Mall Foxes

Let's consider cryptids. It takes so little for an animal to migrate from the category of pedestrian fauna to an extra-ordinary cryptozoological creature (speaking of which, when did "creature" start to mean an animal that doesn't exist?).

For instance, take the foxes that live at Austin's Highland Mall. They are an elusive animal in an incongruous place. And it takes very little darkness to stymie attempts to record their existence.

I saw two foxes in the mall parking lot last week. They skimmed the asphalt with their noses to the ground, hunting for dropped pieces of food court cuisine. If they were lucky they ate a gumball or licked residual pretzel-dipping sauce. It's amazing how even at a distance they look so little like cats, or dogs, or raccoons, or anything else that you would expect to see.

Each image was more blurry and grainy than the last. I found myself annotating the unconvincing shapes with strident labels.









Even the video seems unconvincing.

Considering this quality of evidence, I could find Bigfoot and chupacabra sleeping in the Dillards dumpsters and never convince anyone.