FOX, a Hero's Journey. BOOK ONE, The Birth
Michael Gray Griffith
Synopsis
This tale is warning to us all
We humans have always had a love-hate relationship with foxes. A conflict of emotions rooted in their ability to thrive in our shadows. They steal our chickens, eat our guinea pigs, and do it all while looking elegant, confounding our enslaved dogs, who must wonder how they survive beyond our fences—without a collar or a leash.
But what if foxes are more beautiful than we realize?
What if they also possess, or are entangled within, a rich yet troubled spiritual life?
A troubled spiritual life that will demand a herculean effort by a living being to repair.
Well, this will have to happen soon, for we humans, with our love of playing God, are about to release a genetically engineered virus that threatens to wipe out all the Australian foxes.
An unnatural, merciless pandemic, within which a fox cub will be born. A tiny cub whose first view of the world, once he finally opens his eyes, will be the golden but worried eyes of his mother.
But if we knew what we were actually doing, then behind her concerned gaze should be ours. For the problem with playing God is that God can play too.
FOX
BOOK ONE: THE BIRTH
A gold, heavy moon oversaw the birth, illuminating the earthy lair as it crept its weight over the crest of the world. Inside the lair, Mother’s womb, life full, ruptured. Digging her claws into the earth, she yelped to the break: a wail that clung to the scrub’s leaf-rotting breath as the cubs, brunted from their liquid cell by time, poured consecutively free. Mother, muscles like water, rose and sniffed her squirming cubs. They were hairless, blind, and steam rose from their pink skin. She licked them both to clean them and simultaneously imprint her odor into their naked memories. But while Mother’s scent was becoming their axis, everything else was shock. And there was pain: a sharpness where the cord had been. An empty, calling, needing pain they fought with the only tool they owned: crying, crying, then more despairing crying.
Cleaning finished, Mother lay on her side and, picking them up, she used her tender jaws to crane them, one by one, from their afterbirth’s pool to her stomach. At the touch of her belly, they both fell quiet. Things were beginning to make sense. Instinctively, they found and utilized their limbs. Squirming through her long white hair, they searched for and then attached themselves to a teat. As she ate their placentas, they drank, ballooning their bald bellies with milk. And as their stomachs filled, hunger began to lose its bite, and this bird-squawking, insect-singing, leaf-rustling blindness . . . this black cold, became softer and warm. But it was not only the milk that calmed them. As they fed, they listened to their lullaby: the thump of Mother’s heart, beating strong and furiously alive from there, where they had just been.
Chapter
Despite losing its gold, the Moon continued to float through the stars, creating from the park’s eucalypti canopy an ocean of leaves and shadows that, driven by the wind’s currents, rippled their dark, tumbling waves to the four impounding shores of humanity.
Against every perimeter of the park, dairy cows slept, while other foxes, who knew they owned the night, patrolled the same tree-stripped paddocks. Further inland, the great lakes of juvenile wheat grew, the lay of their developing stalks corrupted only by the lights of the satellite towns. Toward the coast, the lights of Perth twinkled like their own universe, so bright that on clear nights they created their own violet dome of luminance. A dome Mother had seen from the clearings in the park. This park’s thirty square kilometers, which fit into a single aerial photograph, were a memory of how the entire surrounding landscape had once been. A bunker of native life under constant siege from the introduced species that not only followed man’s progress but prospered because of him. Other tributes to the lost landscape were situated around geographic abnormalities: caves and hills not conducive to farming. Other parks were located out on the ocean, where, with his law, man attempted to protect the fragile beauty of reefs and all their colorful menageries.
This park was sheltered behind the low, rolling hills of the Darling Ranges. Hills that, in the mist of day, often appeared blue.
Chapter
The first morning brought rain, and rain remained for days. Sometimes pouring, sometimes drizzling, sometimes pretending to be gone but then, always just pretending. Mother had not eaten since the boys had been born, and apart from her stomach bellowing in gurgles and syrup sounds—clearly audible outside the burrow—her milk supply was not keeping up with the appetites of the cubs. Curled around them, she observed their fourth dawn and its drizzling grey light wake the outside world and rouse her still-blind boys. She studied them as they suckled. There were odds in their favor. Their emerging jet-black fur would keep them hidden inside the den’s dark. Their instinctive silence would attract no attention, but it was their combined smell that concerned her. The air of the surrounding scrub was thick with fox-birth, and it would not take long for a scavenger to ascertain that their parent was hunting.
