Mia whirled, snarling, hackles growing sharp. But there was nothing there.
Her snarl faded. She scowled at the icicles and then limped back to the kits, curling around their shivery bodies. Hunger was making her imagine things. The wind couldn’t sniff. It just blew in a way that sounded like sniffing. It also must have broken that icicle.
“Can everyone say, ‘Hurry back, Uly’? Aroo-roo-roo!”
The kits mimicked her sound—aroo-roo-roo!—their tiny voices echoing through the den. Once she got them started, they wouldn’t stop. Aroo-roo-roo-roo-roo-roo-roo-roo!
“Okay, okay!” she said, giggling. “That’s enough. Very good. But enough.”
Outside, the blizzard howled. How had her mom passed the long winter nights when she and her siblings were still babies?
“Ooh! Who wants to hear a scary story?”
Tink ting ting.
The wind rattled the icicles again, sending a chill up her spine.
“On second thought, who wants to hear a nice one?”
SIX
ULY SNIFFED AT the patches of dead needles in the pine grove, but he couldn’t smell any prey.
Flumpf!
A sound made his ears perk. It had come from the pine-tree bridge that he and Mia had crossed. Maybe some critter had nestled between the snow and the trunk.
Uly padded to the edge of the river and got low. He wriggled his hips and then made a mighty leap onto the bridge, pouncing to pin the critter down. His forepaw struck the snow, and it shifted beneath him …
“Oh squi—”
The snow broke, Uly fell, and suddenly, he was buried in white. Snow packed in around him, pushing into his mouth and nostrils. He paddled his paws, but the movement only made him sink deeper. Every time he inhaled, his nostrils filled with slush. His breath grew shallow. His body went numb.
But then … he heard something in the distance.
“Aroo-roo-roo!”
Uly stopped breathing and listened.
“Aroo-roo-roo!”
It was the kits. They were howling back in the den.
The sound spread a warmth through his body. He snorted the snow from his nostrils and tried to spiral his muzzle and shoulders. He gained a little breathing space, but the air was close and pinched and barely filled his lungs. He willed himself not to panic as he lashed his head back and forth. Soon his shoulders were free from the snow. Then his forepaw.
“Aroo-roo-roo!”
He kicked his hind paws until the snow packed beneath them and he was able to press up against it. With the last of his strength, he made a great push, and—
The snow gave out beneath him.
Uly fell through darkness before his three paws landed on something solid. He gasped with fogged relief. He was under the bridge, on top of the frozen river. The ice groaned beneath his paws, threatening to crack and spill him into the rushing water. He hopped onto the bank.
Moonlight streamed through the hole in the bridge he’d fallen through. From below, he could see that the bridge wasn’t made from one toppled pine tree, but two. Uly had just happened to pounce directly onto the snowy space between the trunks and become stuck.
“Lucky me,” he said.
A warm stench overpowered his nose. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light, he realized he was surrounded by dead animals. Mice and squirrels and rabbits—all killed in awful ways. Half-skinned. Throats torn out. Heads turned the wrong way. Meat left rotting on the bone.
Uly gulped. This wasn’t what he’d hoped for when he’d thought of dead animals in the pines. He shuddered and left the place as quickly as he could.
He followed the ice back into the open grove where the river ran free again. He bounded up the opposite bank, then gazed back through the trees toward the den. Every frozen inch of him wanted to return and snuggle with Mia and the kits. But he hadn’t hunted anything yet. Nothing but a pinecone.
A breeze blew through the trees, pushing Uly toward the den, as if encouraging him to give up, go back. But then the breeze brought a scent. A fox’s scent.
At first, he wanted to run away, hide. But then he remembered something …
Uly exited the pines and followed the scent.
SEVEN
“GUYS. THIS IS way too much snuggling.”
With five babies pressed against her, Mia’s body smoldered as hot as the kettle on Miss Potter’s stove. Whenever she reached her boiling point, she would extend her paws, pushing the kits away. But then they’d start to shiver and whimper, and she would take pity on them and gather them close again.
