The Midnight Fox

by Betsy Byars

  On Tuesday I was sitting there as usual, and I don’t believe I ever saw anything as green as that field was that day. The sun had turned the grass a sort of golden-green. It was like looking at the grass through sunglasses.

  And I thought that if I could discover one thing in my life, I would like to discover a fabulous new colour – a brand-new colour that no one had ever seen before. Here’s how it would be.

  I would be digging in my back yard and all of a sudden while I was just casually digging, I would get this strange exciting feeling that something exceptionally good was about to happen. I would begin to dig faster and faster, my heart pumping in my throat, my hands flashing in the soft black dirt. And suddenly I would stop and put my hands up to my eyes. Because there, in the black earth, would be a ball, a perfectly round mass of this brand-new colour.

  I would not be able to take it in for a moment, because I wouldn’t ever have seen anything but blue and green and all, but gradually my eyes would adjust and I would see – I would be the first person in all the world to see this new colour.

  I would go into the house and say to my parents, ‘I have discovered a new colour,’ and my parents would not be particularly interested, because there is no such thing as a new colour, and they would be expecting me to bring out a piece of paper on which I had mixed a lot of different water colours and made just an odd colour, and then slowly I would take my hand from my pocket and hold up the smooth round ball of new colour.

  That night I would be on the news with my discovery and the announcer would say, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, if you know someone who has a colour television, go there immediately, because tonight you will see, later in our programme, a new colour, discovered today by a young boy.’ And by the time I came on the television, every person in the world would be sitting in front of his set.

  The announcer would say, ‘Now, young man, would you tell the world how you came to discover this new colour.’

  ‘I was outside digging in the dirt –’

  ‘Where was this dirt?’

  ‘Just in my back yard. And I got a strange feeling –’

  ‘What was this strange feeling like?’

  ‘It was the feeling that I was about to make a new and important discovery.’

  ‘I see. Go on.’

  ‘And I dug deeper and deeper, and then I looked down into the earth and I saw – this!’ And I would bring forth the new colour, and all around the world a silence would occur. The only silence that had ever fallen upon the whole world at one time. Eskimoes would pause with pieces of dried fish halfway to their mouths; Russians who had run in from the cold would stop beating the snow from their arms; fishermen would leave their nets untended. And then, together, all at once, everyone in the world would say, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.’

  I was so interested in thinking about my discovery that I almost missed seeing the black fox.

  There were some old tree stumps in the field that stuck up above the grass. Several times I thought one of these stumps had moved and that the black fox had come at last. I had kept quite still and waited until the stump became, again, a tree stump.

  Now suddenly – I was looking in the right direction or I might have missed it – the black fox appeared on the crest of the hill. Gracefully, without hurrying, she moved towards me. There was no wind at all; the air was perfectly still; and Hazeline had told me that on windless days foxes liked to hunt mice. The way they catch them is by watching for the faint movements of the grass. The mice run below the grass in little paths. The fox crouched low. She did not move. I could see her head above the grass, the sharp pointed ears. She waited, and then slowly, without seeming to move at all, she stretched up, rising tall in the grass. She paused.

  Her eyes watched the grass. Suddenly she saw what she was looking for, and she pounced. It was a light, graceful movement, but there was power in her slim black legs, and when she brought her head up, she had a mouse between her jaws.

  She turned, her full tail high in the air, and moved towards the woods. I stood up slowly and watched as she trotted away among the trees.

  Eight

  The Forest Chase

  It was impulse more than anything else that made me follow the black fox, and the desire to see where she was going and what she was going to do. I walked quickly across the field to the woods.

  I cannot exactly explain my fascination with this fox. It was as if I had just learned a new and exciting game that I wanted to play more than anything else in the world. It was like when Petie Burkis first learned to play Monopoly, and that was all he wanted to do – just play Monopoly. One time he followed me around the yard on his knees, begging me to play with him. And one time he made his sitter play with him and he did everything for her – collected her money, moved her piece, paid her rent. All she did was sit there reading a magazine.

  That’s the way I felt about this fox. It was a new game. The rules I didn’t exactly know yet; all I had so far was a fierce desire to play. My father once said this could be the most important thing in any game.

  I slipped through the trees, and the forest was warm and sunlit. All around were large wrinkled boulders. It was as if hundreds of full skirts had been left on the forest floor to dry. There was not a sound anywhere, and I had the feeling I was the only living being in the whole forest.

  In English class one time we had to say poems and one girl recited this poem called ‘Where Are All the Forest Folk?’ And when she started speaking, big tears started rolling down her cheeks. There was no noise at first, just big tears dropping down on to her blouse, but when she got to the line ‘The gay little chipmunk romps no more,’ she really started sobbing. She could hardly go on she was crying so hard. The teacher said, ‘Ruth Ann, maybe you’d rather finish later,’ but Ruth Ann wouldn’t sit down, and by the time she got to the last line, which was something like ‘Oh, where are all the forest folk who were so dear to me?’ every girl in the whole room was sobbing. Mrs Heydon said, ‘Girls, girls!’ and then, ‘Is there anyone who has a gay poem?’ Petie said he was ready with his original composition, entitled ‘TV Land’, but even that didn’t help much. You would have thought that the saddest thing those girls would ever know in their lives would be an empty forest.

