Nature lessons learned from a tree stand

"You can observe a lot, just by watching," Yogi Berra is reported to have quipped.
He was right. I learned a couple of things about foxes by watching them this past fall while hunting deer from a tree stand.
On the first occasion, I had been watching a doe feeding about 30 yards in front of me for quite some time when I heard something coming through the leaves. It was a red fox just trotting along and it was going to go past the deer on its way toward me.
The fox never stopped to look at the deer and the deer never even turned its head to look at the fox which passed quite close to her.
It occurred to me then that fox-deer interactions are pretty common. The deer could tell from the sound that it was a fox coming and the fox could tell from the smell that there was a deer off to the side. No big deal.
But then the fox came right to where I had walked an hour or so before. When it hit my scent it instantly whirled and sped away as fast as it could fly. To my astonishment, so did the deer. Apparently the deer knows the difference between the sound of a fox trotting and a fox fleeing.
Two weeks later, again in a tree stand about 100 yards from the first location, I heard something coming quickly through the leaves. It was another red fox and it was coming right toward the ladder stand. I expected it to respond to my scent like the other fox and vamoose. And sure enough, when the fox hit my scent it put on the brakes but after a moment's hesitation, ran right under the stand and beyond.
A few seconds later, I found out why. There was another fox on its tail and this one, when it hit my scent trail, did a 180 and fled back to where it had come.
I knew right away what had happened. The first fox used my scent to "rub" the second fox off its trail. Foxes are afraid of humans but the first fox was more afraid of the second fox than it was of me.
I could almost imagine the first fox saying, "Hey, there's a much bigger fox coming behind me. Wait and shoot him!"
I didn't realize how territorial foxes were until I found a dead fox one time right after a fresh snow. The only tracks in the snow were fox tracks and there weren't very many of them. I was a trapper at the time so I kept the fox and skinned it, carefully, wearing gloves because it seemed it must have died of a disease.
The skinning process, however, revealed four puncture wounds in the jugular. Another fox had killed it.
Foxes aren't always loners though. We had two that were more or less together here this fall. One fox was always about a hundred yards ahead of the other.
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