This happened in winter. There was ice in the earth. When the sun was down, skin and clothing were of no use outside. You needed fur, or feathers, or you needed to be indoors. The girl caught a chill. A bad chill. Her breath cracked in her chest; she took a fever because her body needed the warmth. Her teeth chattered. She reminded the fox of leaves blown in the wind. When she woke up, she was weak, and, much to the delight of the fox, she lay on her log and wept again. Without knowing it she had walked a long, long way into the wood. Sunrise dazed the redwoods — birches wept, and so did the girl. Eventually she chose a direction and began to walk — the fox followed her, wondering where she was going. Home — her home — was the other way. Discreetly, he rattled some branches. She noticed him, and then he ran, too fast for her to catch him but slow enough for her to keep up. The girl could hardly believe that she was following a fox again — it could be taking her anywhere. To her death in a deep pool, to a shallow pit crammed with tiny bones. Perhaps it didn’t even mean for her to follow it, perhaps it was just bounding along, enjoying its morning. The fox never looked back at her. A different fox?
She heard the search party before she saw them. The air rang with the sound of her name. The fox swerved and dashed past her, back to the heart of the wood. She put out a hand just in time and felt its warm fur against her palm.
There were no more puppet shows after that. Snow fell. The girl sank, and the girl shivered, and the girl raved, and the girl died. The cause of death was twofold — the extreme chill she’d taken alone in the night, and the berries, which were poisonous. The fox didn’t know what was happening. He dared much, so he returned to watch the house. All the curtains were drawn. Steady lamplight escaped from a gap at the top of one pair of curtains, the pair in the girl’s bedroom. He lost interest after a few nights of that view, and returned when he next remembered. There was no light that night. The whole house was dark. It was the same the next night, and the next. The fox was philosophical. From the moment he had recognised loveliness he had known it couldn’t last. And he returned to fox business.
II
Now I will speak of another kind of fox. The other fox was a grey fox; this one is red. I am speaking now of a fox who had been hunted, a beast of the chase who was alive only because of luck and cowering and grim fighting — grim and miserable and low. This fox wasn’t innocent — he had turned hutches into bloodbaths purely to divert himself. But he also knew wounds and weariness, had crawled into holes and lain like a rag wadded deep into the ground. He killed hens because they were there to be killed, and he understood that the hunters sought to do away with him for the same reason. The fox had started his life in a den heaving with cubs, but they had all been hunted down almost as soon as they were grown. A few times he had hidden alongside foxes who had been bred in captivity, but they never got away. Their wits were dull. The horizon made them run around in circles, confused.
This fox had no one. I’ve said that foxes are solitary, but there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away. I’m not saying that I myself know what the difference is. But our fox knew.
One afternoon the fox jumped some fences and walked straight up to a farmhouse. He didn’t want to be a fox anymore. He didn’t want to be anything. His head was down, so he didn’t see the farm dogs, looking askance. They bristled and growled, but they didn’t attack, not even when the farmer’s wife came out and commanded it. The farm dogs knew a sick fox when they saw one. The farmer’s wife went inside, but she left the door half open — she was coming back with something. The fox looked at the ground. He appeared to be smiling, but that was just a meaningless expression created by the look of his muzzle. The fox had no plan. Something might happen soon. Or it might not. Either way he was here, at the end of his nature.
A human form appeared near him — the dogs jumped at the sky and bayed in a way that wolves do sometimes when the full moon draws them. The fox didn’t look. This person had been following him about for days. He couldn’t remember when she had begun. He had been badly hurt and she was there, she was just there. She had sticky stuff that he had permitted her to smooth over his wounds. The wounds were just scars now; they’d healed fast. He had been too sore to move, and she had dug up voles and snapped their necks and scraped at them and fed him. With her five fingers and her funny, flat palm she had placed food in his mouth. At night, when he was in too much pain to rest, she counted stars and whispered into the hollow of the tree he lay in, telling him how many she could see, until he fell asleep. There was no reason for her to do such things. He didn’t know what this person wanted from him, and he hadn’t come across anything like her before. So she probably didn’t exist. The fox ignored her as best he could. Now she crouched down beside him and she touched him. She rubbed his neck. She spoke into one of his ears, and he understood. Whenever she spoke, he understood. Her voice had all sorts of sounds in it — the flow of water against rock, an acorn shaken in its shell, a bird asking for morning. Her voice wasn’t loud, but he heard it throughout his body.
Listen. . That woman is looking for a gun.
A gun? Good. . Even if the fox had been able to reply, he wouldn’t have.
She’s found the gun. Quickly: Why did you come here?
The dogs became braver and crept close — she put out a hand and sent them away.
It’s true, then, fox? That you want to die?
He couldn’t tell her the truth; he lacked the language.
She sighed.
Very well. It is your right. Good-bye.
She stroked his back. She strolled away. The sound of the shotgun shattered the air and sent him after her, as hard and as fast as he could go. They both ran, but he overtook her. All things considered, two legs, etc., she wasn’t a bad runner. “Live.” She laughed, breathlessly. “Live, live, live.” And when it was safe to stop, she collapsed against a stile in a fallow field and held her face between her hands and made noises that sounded like “Hic, hic, hic.” He began to pay attention to her. Her eyes were set quite far apart. He had never been so close to one of his hunters, had never been this close to harm.
She told him that she had looked after him because of the white hairs on his forehead that grew into the shape of a star. Sometimes you see that someone is marked and you’re helpless after that — you love. She wanted to tell him that, but she decided it was better not to. He hadn’t known that there were such hairs on his forehead, or that such a thing could be of significance. She sat and he lay near her, and a little time passed, quiet and bright. Then they had to go, in case the farmer had been told of their trespass and decided to look for them.
They parted outside her hut. It was a ramshackle thing beside a stream. It had a heavily dented tin roof, and its windows were coated with dust. All in all, it looked cross, and as if it had plenty of things to say to its inhabitant about having been left alone for so long.
“Come inside,” the woman said to the fox.
The fox demurred. Sadly, the woman watched him go his own way again.
Days went by. The woman made her peace with her hut. She gave it a thorough sweeping, built herself a new roof, washed the windows, plaited rugs. The woman picked herbs and grasses and boiled and bottled various concoctions. Sick people and their relatives sought her out in the forest; she took their money and they took her bottles away and were cured. “Where have you been?” she was asked, again and again. “Weeks we’ve been looking for you.”