Mah explains that in the Chinese classic text “The Classic of Mountains and Seas,” the fox is depicted as a malevolent spirit that devours humans. “Encountering a dead European red fox both excites and frightens me as a Southeast Asian Australian,” he says, as he thinks of the fox as introduced species, a sentinel of British colonisation and an apex predator in a foreign land. “Foxes have ravaged native wildlife and reshaped the Australian landscape irreversibly.”