Little Foxes
Little Foxes is a book written by Michael Morpurgo in 1984.
Plot
Billy Bunch is an orphan who has had many foster families, but none of them have worked out. He is currently living with a foster mother in the suburbs of a city. They don't get on well, and at school Billy is not good at subjects, especially English (he cannot read out loud because he has a stutter). One night, Billy tries to run away, and runs into the nearby abandoned land where there are the ruins of a monastery. There is plentiful wildlife living in this place that everyone calls "The Waste Ground". Billy fathers four orphaned foxes and develops a relationship with a swan, too. However Billy's secret place is found out and the fox family is gassed by the local council. But one survives
Billy decides that his life is becoming a little better - he has found some animal friends and has lost his stutter. He returns to his foster home, but this doesn't last, and eventually he runs away with one of the young foxes (the other three were gassed by the local council), and goes on many adventures. At the end he lets the swan fly away freely. On these adventures, he meets a man who has a boat and cares for all the birds around the river. The man says that Billy can stay with him on his boat as they are going in the same direction. Eventually, Billy shoots above the foxes head and the fox runs away, never to return. Billy and the man then return to his home, where he is adopted by the man and his wife.