If things had been as they should, their father would have left her here to protect their cubs while he spent the days scouring the park for enough food to feed them all. It was how foxes raised their cubs. How she’d been raised. But he was not here, and despite her grave apprehensions, alone, she could not withstand hunger’s onslaught. Inevitably, she gave in.
Placing them both in one of the den’s corners, she waited until they had fallen back to sleep, then, with a fraught heart, broke into the pouring day.
Immediately, she began urinating on the surrounding undergrowth, not satisfied until her spray overpowered the scent of her boys. It was a fragile ruse, but then she had survived for two years within the constraints of frailty. Finally, she powered away, her nose a stone scrounging the earth for the flint of a trail.
Several times it sparked, leaving her frantically circling as, snout down, she thoroughly evaluated the new scent. But as soon as she started following it, she gave up, as time and again the rain washed the scent away. She cursed each dead end and found herself turning back, wondering whether misfortune was an omen: a sign to return home. Hunger, though, had no time for signs and constantly pushed her on.
For a while, she dug at a rabbit hole, and kept digging even after she knew it was pointless. Later, she climbed a tree as she chased a possum who, as determined as she was to live, kept climbing onto higher and more frail branches. Branches that Mother knew would not support them both. She could not afford to get injured. Hungry and able, there was hope. Hungry and crippled, there was not. Back on the ground, she tore up the soaked, fallen leaves, scattering branches and empty soft drink cans as she dove for parrots. Parrots who not only flew away but used their panicked, crackling voices to alarm the bush to her starving presence. Late in the afternoon, she emerged from the trees and stood up against the rubbish bins. The rain was pooling in their empty bottoms, and the pools reflected her head.
After checking for man, she surveyed the pond. Ever vigilant, the ducks and swans were floating away from the stone edge, all of their eyes on her.
She plied her way down to the barbeques. Jumping up onto a cold plate, she began licking the solidified grease. The sound of a car approaching saw her flying back to the trees, from whose hide she watched the vehicle pass.
It was the Ranger’s ute. In the back, the Rottweiler had its head up, and the fast, wet breeze was blowing back his gums, exposing, as it did, his formidable jaws.
She did not go back to the clearing. Choosing a new direction, she headed off, keeping to the muddy dirt of one of the park’s many walking paths.
She could smell old human footprints despite the rain. When humans were here, she was able to hear them long before they appeared, as they thudded down the paths in their walking boots. Sometimes she followed them, became another shadow stalking them through the trees, waiting for them to throw away food or to take a shit. Their shit was nutritious. There were no humans to follow today.
A nightmare slipped into her mind. She saw a feral cat carrying off the smallest cub, heard it whimpering as it struggled to free itself from the cat’s jaws. Back at the den, the larger cub was scraping the soil, searching for his brother. The image was so clear that when Mother turned and looked back, she expected to find the cat standing there, shocked by the sight of her. Instead, it was Mother who was shocked by the sight of the trees and the drizzle filling all the spaces between them. For a moment, she went to return. Shook the rain from her coat and began sprinting home, her jaws open and panting, ready for a fight. But after a handful of steps, hunger pulled her up and turned her back to her initial direction.
Chapter
From behind the wire-mesh doors of their white plastic cages, the foxes watched the laboratory technician, masked and gloved, unclip the cage from the shelf and carry it, along with its silent occupant, out of the room.
All night, the foxes on this side of the long, white room had watched that cage’s fox run and shiver itself to death.
The Spirit Foxes had watched it die too. Floating between the cages, they had illuminated its final hours of suffering and bleeding.
The room, longer than it was wide, was always lit. It could hold up to ten cages at a time: five along each of the two longest walls.
This fox wasn’t the first to die. Inside the room, foxes were always dying. Sometimes, all twenty would perish within days of being injected. As they died, the laboratory technicians monitored their decline, taking detailed notes and selecting one or two from each batch to film.