“Ow! Someone keeps stepping on my hurt paw,” she said, moving Marley. “Now I know how Mom felt.”
Tingl tink ting.
The wind stirred the icicles again. Mia sniffed for Uly’s scent, but only the cold burned her nose. He’d been gone for hours now, and the storm was getting worse.
“We need a distraction till Uly gets back,” she told the kits, searching the den. “I know! We’ll play a game. What was that one Miss Vix taught—”
FLUMPF!
The kits squeaked as a pile of snow collapsed in the den’s entrance, snuffing out the light.
“It’s okay, guys,” Mia told them. “Just more dumb snow.”
She licked their tiny heads—Roa, Marley, Bizy, Alfie, and Uly Junior—until their shivers settled. Then she scowled at the buried entrance.
“This won’t do. If Uly’s going to bring us back a nice, juicy groundhog, he needs to be able to sniff us out. Otherwise, we’ll look like any other mound of snow, and we’ll starve. Isn’t that right, my little cherubs?” She rolled her eyes. “Ugh. I’m starting to sound like Miss Potter.”
She hobbled to the entrance and started to dig.
It was funny. She’d thought heading north would lead her to her mom. But instead it had led her to becoming a mom of sorts. She pawed out another swath of snow. Her mom had told Mia that if she wanted kits, they would come to her.
“Well, Mom,” Mia said, “turns out they’ll come if you don’t want them too.” She smirked at the shivering kits. “Only kidding, guys.”
It took a while to dig out the entrance while balancing on one hind paw, but she finally broke through. Outside, the snow fell in vast sheets. A breeze brushed past her as she squinted into the blizzard, hoping to see Uly’s silhouette. When he didn’t appear, she limped back into the den, excited to have five tiny bodies to warm her.
“I’m b-b-back!” she managed to say through chattering teeth.
The kits whimpered in response.
“Oh, hush,” she said. “I wasn’t gone that long.”
She counted their heads. One, two, three, four …
Mia’s heart skipped a beat.
One, two, three, four … Someone was missing.
She heard a tiny growling and turned to find one of the kits outside the den.
“Alfie,” she scolded, her heart settling. She limped back to the entrance. “How in the squi—How did you get all the way out there?”
Alfie snarled and tugged on something in the snow. Mia reached beneath the icicles, plucked him up, limped back, and plopped him near his siblings. She quirked her head, looking at the long stretch between the entrance and the litter. With their round tummies and wobbly stem legs, it took the kits an eternity to crawl a single tail’s length. Alfie couldn’t have made it outside that quickly unless …
Mia’s heart skipped another beat.
Unless something had carried him.
She went to the den’s entrance to investigate. There were no prints in the snow. No paws crunched through the frozen layer. No wings beat the cold air. She thought she smelled the faint odor of moldy fruit. But then it was lost in a whirl of snowflakes.
She remembered that Alfie had been chewing on something, and she slid beneath the icicles. She sniffed around until she found something small and black sticking out of the white. It was a claw. She started to dig until she uncovered red fur. Four paws. A head and a tail.
Mia leapt back. It was the frozen body of a vixen. She was curled up beneath the snow, spine twisted. Mia sniffed at the body, and her heart started to settle. The fox didn’t smell like apples.
Was this the kits’ mom? What had killed her? Was it the same thing that had tried to take Alfie?
Mia kicked snow back over the body, covering it up. She returned to the kits—one, two, three, four … five.
“Sorry about that, littles,” she said. “I just needed some fresh air.”
She tucked the kits under her belly fur so she could feel the rise and fall of their little chests. Once all five were snoozing, she laid her chin on the hard earth and fixed her eyes on the entrance. She watched the snowflakes bend around the icicles, trying to get in. If something had dared to sneak into the den while she was there, then it would be back. But this time, Mia would see it coming.
She just hoped Uly made it back before that, so they could leave this place. All of them.
EIGHT
ULY PRESSED THROUGH the blizzard, following the fox’s scent.
When he was a quarter the size he was now, he had watched his mom bury squirrels in the mud swaths of the Boulder Fields.
