I hunt here.
Pax felt an urge to run back to his crude nest and press himself into the remaining stalks, as if retreating to his pen, but he resisted it—what if his boy came back and he wasn’t here? He flattened his ears to show he meant no threat, but that he would not leave.
The vixen paced over, and Pax drew in her scent—as familiar as his own, but also exotic. She sniffed and bristled in distrust at the human scent on him.
Pax had been born with that same instinct as well, but distrust is no match for kindness administered consistently and unmeasured, especially in creatures new to the world. Pax had been only sixteen days old when Peter had rescued him—a fatherless, motherless curl of charcoal fur, his eyes barely opened—and it wasn’t long before he’d come to trust the quiet, gangly boy who’d brought him home.
The vixen poked her pointed snout in to sniff him more closely and bristled again.
The scent is my boy’s. Have you seen him? Pax shared the most important features of his human—the naked round ears; the towering legs, so improbably long that Pax always feared he would topple over when he ran; the black curled hair that grew to different lengths, then became short again.
No humans are here, but they are approaching. Just then, Bristle’s head rose as if jerked on an unseen wire. Her ears pricked, trained on a slight rustling in a nearby tuft of broom sedge. Her rear began to twitch, gathering energy. She sprang high and then, paws tight over her black nose, dived into the grass with a flash of white-tipped tail.
Pax sat up, alert. In a second, Bristle’s head reappeared, and in her jaws was a wood rat. She leaped clear of the grass, bit through the rat’s neck, then dropped it to the ground.
Orphaned before he’d been weaned, Pax had never eaten raw prey. His hunger rose at the blood-scent, and so did his curiosity. He took a cautious step closer. Bristle growled, and Pax retreated to watch from a safe distance.
He grew hungrier as she crunched bites. He thought of the brimming comfort of his kibble bowl, the pleasure of Peter’s hand-fed treats and the ultimate reward: peanut butter. He needed to find his boy. His boy would feed him.
Before he could ask about the approaching humans, Bristle picked up what remained of the rat—a single hind leg with its long tail—and stalked off with it dangling from her jaw. Pax watched as she wove her way between the grass tufts, becoming only flashes of flame and white. Leaving. He was swept by the memory of his humans’ car roaring away in its stinging spray of gravel.
Just before she slipped into a fringe of ferns at the wood’s edge, she paused to glance at him over her shoulder. At that moment, a sharp snap from the fallen oak startled her. It was followed by a red streak of fur that hurtled from the dried foliage, flew over the weeds, and landed on her back.
Pax flattened himself. He could hear the vixen’s yips as she scuffled with her attacker, but they sounded more irritated than afraid. He poked his head up. Bristle pounced on a ball of fur and bit it hard. To Pax’s surprise, a smaller, skinnier version of herself unfurled at her paws.
Pax was stunned. Never had he suspected that foxes might soar like birds, whose swooping arcs were not like any movement he himself could achieve.
The little fox flipped to his back and gave his belly in submission, but this seemed only to make Bristle angrier, her chattering now punctuated by jabs and nips. Pax bounded over, overcome by curiosity.
The skinny fox startled at the unfamiliar human scent and looked over Bristle’s shoulder. His eyes widened when he spied Pax, and he scrambled to his paws. Friendly, he announced to Pax; brother but not littermate of the vixen. Play!
Bristle bared her teeth and snarled at her brother. Dangerous. Stay away.
Pax ignored Bristle’s warning posture and met the greeting. Friendly. You FLEW! BIRD?
The little fox bounded back to the fallen oak, then sprang onto its trunk. One fork of the dead tree angled up. The small fox walked lightly along its length. He looked down to make sure Pax was watching.
Pax dropped and tucked his paws under his chest, but it was hard to keep from leaping onto the tree to try it himself. He had climbed the walls of his pen, of course, but he’d never been higher than its six feet. His brush twitched.
