Sly
Sly, slytail, or slyfluff -- a red fox, and one of the few Wisewood residents that will use a garden as readily as a hedgerow, which is why most of Hellsborough has an opinion about them whether they've thought about it or not.
A sly holds a run rather than a territory in the way a grizzler does -- looser, overlapping with two or three neighbours, marked more by scent than by any visible boundary work. What it does defend, absolutely, is the den, and a vixen with kits underground will hold that ground against something considerably larger than the fox itself looks capable of troubling.
The danger to a person is close to nothing, most seasons. What changes it is the bark -- a sly's contact call carries a long way on a still murkneet, and it is close enough to a scream that half of Hellsborough has been woken at some point convinced someone's being murdered two gardens over. It is not the sound you should worry about. It's what a repeated, urgent bark from the same spot, going on past when a fox would normally give up and move on, tends to mean: something's cornered it, or it's cornered something else, and it hasn't decided yet whether to run.
They're opportunists first and hunters second, working bins, sheds, and the odd unguarded clucker run with the same low cunning the name promises, and I have never once caught a sly repeating a route two nights running. They learn faster than almost anything else in the Wisewood learns, which I suspect is the actual reason the name stuck.
Field note: a fox's bark on its own means nothing. A bark that keeps going, from one place, past the point where it should have moved on, means stay away from that spot until it stops.
| Type | Warden |
| HP | 4 |
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