We don’t exchange messages in our Observant WhatsApp group chat on weekends and bank holidays. It’s our rule, and we only break it in exceptional circumstances. On Easter Monday, I returned home from a bike ride to find 21 unread messages in our group chat De Objes, which has a picture of our office dog Cockey, who is unfortunately no longer with us, as its icon. This is just to say that we do love animals – but there’s a time and a place for everything.
Exception
The exception that proves the rule came from colleague CF. She had just made the local news (Wat is loos in Mestreech and 1Limburg) and wanted us to hear it first-hand. She would even appear on national TV, with a brief appearance on the children’s news programme Jeugdjournaal being the highlight of the day. (This wasn’t exactly how she saw it; she prefers that her name appears in the byline rather than the story itself, let alone on TV.)
Yapping
On Easter Sunday, she’d first smelled something strange in the house and then heard yapping. She could tell that it wasn’t a dog, but it was clear that the yap was coming from inside the house. In the basement, she discovered a fox cub that had peed all over the floor, hence the smell. It had fallen from the adjacent crawl space, where CF and her partner found its siblings a little later. Mother Fox was nowhere to be seen and clearly hadn’t been around for a while. The cubs were starving, according to the Animal Ambulance workers who had now arrived. It was a litter of five cubs; two had died, the other three were taken to an animal shelter.
Dugout
As if that wasn’t enough, our colleague DV also shared his own latest news with the group chat. It wasn’t going to make the local paper, but during a football match in Mheer he had been tackled hard, just barely managed to avoid a wall, and ended up in the dugout, where he had to stay. His right wrist is severely bruised; we’re still waiting for the doctors to tell us whether there’s a fracture in it. He can only type with his left hand, and he can’t write with a pen at all (he’s right-handed). He’ll be forced to take it easy for a while.
CF is back at her desk; the media storm has passed. The crawl space has been closed off with a fence and marked with a sign: No Foxes Allowed.