“Why you doin’ that?” he’d asked.
“When the snows fall,” she’d said, digging, “all the critters hide deep in the cracks, making them nearly impossible to catch.” The hole finished, she dropped the body of a squirrel inside. “This is for winter.”
He had hopped behind her as she made the caches, scattering them so they’d be more difficult for scavengers to find. She showed him how to bury the kills close to the surface so they would be able to sniff them out again once the snows came. He even helped pack the dirt down with his forepaw while she dragged twigs and leaves over the spot until Uly couldn’t tell it apart from the rest of the ground. Unless he smelled it, that was.
And so Uly continued to sniff the snows for the fox scent. If this fox had marked his territory, there might be a whole winter’s worth of food, buried and safe, waiting to be dug up.
Uly’s nose led him to a snowless place beneath an earthen overhang. He checked to make sure he was alone and then searched the frozen mud for signs of disturbance. He found a spot that smelled of blood and dug at it with his forepaw, but he turned up nothing save roots and stones. He marked the spot so he wouldn’t be tempted to dig there again, and sniffed out another.
The second spot he found had been robbed, dug up by some creature that hunted with its nose. All that was left was a mudhole, a bit of frozen fur stuck to the bottom.
A raven was perched over the third cache. Its black claws clung to a jagged rock as it tilted back its beak, choking down the feet of a muddy rodent that had been buried there. Uly hesitated. The raven was bigger than he was. He could lose an eye to its sharp bill. Or his heart.
He thought of Mia and the kits back at the den. He imagined the snows slowly freezing them to icicles, their little bones swarming with spiders and centipedes … He needed the food in that cache.
So Uly, heart pounding, lay down and closed his eyes.
A moment later, he heard a shuffling of feathers. Then the beating of wings. And finally, the hopping of clawed feet. It took all of Uly’s willpower to keep his eyes closed. The moment the raven pecked at his side, Uly leapt up with such a big snarl it surprised even him.
“RRRRRAAAAAAAA!”
“Grawk!”
The raven cawed, beat its black wings, and took flight. Uly smiled proudly as it faded in the flurries. He just wished Mia had been there to see him use the nap-and-scare technique—his twist on nap-and-capture. An Uly original.
He nosed away the remaining twigs and leaves that camouflaged the cache and started to dig. The frozen mud pulled at his claws, but soon he unearthed a bright smear of blood. Without thinking, he gobbled the mouse, crunchy with ice. There was another mouse beneath that, and he gulped it down as well. He was about to devour another when he stopped himself.
One for the trip here, one for the trip back, he decided.
The rest was for Mia and the kits.
He hitched the frozen bodies in his mouth and then heard the ashen chuckle behind him.
“I would be upset that you ate the food I was about to rob…”
Uly turned, mouth full of mice.
Mr. Scratch smiled. “But the meat on you will do just fine.”
NINE
MIA STAYED AWAKE.
While the kits slept, their tiny paws twitching against her belly, she kept her tired eyes fixed on the den’s icicle entrance. And she thought about her mom.
It was scary work, keeping kits safe. They were fragile, wriggly little things, so cute and tiny that you couldn’t help but worry over every whisker. She imagined leading a kit, who still had her milk teeth, out of the Eavey Wood, across the open fields, and into a forest. The thought made her heart hurt. It was scary enough keeping an eye on kits in an enclosed den.
Ting tingl tink.
Snff snff.
Mia perked her ears. She widened her eyes. That wasn’t the wind.
One of the kits whimpered. Then another.
“Hush,” she told them.
Snowflakes whirled through the icicles, like breath through clenched teeth.
“Uly?” she said.
She listened for the familiar crunch of his paws. Watched, hoping to see him shake the snow from his coat and triumphantly drop a groundhog carcass.
“Uly,” she said, more sternly, hoping to make him appear.
The snow didn’t answer. Her whiskers told her something was there. But she couldn’t see it. Couldn’t hear it. She sniffed the crisp air—snff snff—and thought she smelled apples.
Her breath caught. “… Mom?”