  That, I thought that day, is exactly what I have come upon now. I walked slowly towards a thicket of pines to the right, and just then I heard crows beyond the trees. Hazeline had told me that crows were great thieves. She had once seen a bunch of crows make a fox drop a hen and run off, and I thought perhaps these crows had seen the black fox with her mouse. I charged through the pines and then, to the left, I heard the sharp bark of the fox.

  I stood perfectly still, waiting. A butterfly lit on the stone by my foot and flexed its wings. The bark came again. A high, clear bark. I turned and began to run around the pine thicket towards a rocky ravine. The underbrush was thick here, and briars scratched my legs. I ran past the ravine and on through the trees. The fox barked again and I ran even faster.

  I don’t know how far I went, or in exactly which direction, but I finally stopped by a huge old tree and sat down on a root. There was not a sound anywhere now. I waited. I had had the feeling, all the while I was running, that the black fox had been calling me, leading me somewhere, and now I had lost her.

  I turned my head slowly, listening. I could not give up the idea that the fox had wanted me to follow her. I imagined all sorts of things as I got up and reluctantly began to walk back through the forest. The kind of thing I was imagining was that a giant boulder had accidentally rolled over the opening to the fox’s den, trapping her family inside, and now the fox was leading me to the den, so that I could push the stone aside for her.

  I paused from time to time and listened, but I heard nothing from the black fox. I continued to walk until I came out of the forest, right by the pasture where the cows were grazing. They were all together in the shade of the trees, and they turned in a body and looked at me.

  I had thought, when I f
irst saw these cows from a distance, that if I ever had to do a circus act, I would get about six cows like these and train them. They would be called The Cow Family Dancers, and I would come out in an Alpine suit with an accordion, and as I would start to play, the cows would come dancing out into the circus arena, not trotting like horses, but doing peasant steps, turning and clicking their heels and tossing their heads.

  Now that I saw the cows at close range I abandoned this idea for all time and began to walk slowly past them. ‘Cows do not attack people. Cows do not attack people. Cows do not attack people.’ Then, completely against my will, I found myself making up a Petie Burkis news story:

  COW ATTACKS BOY – SCIENTISTS BAFFLED

  Scientists in Clinton County were baffled today by the report that a cow attacked a young boy. The young boy, who was passing the cow in a respectful manner, was able to give no reason for the attack. ‘She just came at me,’ he managed to whisper before he was driven away to the hospital. No one has been able to reach the parents of the young boy, as they are having a vacation in Europe.

  At this point one of the cows actually did take a step in my direction and I began to run down the hill. I ran past the cows, crashed into the fence, got up and brushed myself off, crawled under the fence, and ran on into the yard.

  ‘Well, what on earth’s the matter with you?’ Hazeline said. She was taking clothes off the line.

  ‘I was just running.’

  ‘Anything after you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought maybe you’d stirred up an old bear or something.’

  ‘No.’ I did not say that I was running from an interested cow, because even Hazeline might not be able to resist the temptation to make sport of that.

  She went back to her clothes. I never saw anyone take clothes from a line so fast. With one hand she kept lifting off the clothes pins until she was holding about a hundred.

  ‘Hazeline?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I followed a fox in the woods.’

  ‘Did you?’ She deposited the clothes pins in an apron pocket.

  ‘This fox acted like she wanted me to follow her.’

  ‘You were probably near her den and she wanted to lead you off. That is the oldest trick in the world. It’ll fool a dog every time. But you – next time a fox tries to lead you off, you remember that if you keep looking around where you are, you just might see yourself some baby foxes.’

  The idea was so appealing that I wanted to go back to the woods right away.

  ‘It looked like it was a black fox.’ I could no longer keep this information to myself.

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed more interested in the fact that she only had one blue sock left and no mate. This was why I could talk to her. Information just poured out of her and then she would forget it. She would never say at the supper table, the way some girls would, something like, ‘Well, guess who thought he saw a black fox today?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a black fox, Hazeline?’

  ‘I saw one on a coat one time.’ She found the blue sock and put all the clothes in the basket. ‘The fur was about that thick. It looked so warm and soft. This lady in front of me in church had it on and I kept putting out my hands wanting to stroke it.’

  ‘Is a black fox different from a red one?’

  ‘I don’t know. Listen, you ask Dad about foxes. When it comes to hunting animals there isn’t anything he doesn’t know.’

  ‘I don’t want to bother your dad.’

  ‘Oh, he’d be real tickled. He loves to talk about the woods and all. Why, if you wanted him to find you a black fox, he could go out and do it.’