The vixen stalked a few steps away and then dropped to the ground. She rolled onto her side to gaze directly up at her brother, her love for him obvious now. He was the runt. He’s small, but he’s tough. I don’t want him with me when I hunt. But he follows me. She tossed her head and growled at Pax, as though blaming him for her brother’s play.
The runty little fox stepped out along the branch, tail poised for balance, then coiled himself and leaped out over the heads of the earthbound foxes. He landed in a clump of burdock beside the road and then burst out covered in burrs. He tore around in mad circles, as if soaring had filled him with an excess of joy that had to be spent through his legs, and then flung himself onto the ground to roll out the rest.
His sister pounced on him. Too close to the road! While she pulled the burrs from his coat, she scolded him for the recklessness of his flight. But Pax marveled at it—a good five full-bounds he’d traveled without touching paws to ground. He would try the feat himself one day.
When Runt managed to get to his feet, he lowered his head and nuzzled his sister. She knocked him back to the ground, only mock-rough this time, and then sat on him, pinning him down. He struggled a little but never really tried to upset her, and he protested only meekly when she began to groom him.
Pax settled himself a respectful distance away. After a while, her brother now properly subdued and her irritation spent, Bristle retrieved the morsel of rat and dropped it in front of him. She lay down and began to lick her paws, then to clean her face with them.
Pax edged closer, so low that his belly brushed the ground. The company of these two young foxes drew him, whether he was welcomed or not.
Bristle stretched out in a patch of slanting sunlight. Her damp cheeks glistened like the pumpkin-colored wood of the table where Pax’s humans ate their food, brilliant against the white of her sleek throat.
Pax looked over at Runt, who was sniffing the spot where Pax had slept. His coat markings were identical, but not as vibrant. His fur was sparse and tufty in places, and his hip bones protruded at sharp angles. He reared back suddenly and pounced in mock attack.
Pax watched as Runt tossed the toy soldier into the air and then pinned it down, over and over. He had done the same thing as a kit. He trotted over and joined the game, and Runt welcomed him as though they had played together since birth.
Bristle got to her feet. Bring it here.
Her brother ignored her for a moment but then, as if he had been judging the limits of his sister’s patience, he loped over and dropped the toy at her paws.
Bristle issued a throaty rattle at the soldier. Human. Leave it. Home. Now, she ordered her brother.
Runt leaned in to Pax and braced his forelegs.
Bristle sprang back to nip at her brother. He stinks of the humans. Remember.
Pax was startled by the image she communicated to her brother then: a cold, howling wind; a mated pair of foxes, struggling with something that reminded Pax of his pen—steel, but with jaws and clamps instead of bars. The steel jaws and the snowy ground were smeared with blood.
Bristle tipped her head to assess the sky and sniff the breeze, which carried the threat of thunderstorms from the south. Home.
Runt lowered his tail and began to follow his sister. But then he turned back to Pax, inviting him to come as well.
Pax hesitated. He didn’t want to leave the spot his humans would return to. But dark clouds were rolling in, and just then, thunder boomed in the distance. He knew his boy would not venture out during a storm. He didn’t want to think of getting drenched by the side of the road. Alone.
He tucked the toy soldier into his cheek and set out after the two foxes.
Bristle turned when she sensed his presence. One night only, Human-Stinker.
/> Pax agreed. He would follow his scent back to the road after the storm. His humans would come for him then. And once he found his boy, he would never leave his side.
Peter recognized the sounds before he was fully awake: the footfalls of a herd of just-released kids, their hoots, the thumping of their eager fists into gloves. He scrambled out from under the bench and grabbed his stuff. Too late: twenty boys and their coach were streaming down the hill. Up at the parking lot, a bunch of adults were overseeing the dismissal, and some of them wore uniforms. His best option was to join the dozen or so kids who were already scattered over the bleachers, heads bent together in clusters of two and three, and blend in when they left.
Peter climbed the bleachers to the top row and dropped his pack. A kid watching a baseball practice—nothing could be more normal, yet his heart skidded.