And what a pain to die with: in the last hours, it felt as if their flesh was being burned from their bones. In the end, the flames grew so intense they devoured everything—their senses, their thoughts, even their memories. All that remained was an urgency to run. A need to shove their snouts against the locked wire doors and run, their paws gouging the resilient floors of their plastic tombs.
Outside, in the rows of communal pens that backed onto the laboratory building, other foxes waited their turn, pacing, sleeping, and eating to pass the time.
To ensure a steady supply, a small team of technicians managed the laboratory’s breeding program, becoming adept at artificially inseminating the vixens. Lately, since the breakthrough, they had refreshed their gene pool by introducing foxes caught in the wild.
The project’s director was the virologist, Professor Sebastian Chute.
For ten years, he and his team had worked to engineer a virus specifically designed to infect foxes. After eight years of failure, they had made a breakthrough. In the last few months, not a single injected fox had survived.
Chapter
The larger cub, Dint, could not recall the moment his eyes had opened. He couldn’t remember being blind, and the only sight that stirred his interest was Mother’s teats. He used his vision to find his favorite, then closed his eyes to drink, preferring his personal darkness to savor the nurturing flow. This was, of course, when there was milk to drink.
The first thing the smaller cub, Fox, saw was a spider: a minute arachnid dangling confidently, despite its own poor vision, from a single thread in the middle of the den. It had spent hours struggling over the ceiling’s chaotic cobwebs to reach the apex of the den’s ceiling, where, unaware of its location, it had dropped down to begin spinning the integral chord of its web.
Fox watched it sway in the few elusive breezes that found their way into the burrow. With each waft, the spider paused, becoming a suspended jewel. Mesmerized by its saffron color, Fox tripped over Dint, who was asleep, waiting for Mother’s return. Righting himself, Fox found that the spider had continued its descent. Opening its eight fragile legs like a miniature, upturned flower, it landed on his nose. Unable to differentiate his nostrils from the soil, it attached its chord mid-landing.
Startled, Fox shook his head, snapping the sticky thread in two. Terrified, the spider clenched its moving floor, unaware Fox was about to wipe his snout with his paw. Upside down, it fell to the ground.
As Fox went to sniff the dirt for his missing toy, he was stopped by the colors brown and white—the shards of mice bones.
Looking up and out of the hole, he crept back to the side of his sleeping brother, daunted by the view. But as he continued to watch, the blurry greens and blues began to focus. Trees, leaves, bushes, and sky all sharpened into distinct shapes.
As the morning aged, he noticed the black of his brother’s fur, the cream of the plant roots visible within the crumbling walls, and the sharp, wet green of the buffalo grass, which raised its creeping spikes at the entrance of the den.
The only thing the spider could see was the circle of daylight marking the burrow’s mouth. Broken, it crept toward it, unnoticed by the cubs and by Mother, who was entering.
Fox watched her as she gently roused his brother. Her movements were fluid, her face slender and narrow. From her bottom jaw, a pelt of pure white ran underneath her throat, colored her stomach, and rose a short way up her abundant tail. Her top color was a mixture of reds and ginger, crowned by white tips at the ends of her ears and tail.
His brother yawned as he crawled onto her stomach, whimpering as he moved to his usual teat.
Finished with Dint, Mother turned her attention to Fox. As she did, he noticed her eyes were gold, like the spider.
Chapter
While Mother scoured the park for food, the cubs played, unknowingly practicing their hunting skills. They prowled clumsily over the uneven floor before leaping full-length onto each other. Dint, the larger cub, would playfully wrestle Fox down and hold him there until Fox stopped struggling. Together, they tossed small sticks over their heads, somersaulting them into the stagnant air, or dug shallow, amateurish holes in which they buried imaginary food. Later, they would forget the holes were there and stumble into them. Their favorite pastime was careering full-pelt around their small, secure world, ripping roots and cobwebs from the walls. They played at this for hours, running themselves to exhaustion.
Dint always rested first, and as he did, Fox would tenderly lick the dirt from his brother’s black fur. Working his way up Dint’s protruding spine, Fox nibbled off fleas, which, flustered by his tongue, momentarily revealed their existence.
They always ate the fleas.
Finished, Fox would stretch out in the den’s opening, relaxing as his brother pulled himself up and shook himself awake.
