LEWISTON — Who knew? Apparently, if a diseased fox runs into your home, the most helpful thing it can do is to head for the bathroom.

At least that’s how Jeanie Giroux sees it after surviving an unpleasant encounter Wednesday at her Webster Street home.

Jeanie, home sick from work, had just let the dog out. It was a nice day, she figured. Why not enjoy it?

“I left the door open just a little bit, just enough to let some fresh air in,” she said.

Oh, the irony. Minutes later, Jeanie was standing at her sink, rinsing dishes.

“I felt something brush the back of my legs,” she said. “I thought, ‘Is that a cat?'”

No, ma’am. It was not a cat. It was, in fact, a sick fox that has been roaming the neighborhood since midwinter. Jeanie began to understand and so did her son, Mason, who was sitting in the kitchen: This was no cartoon fox.

“It was the most disgusting creature I have ever seen,” Jeanie said, wrinkling her nose. “The thing stunk so bad. He was clearly rotting. His tail was just a long stem with a puff at the end of it. His eyes were gray and his face didn’t seem to have any hair left on it at all.”

Mason summed it up more tersely: “Awful,” he said.

The fox ambled from the kitchen and moved deeper into the house. Before Jeanie and Mason could recover from the shock of it, the animal did them a favor.

“It bolted into the bathroom,” Jeanie said. “And I just closed the door. I thought, ‘Now what?'”

She called police and the police did what they usually do when an odd-behaving animal is afoot: They called in Animal Control Officer Wendell Strout.

“He was great,” Jeanie said.

Strout, who has seen his fair share of wild animals trying to share human space, wasted little time with the fox. He snagged it with an animal control pole, which is essentially a long rod with a wire noose on the end of it.

“He told me I might want to step outside,” Jeanie said, “in case the fox got a second wind.”

The fox did not muster a second wind. Strout said he put the animal down in the interest of public health, but also because it was clearly suffering. It showed signs of mange, Strout said, but it also had clearly tangled with a skunk in the not-so-distant past. The smell was powerful, he said, and the Girouxs agreed.

Jeanie followed up by using a lot of bleach and disinfectant around her house. She didn’t have to worry about her dog, a chocolate Lab named Her-She, because the dog never got involved in the weirdness.

“He just came sauntering in,” Mason said, as though all was normal in the Giroux household.

By the end of the day, their house was cleaned and disinfected. They were still musing over the strange occurrence, but there was also a measure of sympathy for the fox, which they had seen on a few occasions during the winter.

“He’s out of his misery,” Jeanie said. And after a second or two of further thought: “And out of my bathroom.”

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