Baron. Red Fox Dances

Red Fox Dances is a children's book by Alan Baron, with art by the author, published in 1997. It is available at the Internet Archive.

I previously wrote about this book by Baron: Little Pig's Bouncy Ball, which was a (short) chain of mourners but with a happy ending. Red Fox did not make an appearance in that book, but characters from that book like Little Pig do appear here. As Red Fox is creeping around looking for food, he sees Little Pig dancing a jig to a tune played by Dan the Dog. As he watches, Big Duck and Fat Hen join the dance (instead of accumulating one by one, they are accumulating two by two!). Then come Tabby Cat and Lucy Goose. Then Red Fox cannot resist: he jumps out and shouts that he will show them what real dancing looks like. They are scared, but he Dog keeps playing, and Red Fox dances, as promised in the title of the story:

And as he dances, everyone else takes the opportunity to run away. As a result, Red Fox ended up without any dinner after all.

As you can see, the accumulation is very brief, and it is not really related to the main plot of the story; the main plot is similar to the Aesop's fables about a little animal trapped by the wolf (or fox, etc.) who asks for permission to play a song and/or dance before being devoured, and when the wolf also joins in the dancing, the little animal gets away. Baron's fiddling Dog doesn't trick the Fox on purpose, but the end result is the same: the Fox fails to get his supper! 

So, this is not much of a chain tale really, but because it has some character overlap with Baron's other book, which is more of a chain tale, I wanted to include this book in the blog too! Alan Baron also wrote another Red Fox book where the Dog and the other animals do trick the Fox on purpose: Red Fox and the Baby Bunnies, and there are also tricks going on in The Red Fox Monster.