Fox adored being cleaned. He loved the feel of his brother’s tongue dragging firmly through his fur until his skin felt as though it could breathe. He also enjoyed the silence of his brother’s preoccupation, which allowed him to unleash his ferocious curiosity upon the view.
Outside, as the rain fell, birds swooped down, landing near puddles where they turned over wet leaves in search of grubs.
Quietly, studiously, Fox learned the birds’ system of glancing around to evaluate their safety with every second step. He realized he could hear the noises that, without fail, would startle them back to the trees before they could. He could smell approaching feral cats long before the feathered alarm was raised. As the cold days passed, he watched all this and more.
Chapter
The parked car rocked back and forth. The humans inside were on the back seat, and the car’s windows were misted.
In the night’s shadows, Mother waited. Rain dripped from her nose, and she blinked constantly to keep the water out of her eyes.
Still, the car rocked.
Other hungry scavengers arrived.
Two cats.
Aware of Mother, they climbed separate trees and began cleaning themselves. The park was full of cats. They came in all colors and sizes—their size dependent on how good a hunter they were. Some toms were so big they didn’t even flinch in the presence of a fox. Mother never bothered cats. She saw no point in attacking something that could fight back and injure her in the process.
The rain grew heavier. She looked down the road. Her mate, the cubs’ father, had been killed near here. While he was a consummate hunter and brilliant survivor, he had also nurtured a dangerous habit that had ended the lives of many foxes: the desire to let humans see him. There was no reason for a fox to be seen by man. Man was, by nature, a noisy, clumsy creature whose approach any healthy fox could sense from a mile away. Yet, despite humanity’s clumsiness, so many foxes crossed roads in front of cars, then sat in the tree line, hoping they would stop. Often, they did, and when this happened, the thrill was in remaining there—sitting with a nonchalant expression as the car’s occupants pointed and jabbered in excited voices. In the last six months of his life, Fox’s father had become addicted to this thrill. So much so that, despite Mother being close to full-term, he waited in the tree line, adrenaline pumping.
From the dark, where she always hid, Mother had watched the moment shock hit him—the moment he realized it was not a tourist’s car that had stopped but the Ranger’s ute.
At the gunshot, the cubs in her belly had kicked, and they continued to shift as she watched his limp body being thrown into the back of the ute.
A crow brought her back to the couple in the car. It landed in the branches above her. Mildly interested, Mother watched it shake the water from its feathers, then, unconcerned, she returned her attention to the car.
Slow time measured its passing in the squeak of the car’s springs. It was annoying yet, mixed with the cold, hypnotic. Before she knew it, Mother’s mind was drifting again. She remembered a half-eaten hamburger she’d found near the ponds months ago. She could almost taste the cooked meat and bread. Closing her eyes, she imagined the morsels slipping down.
The crow cawed.
Looking up, Mother found the bird studying her: its black eyes, almost invisible in the night, were fixed and drilling. It didn’t bother her. She’d encountered thousands of crows, and they often did this. But as she looked away, it cawed again—long and mournfully.
Mother bared her teeth. Still, it studied her. It shook its head free of rain and cawed once more.
There was movement in the car: a woman’s upset voice, then a man’s pleading. A short time later, a grumbling man got out of the back, grimacing at the trees as he pulled on his pants. A woman did the same, her pale, chubby belly bouncing as she pulled on her pants. Finally, both in the front, the car started up and drove away.
As soon as it was gone, Mother ran out. With the cats and the crow watching, she sniffed the wet ground.
The humans had left nothing.
Mother wondered whether to try her luck at the next car-parking bay, but as she deliberated, the crow cawed. Both the cats and Mother looked over at it, studying it as blacker than the wet night, it refused to remove its eyes from her.
An hour later, Mother disappeared under a large spread of tangled dyandra bushes—a native plant with savage, thorny leaves. There, she waited. The crow had not stopped following her. She couldn’t see it now, but she could hear it. Every time she stopped, it roosted in a nearby tree and cawed. But there was no way it would risk wounding itself by landing in this bush—especially at night.
She knew what it was up to. Crows were clever. It had noticed her hanging teats and deduced she had cubs somewhere. By her exposed bones, it had likely concluded that not only was she in trouble, but her cubs were also suffering. A lone crow was a pest, but if it called to its murder once it located their den, her boys would not stand a chance.