  Nine

  Uncle Fred

  I still did not feel at ease with Uncle Fred. He was a large man, very powerfully built, and to see us together you would think we would make the perfect cover picture for a story called ‘The Boy Who Tried To Be a Man’. There was a tremendous physical difference between us, and there was something else I don’t know how to explain. We couldn’t talk to each other. One time he took me to the lake and I couldn’t think of one single thing to say all the way over or back. It was an awful feeling not to be able to think of one single thing worth saying.

  Every night before supper Uncle Fred would take a swim in the pond. It was a ritual. He would come out on the porch in his bathing suit, put his towel on the back of a chair, pause for a moment on the steps, and then he would start running. He would run until he was at the very edge of the pond and then he would dive – it was more like a launch really – his body straight out, and he would go almost halfway across the pond before he hit the water. Then he would swim across, back, come up, and dry off.

  This night when he came up on the porch Hazeline and I were sitting in the swing.

  ‘You youngsters ought to take a dip. Makes you feel good.’

  ‘The water’s too warm,’ Hazeline said. ‘I can’t stand to swim in warm water. It’s real ucky.’

  Uncle Fred was rubbing the towel over his head, so we couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but it was something about Hazeline and me being a lot better off if we’d take a dip. This was my one big dread – that some night I would have to go swimming with Uncle Fred. I could imagine that while he was running and executing that long powerful dive, I would be wincing along (I had very sensitive feet) and then I would inch out into the water, terrified, and just stand there, bending my knees so everyone would think I was in deeper water than I was. Then, probably, to complete the horror, Uncle Fred would suggest that I climb up on his shoulders and dive off.

  At that Hazeline would call from shore, ‘Wait – let me get my camera. Wait now!’ for she would consider it a wonderful thing to be able to snap a picture of a disaster. And she would run down and get us in focus – all the while I would be standing on Uncle Fred’s shoulders, shaking – and then she would say, ‘Go!’ With my whole body trembling I would fall forward into the muddy brown water, knowing that the last sight I would ever see would be the reflection of the sun on that muddy water.

  They would ask my friend Petie Burkis to write a headline to go above the picture and he would write:

  BOY DROWNS – GIRL PHOTOGRAPHS IT!

  I went on thinking about that until Hazeline said, ‘Dad?’

  Uncle Fred draped his towel around his shoulders. ‘What?’

  ‘Tom and I were talking about foxes this afternoon –’

  ‘Foxes?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Yes, and he was asking me about the different types of foxes, about black and red ones and all. And I told him you’d know.’

  He rubbed the towel under his chin. ‘Well, as far as I know – and I could be wrong about this – black foxes are sort of like an accident – like a black-haired baby born in a family of redheads. The pigment gets intensified and most of the time it’ll be in just one fox in a litter. There’ll be five cubs maybe and only one black one, and you can take two black foxes and mate them and get six red cubs.’

  ‘Is a black fox smarter than a red one, do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘Supposed to be, has to be maybe, to keep out of the hunter’s reach. A hunter’ll do anything to get something rare.’ He leaned back against the porch railing. ‘When I was a boy – oh, this was a long time ago, but I still remember it – I saw a fight between a red fox and a black one. It was during the mating season, and it was over this little red fox who looked like she didn’t give a darn for either one of them.’

  ‘Playing it cool,’ Hazeline said.

  ‘I was up in a tree – I don’t even remember what I was doing up there – probably some mischief – and in a little clearing ahead I saw these two foxes, one black with just a little white on him and the other red with a cross mark on his shoulders.’

  I could almost see them. ‘What was the fight like?’

  ‘You ever see cats fight? Or dogs?’

  I nodded my head.

  ‘Well, that’s the way this was. They were standing apart and walking around each other
, just like dogs or cats, each testing the other, and all the time they were growling and snapping and darting at one another.’ He moved his shoulders as if he were involved in the fight himself. ‘Then the red fox sprang at the black one and just as quick as a whip that black fox brought his tail around – he had an enormous tail – and shielded his head with it. All the red fox got was a mouthful of fur.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, that was all I saw, because they moved on through the woods. The last I saw of them, this little lady fox was just the tiniest bit closer to the black fox than the red.’

  ‘Sup-per!’ Aunt Millie called.

  ‘I better get myself dried off. You two go in.’

  We went in and Aunt Millie said, ‘Tom, there’s a letter for you on the table in the hall.’

  This letter from Petie Burkis had been there all day and I had not even seen it. I tore it open right there in the hall. It was so thick I thought Petie Burkis had written me about a ten-page letter and I wanted to see what he had to say. Instead, it was a questionnaire he had made up, and he said that if I would answer the questions and send it back to him he would be able to figure out what kind of person I was from my answers. He was so eager to have it returned that he had even included an envelope with his address on it. The questionnaire looked like this.

  *

  Circle the correct answer.

  1. If you found a whole box of candy bars, would you

  (a) sell them

  (b) eat them

  (c) try to find the owner

  2. How many TV commercials do you know by heart?

  (a) none

  (b) more than none but less than five