Below, the coach started lobbing fungoes into the field. The players were mostly the usual guys you expect to see on a ball field, all muscle and shout. Peter found the one he wanted to watch: a small kid with a straw-colored crew cut and a bleached-out red T-shirt, playing shortstop. While the rest of the players scrambled around like puppies, this kid was a statue, hands poised waist high, eyes glued to the coach’s bat. The instant wood smacked cowhide, he sprang. Somehow he managed to reach every ball that came anywhere near his territory, even though he was so short that he looked like someone’s tag-along kid brother.
Peter knew he himself wasn’t the kind of kid you’d expect to find on a ball field, either, and he was even less at home in the dugout with all the shoulder punching and trash talking. But a baseball field was the only place where he felt he was exactly where he was born to be.
The feeling that brought Peter was something he had never even tried to describe to anyone else—partly because it felt too private, but mostly because he didn’t think he had the words to explain it. “Holy” came the closest, and “calm” was in the mix, but neither was exactly right. For a crazy minute, Peter sensed that the shortstop understood about that holy calm, was feeling it too, right now.
The coach had taken the mound and was tossing puffballs. The batters were hitting sharp liners and grounders, and the outfielders were finally paying attention, or at least facing in the right direction. The shortstop was still the one to watch—he looked like he was stitched together with live wires, gaze steady to the play.
Peter recognized that kind of concentration—sometimes his eyes would actually go dry because he forgot to blink, so focused was he on every move of every player—and knew it paid off. Like the kid in the red T-shirt below him, Peter owned his territory on a ball field. He loved that territory right down to the cut-grass, dry-dust smell of it. But what he loved more was the fence behind it. The fence that told him exactly what was his responsibility and what wasn’t. A ball fell inside that fence, he’d better field it. A ball soared over it, and it wasn’t his to worry about anymore. Nice and clear.
Peter often wished that responsibility had such bright tall fences around it off the ball field, too.
When Peter’s mother had died, he’d gone for a while to a therapist. At seven years old, he hadn’t wanted to talk, or maybe he just hadn’t known how to shrink that kind of loss into words.
The therapist—a kind-eyed woman with a long silver braid—said that was okay, that was perfectly okay. And for the whole session, Peter would pull little cars and trucks from a toy box—there must have been a hundred of them in there; Peter figured later that the woman had cleaned out a toy store for him—and crash them together, two by two. When he was finished, she would always say the same thing: “That must have been hard for you. Your mom gets in a car to go buy groceries, a regular day, and she never comes home.”
Peter never answered, but he remembered a sense of rightness about those words, and about the whole hour—as if he was finally where he should be, and there was nothing else he should be doing except crashing those little cars and hearing that it must have been hard for him.
Until one day, the therapist said something else. “Peter, do you feel angry?”
“No,” he’d said quickly. “Never.” A lie. And then he’d gotten off the floor and taken a single green-apple Jolly Rancher from the brass bowl by the door, exactly the way he did at the end of every session—that was the deal the kind-eyed therapist had made with him: whenever he’d had enough, he could take a candy and the session would be over—and left. But outside, he’d kicked the candy into the gutter, and on the way home, he’d told his father he wasn’t going back again. His father hadn’t argued. In fact, it had seemed a relief to him.
But not to Peter. Had the nice therapist known all along he’d been angry that last day, that he’d done something terrible? That as punishment, his mother hadn’t taken him to the store? And did she blame him for what happened?
A few months later, Peter had gotten Pax. He’d come across a fox run over by the side of the road near his house. So soon after watching his mother’s coffin lowered into the ground, he’d felt an unshakable need to bury the body. As he’d looked around for a good place, he’d found the den, filled with three cold, stiff kit bodies and one little ball of gray fur still warm and breathing. He’d tucked Pax into his sweatshirt pocket and brought him home, and said—not asked, said—“I’m keeping him.” His dad had said, “Okay, okay. For a while.”
The kit mewed piteously all through the night, and hearing him, Peter had thought that if he could visit the kind-eyed therapist again, he’d smash those toy cars together all day and all night, all day and all night, forever. Not because he was angry. Just to make everybody see.
