My day could not have started better. Usually I only come out of my room after 8 a.m. but today somehow I had the feeling that I would better spend the morning out there. Now I do not regret going out of my room so early.
Yesterday I woke up early in the morning and went out the tent to drink a coffee. It was very foggy like every morning and I could not see far. I was just staring into space and sipping my coffee when I heard a noise as if a dog shaked its head. I turned my face into the direction of the sound and suddenly I saw a dog-like creature standing in the middle of the field just 4 meters away from me. Yellowy grey thick fur, short legs, long body, strangely round head and a pair of bright yellow eyes that were looking straight at me. It was clearly not a dog. However before I could have said "fox" it had already ran away.
Since it was around 5:30 and I was still half asleep I did not really realise what I had seen and didn't think of it at all during the day. However in the evening at dinner somebody brought up the wildlife of the area and my morning encounter popped into my head again. I asked Siddarth if there were foxes living on the hill and he said "Of course! Foxes, leopards, porcupines. We've got all sorts of animals in the jungle." At that point got very interested in what I had seen in the morning and looked it up on Google. It seemed like I met a tibetan fox, which mostly lives in China and Nepal. Fortunately it is classified as least concern on the IUCN red list. Although (according to Wikipedia) it lives "well away from humans or from heavy vegetation cover" which is interesting since we're in a village near to the jungle. They probably find prey in the villages easier.
