Czytaj książkę: «The Fox and the Ghost King»

Imagine a family of foxes – Mum, Dad and the four of us little cubs – living in our den under a garden shed in Leicester. That’s us. I am the oldest, and I am the boss cub too, the friskiest, the peskiest, the pushiest. Dad likes that because it reminds him of himself, he says. And that’s why, if I pester him enough, he takes me out with him, now that I’m a little older, when he goes on his hunting expeditions at night. Mum never does, because she says she hunts better without me there to worry about. And it’s true; she always brings back a fat rabbit or a rat or a mole or a vole every time she goes out. Mum’s milk is so good and tasty and there’s always enough for all of us. But she does snap at me when I push my sisters off to get the best place to feed.

Dad never snaps at me. He’s a good hunter too, but he prefers dustbins, he says, because they don’t run away, and they’re full of tasty surprises. He hunts pizza crusts, and chips – my favourite, because I love tomato sauce – and chewy Chinese spare ribs, bits of burgers and buns – all great stuff. He’s the best dustbin hunter in the world, my dad, and he’s the top fox around, top dad too.

He’s not afraid of anyone, or anything, not ghosts, not kings, not even ghost kings – as you will see.

But the most important thing you have to know about our family is that all of us are football crazy: Leicester City fans, Foxes fans. The Foxes are our team, win or lose – mostly lose – the best team in the world.

Every fox in the whole town, in the whole country just about, is a Foxes football fan. We foxes are brought up Foxes fans.

All his life Dad has been going to the home games; Mum too, when she can, when she’s not having cubs. Down in our smelly old den – we like it smelly – all the talk is of football, or food. We talk a lot about food, it’s true: pizzas, worms, frogs, mice, chips – especially chips. A varied diet we have.

So you can imagine how excited I was when Dad asked me for the first time, one winter’s night, to come with him to the football. I felt at long last I was becoming a proper grown-up fox. All I wanted now was my silly droopy, drippy little tail to grow into a proper brush, like Dad’s. Once you’ve got a proper brush for a tail, then you’re a proper fox, but I was off to my first football match and that was good enough for me.

Over the moon, I was.

I loved it that first time I went, and every time afterwards, the lights, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, the music, the singing, the chanting. The losing wasn’t so great. Dad always said then that the referee was rubbish, that he had favoured the other side.