Thinking about Pax made the old anxiety snake tighten around Peter’s chest. He needed to get moving again, make up some time. The practice was breaking up now, boys loping in from the field, shedding equipment as they streamed past the dugout. As soon as the field was clear, he dropped from the bleachers, pulled his backpack down, and hitched it over his shoulders. Just as he set out along the diamond, though, he saw the shortstop.
Peter hesitated. He should take off, try to blend in with the stragglers leaving the school grounds. But the rest of the team had left this kid to bag up the equipment and walk back alone, and Peter knew how that felt. He picked up a couple of balls and handed them over. “Hey.”
The boy took the balls with a cautious smile. “Hey.”
“Nice play. The last liner? That ball had hair.”
The boy looked away and scuffed at the dirt, but Peter could see he was pleased. “Yeah, well, the first baseman made it look cleaner than it was.”
“Nah, you planted that ball. Your first baseman would be lucky to catch a cold by himself. No offense.”
The boy gave Peter a real grin. “Yeah. Coach’s nephew. You play?”
Peter nodded. “Center field.”
“You new here?”
“Oh . . . I don’t live here, I . . .” Peter nodded his head vaguely south.
“Hampton?”
“Yeah, Hampton, right.”
The boy’s face closed. “Scouting before Saturday’s game? Jerk.” He spat and walked back to the dugout.
As he left the school grounds, Peter congratulated himself on his quick thinking, covering his runaway tracks. But somehow he felt kind of bad anyway. Somehow he felt lousy, actually.
He shrugged the feeling off—what was it his dad said about feelings, something about a quarter and a cup of coffee?—and checked his watch. Four fifteen. He’d lost over three hours.
Peter pressed faster, but when he came to the town square again, he crossed to the opposite side from the hardware store and forced himself to walk at an even pace past a library, past a bus station, past a diner. Then he counted off a thousand steps before he risked lifting his head.
When he did, he checked his watch again. Four fifty. His grandfather was probably packing up his stuff now. Peter imagined him walking to his rusty blue Chevy, fitting the key into the ignition.
And with that image, his anxiety struck, k
nocking the breath right out of him. He scaled a low wooden fence and dropped into scrubby brush. He pushed in a good safe thirty feet, until the saplings rose up taller than he was, until his anxiety let him breathe right again, before turning to parallel the road. It was rougher going now, but fifteen minutes later he reached it: the highway.
Peter shadowed the entrance ramp, crouching low, then, at a break in traffic, ran down the culvert, scaled the chain-link fence, and dropped to the other side, his heart beating hard. He’d made it.
He loped into the trees, keeping an eye out for a likely place to cut west. And in just a few minutes, he found one: a dirt road running perpendicular to the highway. Well, not much more than an old wagon path, to be honest, but it was heading in the right direction and would be easy walking even at night. He turned in.
For a short while the trees beside him grew denser as he walked, and only birdcalls and squirrel rustlings broke the silence. Peter realized he might have seen the last of civilization for a while. The thought lifted him.
But a few minutes later the road turned a corner and began to run along an old pasture dotted with gnarled fruit trees in ragged bloom. A stone wall bordered the field, and a low barn stood at the far corner. There were no lights on in the barn, no car or truck beside it. Still, Peter’s heart crashed. The barn looked freshly painted, and some of the roof shingles were the raw pink of new wood. This was the road to someone’s home. Worse, it might lead to a bigger road the atlas had been too old to show. In any case, it wasn’t a shortcut across the hills.
Peter dropped his pack and sank into a narrow jog in the stone wall, exhausted and starving. He tugged his boots off and peeled down his socks. Two bad blisters throbbed on each heel. They were going to kill when they broke. Peter dug out his extra pair of socks from the bottom of the backpack and worked them on over the first pair. He rested his head back against the rough stone, still giving off a little warmth from the day’s sun, which was now hovering just over the line of trees, bathing the field in a peach-colored glow.
Pax Page 3