Her only course of action, though it annoyed her—for she needed to find food—was to wait here until it grew bored and flew off.
And so, crouched beneath the thorns, she waited. But the crow was stubborn, and in the long wait, she couldn’t stop the evaluations. She had never been this hungry. If she had been alone, the constant rain and lack of visitors to the park would have driven her to try her luck in one of the towns. If the cubs survived, she was thinking of leading them there. But if her cubs didn’t eat soon—and meat, not the insects, worms, and occasional mice she’d been bringing home—she’d be leading them nowhere. What she needed was a possum. Without closing her eyes, she could see the cubs tearing the possum flesh from the gashes of her bite. She could almost taste the hot flesh herself, feel the blood rushing into her mouth. Then something jabbed her, and she jumped. Blood was rushing into her mouth. She’d bitten down on one of the leaves, and its thorns had pierced her tongue. It brought her back to where she was.
Crawling out from under the dyandra, she shook the water from her coat and sucked in the night air for any clues to the crow’s whereabouts. It was nowhere.
Chapter
In the cages, the remaining foxes could feel the sickness rising, adding its kindling to the little fires now catching in their bellies and the skin around their tails. Some could already feel the flames licking at their brains.
Through their wire doors, they studied each other. Each shiver collected their attention as they watched to see if the one shivering would be the first to start shoving their head against the wire—the first to start running.
They glared at the technicians as they walked between the cages. They snorted as these same technicians filmed them and yelped as the digital still cameras’ flashes fired.
But the ones they growled at were the Spirit Foxes, who, surrounded by their soft light, floated in front of the cages and, with impassive expressions, watched them die.
Once the fires had consumed them—once there was nothing left to burn—the shaking started. A vicious seizure that saw them spitting out saliva and bleeding freely from every orifice. Even then, the virus took its time.
In the cage alone on the shelf—now that the cages on either side had been removed—an old vixen moved into the running stage. Too old for breeding, she was the mother of a young male now incarcerated in one of the cages across from her. Whining, he watched her.
She didn’t want to run. She wanted to curl around the burning and not let it win. But the flames had become too intense. Finally, she uncurled and, unable to bear it, smashed headfirst into the wire door and began to run.
Chapter
As the cubs fought over the last few worms, Mother found it difficult to look at them. Lying down, she felt Dint’s freezing body as, worms eaten, he suckled from one of her dried-up teats. She called Fox over too, but he refused. Fox knew she had no milk. He had felt her becoming slimmer, watched the hungry days revealing her bones—the same days that had done the same to him. Inside, he knew, despite having no past to learn from, that this was not how it was meant to be.
Alone, at the mouth of the den, he watched the night. Out there somewhere was food, and yet, as he studied it all, the darkness itself seemed more interested in eating him. When he turned back, he found they were both asleep. Mother’s weary face curled around and back, her long, slender jaw becoming a partial blanket for Dint.
Fox trembled. With no body fat to keep him warm and his breath making mist, he decided he too would curl up against her.
As he rose to move, something else moved.
Turning back to the darkness, his eyes peered into the distance as he waited to see if it would move again.
Leaves fell. Rain pattered. The cold breeze entered and chilled his face.
Nothing. Not one solitary sound, except the ones he was used to, reached him. Regardless, he sniffed the air and listened so hard he wasn’t sure if his ears were inventing what he so desperately wanted to hear. Time passed, more rain fell, but that was it. It was nothing.
Giving in, he left the hole and then jumped up. This time, he not only heard it move—more importantly, he could smell it.
Chapter
Mother dreamt, and in the dream, it was also night, and it was raining. The boys were huddled together, asleep, and she was not just leaving but running away. As soon as she was out, she was flying over the damp undergrowth, splashing through puddles. Soon, the puddles were gone. But this was not enough. On she ran, traveling from this season to the next, and as the damp forest dried, hunger began losing its grip, and the sun, in a long, split line of milk, began cleaning the entire horizon.
Nothing could catch her. Nothing could stop her—not even the voices of the crows cawing at each other as they argued over something she had left behind.