She sniffed again, this time catching a faint yellow scent.
“Miss … Vix?”
A swirl of snow blew into the den, sweeping the scents away. Now she smelled nothing but winter.
Mia gave her head a shake. She was exhausted. Delirious. The snow was shifting, releasing old scents. The cold was reaching into her past and drawing out memories.
“Hush, hush,” she said, nuzzling the kits closer. “It was just our imaginations.”
She laid her head down and let her eyes flutter shut.
* * *
Mia jerked awake. She had accidentally fallen asleep.
She sniffed the kits. Roa, Uly Junior, Alfie, Marley …
“Bizy?” she called.
Mia was up on her paws, frantically sniffing the den for the baby girl kit.
Bizy wasn’t there.
Mia darted to the entrance and slipped outside, searching frantically. There was no trace of dusty fur. No tiny-sized mews. No little tracks or flops in the snow.
“Bizy!” she cried into the storm. “Yelp if you can hear me!”
There were no whimpers. No howls.
Mia squinted through the gales crashing against each other, hoping to catch a hint of dusty fur breaking up the white. There. Twenty foxtails away, the snow bent around an animal shape.
She darted toward it and bit deep, but her teeth caught nothing but snowflakes. She whirled, sniffing. All that remained was a fleeting scent, moldy and sweet. As if the creature was nothing but a ghost. How was she supposed to fight something that wasn’t even there?
The kits whined in the den, begging her to come back. Mia trembled. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t leave Bizy out there alone. She was supposed to be protecting her. Instead, she’d fallen asleep, and the baby kit had vanished, as quiet as snowfall.
Mia stood, helpless, staring into the blizzard. And she thought of her mom again. That moment when she’d let Mia down.
Finally, Mia let the tiny howls draw her back to the den. She curled up with the four remaining kits, whose whines quickly melted into whimpers. She snuggled them close as she imagined Bizy being carried through the icicles and through the snow, eyes open, tongue poking out of her mouth.
Frost crept across Mia’s heart … and i
t froze over.
TEN
MR. SCRATCH LOOKED more deranged than ever. His ears were chewed through, his fur shredded by bats. A gash glistened on his chest, showing bone beneath. His head sat twisted on his spine, and he angled a bloodied eye toward Uly.
“Oh, now, now,” Mr. Scratch said through slashed lips. “Don’t give me that look. You act as if I’m the villain.” He limped closer. “And yet you are the one who led a badger into my territory. You made my wives lie to me. You schemed to chase me from my own kingdom. And now you’re stealing the food I was going to eat.”
Uly was silent, his mouth still full of mice.
Mr. Scratch grinned. “If you lay down that food and bare your throat to me, I just might let you off with one less paw. You could use your remaining two to scoot back to that little vixen.” He chuckled. “She might even still find you den-worthy.”
Uly’s mom was no longer there to help him escape. Neither was Mia. He couldn’t outrun Mr. Scratch on three paws.
“Of course,” Mr. Scratch continued, “if you disobey me, then I will reclaim what is rightfully mine. Your body. I’ll chew you up and make a new kit that isn’t a failure.”
Uly’s jaw trembled, and he almost dropped the mice. He thought of the six hungry mouths waiting for him back at the den. He thought of Mia. He slid onto his stomach and then rolled onto his back, baring his throat.
Mr. Scratch stepped close, his fangs hovering over Uly’s throat. “Ah ah ah. You forgot to spit out the food.”
Uly looked up sheepishly. Then with all his might, he drove his forepaw into his father’s chest wound.
Mr. Scratch shrieked, and Uly leapt up and ran.
ELEVEN
MIA WATCHED THE den’s entrance with unblinking eyes.
Bizy was out there somewhere. Cold and helpless.
The kits were quiet, pressing as close to Mia’s ribs as they could manage, as if they, too, missed their sister’s warmth. Mia didn’t push them away this time. She just sniffed at their heads—Uly, Marley, Roa, Alfie—and regretted naming them so soon.
Scary Stories for Young Foxes Page 18