It is commonplace these days to extol the virtues of nature, and the calming – indeed restorative – effect it can have. But it isn’t always a balm.

The other afternoon I strolled around the garden, listening to the birds, which in breeding season grow louder than the Berlin Philharmonic, and enjoying the sight of the blue tits popping in and out of their nestbox.

Stopping by a recently weeded border, I saw a mound of freshly dug earth. With the toe of my boot I started to scuff it back in place, and found myself looking at a mess of blood and gristle. Something had been buried in our garden overnight.

Not possessing an ounce of pioneering grit, I called Alan to come and see. First thoughts were whether we were being sent a message by the Borders branch of the Sopranos – that’s what comes of being addicted to Netflix rather than Springwatch.

With a spade, we gingerly uncovered a shallow grave and, rather than a horse’s head, came on a decapitated pheasant. The bird was recently killed. It wasn’t quite like finding Anne Boleyn in the flowerbed, but the beheading added an extra frisson to the encounter, indicating an expert killer was on the loose, and our garden had become its larder.

Alan carried the remains far into the field beyond the back gate, where it lay by a fence for the rest of the day.

It was a female pheasant, and as I got back to weeding, the loud, proud, territorial male that has been haunting the gardens all around here with his mate seemed subdued. He walked around the field clucking quietly like a hen, with none of his usual trumpeting.

At one point I saw him by the fence, a few feet from the corpse, standing motionless for a long time and not even peeping, as his coppery red and sea green plumage shone in the sun.

Do pheasants mourn? Can they recognise they have lost a partner? It’s too easy to anthropomorphise, but it did seem as if this bird felt uneasy, diminished, and alone.

Later, debris in the field caught my eye. When I went to investigate, a wide circle of clumped tawny feathers indicated the scene of the crime.

Our next door neighbour said he had heard a terrible commotion early the previous evening, coming from the direction of our garden.

We do have three cats in the vicinity, but they were not the prime suspects. This was clearly the work of a fox. Their modus operandi is to bite off the heads of birds, and bury the body to prevent others finding it. Later they will return to retrieve their cache.

It was interesting that in this instance, the fox was so hungry, or had so many mouths to feed, it had dared to go out in broad daylight.

Possibly catering for a den of cubs, it would have seen an easy target in such a ponderous, heedless creature. Since lockdown, Hoolet has been almost overrun by pheasants.

One across the road waits until the finches and tits have shaken nuts and crumbs from the bird feeder for it to gather. The males squawk as loud as saxophonists, and male and female alike have been parading around the village, slow and stately as royalty.

From a fox’s point of view, they might as well carry a placard reading “takeaway”.

Had we been real country folk, a friend said, we’d have put the bird in our own pot.

Learning of this incident, a neighbour recalled a day when she heard frantic quacking and clucking from her ducks and hens. Hurrying out she found a badger in their midst. To silence the duck, it had bitten off its face. In shock, she kicked it, and to her relief it ran off.

Badgers have ferocious jaws; you wouldn’t want to cross one. By the next morning, our pheasant’s corpse was gone from the field. There was a scraping of earth in the garden, so presumably the vixen, or dog, had returned to its fridge before following the scent to where we’d dumped it.

Since then, as dusk falls, I stand at the bottom of the garden, looking out to the woods beyond.

Somewhere out there our fox is biding its time.

It’s a pleasing thought, but not everyone sees it that way. These parts are home to the Buccleuch Hunt, one of the most famous in the country. In autumn and winter we often hear bugles and baying hounds. It’s a sound that sends a shiver up my spine.

Occasionally, as with most hunts, it falls foul of anti-hunt protesters, who remain convinced that legal loopholes allow hunting to continue as it always did, with dogs tearing foxes apart rather than simply flushing them to be shot. Yet since the ban in 2002, there has only been one successful prosecution of mounted huntsmen for illegal hunting.

It is dreadful to think of terrified animals being pursued, running for their lives until the hounds catch them.

Shooting is by far the cleanest and most humane way of dealing with creatures of any sort that pose a threat to farming and livestock.

Yet horseback hunting is bound up with country life in a way that is hard for urban dwellers or incomers like me to understand.

The old class divisions this upperclass pursuit used to epitomise – or was portrayed as embodying – no longer pertains; hunters come from many walks of life, as do those who provide for and look after the horses and packs. Were hunting on horseback to be banned entirely, innumerable livelihoods would be lost, as would a deep-rooted fixture of the rural calendar.

I would prefer no animal ever to be chased to its death, but I can see that the ethics of fox hunting are not as clear cut as they first appear.

Back in Hoolet, the foxes in our woods are safe for the meantime and, if the pheasants continue to patrol the place like two-legged buffet trolleys, they will dine like MasterChef judges.

Come autumn, should hounds ever flush one from its den, it will find a safe haven with us.

At the first cry of a bugle, I’ll open our gate, and hope it remembers the way.