She could do nothing now. Her new course was to reach the new sun and there, warm herself and, once healed, start again. And she would start again. Find a mate that wouldn’t get himself shot and endanger her. Find a mate that would be there all winter to help rear their new cubs—cubs she would never leave, cubs who would never know starvation.
And the crows cawed. Their mournful voices celebrated the end as the sun, as though welcoming her home, began to rise.
But something was wrong with the sun. Something was disrupting the view—a corruption, more broken than the voices of the crows. Something was giving the sun a voice—a whimpering voice.
Suddenly, she understood.
Chapter
To Fox, everything was an explosion. Before Mother had even acknowledged that he was scratching her face and whimpering, she was awake and charging out of the den, bowling over both cubs as she did.
The rabbit had already sensed them. Hearing Fox’s whimpering pleas, it was bounding away before Mother had even reached her full stride.
Unperturbed, Mother squeezed her emaciated body for every ounce of speed. It was not enough. Skidding into the burrow, the rabbit had already disappeared down. She shoved in her snout and snorted. There it was, a few feet away—no more. She began tearing up the soggy ground, fanning the dirt behind her.
An hour later, though, her front paws bleeding, she stopped and tried to regain her focus. Shoving her snout back down the hole, she finally accepted that she could no longer smell it.
Face covered in dirt, she began sniffing the local area. Within minutes, she’d found the burrow’s other holes. One of them smelled of the rabbit she’d been chasing. It had escaped while she was digging. No doubt, it was miles away by now.
Chapter
Standing together, the cubs waited for her to return. Listening to the night, they pressed hard against each other, marrying their warmth as the cold found them.
Chapter
Mother stopped within sight of the den. She had snuck up to it silently, leaving and making new scent trails. Now, as the rain drizzled and dripped from her snout, she watched the pair as they waited for her. Lowering her head, she turned and left.
Chapter
As he watched the vixen leave, the crow didn’t move. The leaves of the gum tree hid him well, and the wind had no downdraft, so his scent did not drop to Mother’s level.
Ever since he’d duped her that night and successfully followed her back here, he’d left and returned constantly—perching far enough away to avoid being noticed but close enough to study the den. This minor slit, cut between the fallen tree and the damp earth, was so insignificant that if you did not witness the vixen leaving and entering it, you could spend forever looking for it and fail.
He shook his head, and then, knowing the vixen was gone, he flew closer. With the dark effortlessly hiding his blackness, he landed in a more suitable tree and roosted, settling down to study. Two cubs. Two skinny, trembling cubs, their stomachs bloated with malnutrition. Inside his black eyes, he smiled.
Chapter
The lack of moon let Mother and the scrub become one dark. To every strange sound, she paused, waiting for her experienced library of noises to either identify it or judge it safe before moving on. There were the constant sounds of leaves and branches falling and rain dripping from every point. But there were other sounds too—distant sounds that seeped up from the human world. The drone of an airplane, the low growls of trucks plying the highways.
Taking in everything—planning, absorbing, and constantly re-evaluating—she moved closer. The occasional nocturnal bird alarmed the surrounding area to her passing. Other birds took up the call. As she traveled on, their echoes followed her.
Long before she saw it, its odors engulfed her, bathing her in a cacophony of stench as if trying to replace her own natural imprint with the complexity of its own. She paused, took a few more steps, then stopped again. But this second pause was only to regain her composure. For all its threat, its pungency was not turning her back.
Chapter
To Mother’s eyes, the Ranger’s house was a human island afloat in a sea of dark scrub. Its green, weatherboard walls dimly glowed, thanks to the light pouring out of its windows.
Mother had purposefully approached from downwind, and the breeze coming off the house was swollen with human scents.
Crouched in the undergrowth, Mother sniffed the flaking fence posts and their connecting wire, then smelled the ute and its general mechanics. All of her senses were so tensely tuned that she could hear maggots gorging their way through the rubbish in the bins and see moths fluttering against the one exterior light. She could also smell and hear the man and the dog.
One side window was open. Through it, she could see the Ranger’s shadow as he crossed and re-crossed the room.
She could not see the dog, though. He was on the other side of the house, outstretched on the front veranda, asleep and snoring. As she studied the human view again, she listened to the dog gurgling on his great gasps of air.
