There are not many songs that are equally as beautiful as the central image of their lyrics. Belle and Sebastian achieve this, creating a song that sounds easily as elegant as the image in my mind of a white fox with furtive, yellow eyes darting over banks of melting spring snow.

The phrases in the singing melody take excessively long to reach their end points, darting up and down scales as with soft paws, as if over hills, down through briar patches. I will never know anything quite as beautiful as the descending line, repeated at many different points, but best is toward the end, with the emphatic line "What else would you do?" And this merely sets up the final killer melody, the earnest mantra, "Fox in the snow."

The piano, strings, xylophone, and plucked acoustic guitar cast a completely unique spell.

It's maybe not even as much about a fox as it is the picture of a fox. The song sounds like the manifestation of old paintings on wood with chipped frames that you find in dusty places.