NAPLES – After a rabid fox attacked his wife and then bit one of his campers at the Loon’s Haven Family Campground in Naples on June 11, Mike Mason figured it was time to deal with the diseased animal.

Maine game warden Pete Herring, with a crew from “North Woods Law” television show in tow, had already scoured the area off Route 114 on Trickey Pond, unsuccessfully attempting to nab the fox. One of Mason’s campers had even caught it under his foot and stabbed it in the head. But that was not enough to finish the animal off, Mason soon found.

“After he put the knife through the fox’s skull I went down to get a piece of equipment so I could bury it like the warden told me to do,” Mason said. “When I got over to where the fox was it was still moving, even though he had stabbed it in the head. So I gently went up on top of him with my skid steer, and then I backed back off of him and he was still moving. This time I went completely up on top of him, and finally he died.”

According to Adam Gormely, a lieutenant with the warden service, the fox’s head was cut off and tested for rabies by the Maine Health Lab in Augusta. It tested positive. The fox’s remains will be incinerated, Gormely said.

Although Gormely characterized the rabid fox attack on June 11 as “unusual,” he said it was not unprecedented. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, “Rabies Surveillance in the United States During 2010,” seven rabid foxes were found in Maine in 2010. There were more than 6,000 rabies cases detected across the country that year, with 62 in Maine, according to the study. In 2010, there were 28 rabid raccoons, 20 rabid skunks, five rabid bats, one rabid groundhog, and one rabid cat detected in Maine, as well.

Gormely said that four individuals had been “exposed” to the rabid fox, meaning they were either bitten or touched the fox’s saliva.

Mason’s wife, Anne, first spotted the fox in the couple’s driveway on Loon’s Haven Drive in the early afternoon of June 11. The fox was playing with their soccer ball. She pulled a Chevy Suburban into the driveway with their daughters, Myla, 4, and Mandi, 1, and the fox ran away. After depositing some groceries inside, she opened the car doors to retrieve her daughters.

“She was going to start taking my daughters out of the car and she had the doors open to get them out,” Mason said. “That’s when she noticed the fox standing right behind her and the fox started chasing her around in our garage.”

Fighting the fox off with a pair of her daughter’s shoes, Anne Mason shut the car doors, ran inside the mudroom, and slammed the door behind her.

“At that point the fox was kind of bouncing up against the door trying to get to her,” Mason said.

After receiving a frantic phone call from his wife, Mason called Herring, a friend. Herring, Mason and the film crew searched for the fox in the woods near Route 114. They received a call from the campsite, where the fox had once more been found, this time playing with a traffic cone.

“At that point the warden service pursued him again and lost him in the woods,” Mason said.

After locating the fox’s den, Mason responded to screams coming from the campground.

“After that incident, we didn’t hear anything else until I heard a woman screaming while I was working down in the campground,” Mason said. “She told me that her husband had caught an animal that was trying to attack them under his feet. It had bit her.”

“The fox had attacked his wife,” Mason added. “He punted the thing probably 10 times, and then he finally caught it under his foot.”

Following the experience, Mason said, neither he nor his wife are yet completely at ease.

“That was the craziest thing that we’ve ever experienced with animals,” Mason said. “My wife’s a big outdoorsy person, and she’s very wary about going outside now. She’s an avid hunter. She’s always on her guard now because she never knows what’s going to be out there.”

A rabid fox slinks around the home of Mike and Anne Mason, owners of the Loon’s Haven Family Campground in Naples.