would take to dry up and disappear. They mated and laid eggs in a matter of days, and as the pool became smaller, they piled onto one another, making it even easier for their predators to catch them.

 

The rain had soaked the hard sands of the sabkha and the soft sand of the dunes. At the edges of the dunes, where the sand was soft, a green hue covered the yellow slopes. Small plants started to emerge now that the rainwater had dissolved the protective cover of their seeds. Quickly they grew, and started to flower. For they too had to complete their life cycle in a short time, before the water had sunk out of their reach. With the plants came the insects. In the daytime only some flies and grasshoppers were active, but at night many moths and crickets, beetles and lacewings whirred in the air and crawled between the plants. At night the Desert hares and the gerbils were eating their fill on the juicy herbs, while at dusk and dawn the lone gazelle could be seen browsing on the new greenery.

The geckos, the Sand cat and Sophie had easy hunting these days.

 

It was a good time to be alive on Sophie’s sabkha.

 

But this would not last very long. There was danger looming for Sophie and the other animals of her home.

 

The fox cubs were now four weeks old. Sophie had moved them a few times to other burrows nearby. So far everything had gone very well. Two of the cubs were dozing in the entrance of the burrow. Their bodies were rolly-polly fat underneath their white fur. Sparse hair was sticking up from the top of their round heads. The bushy tail was stretched out behind them like a large paintbrush. In the clear morning sunlight, they seemed pure white.

One cub was exploring another burrow some twenty feet away. He was playing with the shards of ostrich shells, left from a nest that had held ostrich chicks over a hundred years ago. There were dozens of these shells lying in one place, smooth caramel brown on the inside and light cream-coloured with a rough pattern on the outside. He patted the shells with his paw, enjoying the clear tinkle that they made when they touched. He had no idea that birds as tall as small ghaf trees had grown from the chicks that developed inside these shells.  The ostriches had disappeared from the desert more than fifty years ago, probably because of the double hardship of lack of food and being hunted for meat.

Sophie, who was inside the burrow behind her dozing cubs, could not see her adventurous cub. That was why she did not see the danger that threatened. From the dune top above the burrow a large Monitor lizard came running down. He had seen the cub and was hungry for a meal. It all happened so fast, that there was no time to escape. The lizard’s sharp teeth caught the small fox in a deadly grip and it died without a sound.  The other cubs were startled by the sudden movement and quickly retreated into the burrow. Sophie peered out to see what was the matter, but when she saw the lizard, still feeding, she herded her remaining cubs far down into the safety of the den.  If the monitor had seen them, he could follow them there and there would be little she could do to defend herself and her cubs. She waited a long time. Nothing happened. Maybe the lizard had not seen them in his headlong run down the dune. Or maybe his meal had satisfied him enough not to want more food right away. She missed her third cub and could not quite understand what had happened to it. When evening came she went looking for it, finding its scent at the nearby burrow and then again at the place where a brown stain in the sand marked the lizard’s meal. She whined softly, without knowing why…

 

Shortly after the death of the fox cub, another disaster happened. This time death came at the hand of some young men, who came to the sabkha in a four-wheel drive car. They drove slowly, looking for the burrows of Spiny-tailed lizards or hares. Or foxes, if they could find them. Fortunately, the entrance of Sophie’s den was hidden by a dense salt bush and the men passed by without noticing it. But as they drove along, they flushed a desert hare. It had been resting under an arta bush but when the car approached too closely, it took flight and zigzagged across the plain finding refuge in a burrow some distance away. It turned out not to be a safe refuge, because the car stopped and the men walked to the burrow, carrying a can of gasoline and a shovel. They poured some gasoline down the burrow and held a burning match to it. The terrified hare came out, screaming as the hot flames touched its fur. As it hurtled out of the burrow, one of the men killed it quickly with a blow of the spade. They laughed as they picked up the hare and took it to the car.

 

A few days later several cars came rushing into the sabkha plain. At the far end they stopped in a group and people emerged, carrying boxes, chairs and sun umbrellas. They were the marshals of the car rally that was taking place this day.

A large plume of dust appeared beyond the ridge of the southern dunes. A loud growling noise became stronger and stronger until the air seemed filled with it. First one, then another car came appeared at the top of the dune, pausing there briefly before plunging down into the soft sand and careening down the slip face. More cars followed. The dune turned into a mass of tracks, pits and furrows. Several cars burrowed themselves so deep into the sand that they stalled and had to be dug out. Some raced across the plain towards the marshalling station at the far end. As they tried to pass one another, they drove off the track that led down the length of the plain and drove cross-country, flattening plants and collapsing the burrows of the animals that had made their homes between the roots of the sparse vegetation. One went so far off the track that it drove into the area that had been covered with water earlier. The sand there was still soft and treacherous. The car bogged down to its axles and churned the mud till it splattered the windshield and even the roof.  Several other cars rushed to the rescue.

Sophie’s entire world was filled with the noise of shouting voices, loud music and growling engines. She pressed herself close to the ground in her den, with flattened ears. The cubs had wanted to have a look what was happening, but she cuffed them with her paw and pushed them far into the den for safety.

 

She did not know what was happening outside, but she did not like the sound of it. The event was called a Fun Run. If Sophie had had a concept of fun, she would have thought that this was not her idea of fun. It certainly was no fun for the creatures of Sophie’s world. When over two hundred cars had passed across the plain, it was hard to recognize it as their home. Most of the bushes lay broken and ground into the sand. Countless small burrows of gerbils, snakes, and scorpions had collapsed, their entrances filled with sand and their inhabitants suffocating inside. The nests of the Crested larks at the base of grassy hummocks were destroyed, when the cars plowed through the grasses. The small seedlings of the plants that had sprouted just after the rain were destroyed before they had a chance to flower and make new seeds for future seasons. In other places the heavy vehicles had compressed the sand so hard that any seeds that were still hidden there would not sprout for many years to come.

 

When the cars moved on and darkness came, Sophie decided it was time to move once again. Although the cubs were already quite large, she carried them one by one, dragging them by the scruff of their necks with her strong jaws. This time she took her cubs across the high dune to a parallel sabkha, for her old home would not have enough food to sustain them for many months to come. Fortunately the desert was large and many areas were still undisturbed.  She found a new home easily, where she and her cubs lived their peaceful existence for many more years.