Mother moved closer. Step by determined step, her stomach barely leaving the ground, she reached the fence, where, peering into the yard, she found them.
Mother had never seen them before. But all the park’s foxes knew they were here. Some had even tried to snatch one. All of them had failed. All of them were dead—hunted down by the Ranger and his dog. She, herself, had heard the gunshots.
Their enclosure was attached to the far corner of the house’s back wall—its reinforced chicken wire walls over nine feet high.
Clenching her jaw to steady her heart, she fluidly slipped under the fence.
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Fox watched the dark. Behind him, Dint, to escape the hunger, had curled up and gone to sleep. In his sleep, he was shivering.
Fox peered up at the night sky. There were no stars: only clouds, rain, and the silhouettes of trees. More importantly, there was no Mother.
Tail wrapped around his legs, stomach burning, as always, he watched it all and waited.
Crow dropped to a lower branch. From here, he was able to see a short way into the hole. He could see one cub now. It had heard him move to the new branch. It was looking up at the tree, but Crow could see by the way it had its head cocked to one side that it had not seen him.
Silent, he chose against moving again and instead waited.
Chapter
Inside the yard, Mother paused and processed everything again. Apparently safe, she crossed a vegetable patch that threw up its own blend of new smells. Panting, she hid behind the cover of the potato plants. She took in the window and saw the light fittings hanging from the ceiling. The dog was still snoring. She could not believe that neither the man nor the dog had noticed her. To her, every time she rustled a leaf, it sounded like a branch crashing to earth.
Mouth dry, she moved on.
The wired framework of a runner bean crop stopped her. After sniffing, she plied her way through the thin metal strands. The wooden posts rocked to her passing but held. Now there was only a section of gravel to cross.
Chapter
The incarcerated bandicoots, though native to this area, had never known freedom. Born and bred in captivity—as part of the State’s Re-population program—their lost world had always been viewed through a crisscrossed wire fence. They had seen foxes before; some had even reached the fence, but thanks to the dog and the Ranger, not one had ever been successfully taken. Yet, as Mother picked her way toward their enclosure, lightly crackling across the gravel, their timorous natures told them to fear.
Mother reached the wire. The bandicoots had moved to the other side of the enclosure, where, huddling together, they watched her. As large as a rabbit, they had grey short hair and faces similar to a rat’s, except their snouts were longer.
Mother studied the wire wall with its high, jagged top. She studied too the concrete slabs laid to prevent animals from digging under the wire.
Constantly aware of the lit windows, she worked her way around the cage's perimeter, searching for a weakness.
The enclosure's door was of a stronger construction. The wire at its top had been rolled over the door's top horizontal pole.
She listened once more, backed up, then, with every pair of bandicoot eyes on her, she ran full pelt at their door. She'd judged it well. Running up the face, she balanced on the top for a moment before leaping down into the enclosure.
She captured one as she landed, tearing at its throat. The others panicked. They ran into the wire. They shook the walls. They scrambled behind the nesting boxes, their fear breaking the mountings holding the boxes and sending the boxes tumbling off their benches.
To this thud, the dog woke.
All of the bandicoots were squealing.
In the calamity, Mother broke. Attacking another, she held it down with her paws and bit into its throat until she heard its breath gurgle.
The dog was up. Unable, at first, to position the disturbance, he exploded where he stood, waking the night.
Mother froze. Lifting her head from the dead bandicoot, she heard something bang inside the house. Then she heard too the dog thudding this way from around the side of the house. He was barking.
Everything slowed. Every sound and action separated as if another sense had slipped between them. She knew she had no time; yet felt, oddly, as if she had all the time in the world.
Paralyzed, she calmly watched the bandicoots shoving their snouts through the wire or running around her, blindly. The dog appeared. Careering around from the corner of the house, it was a merge of muscle, jaws, and barks.
A bandicoot, lost in the nightmare, crashed into her back legs. The collision startled Mother back into action. Picking up one of the corpses, she repeated the distance she needed to clear the door and charged. As she ran up its face, the house's exterior lights blinked on. As she landed outside the enclosure, the Ranger, naked from the waist up and rifle in hand, burst into the yard.
Mother tore across the orderly garden. Barking, the dog followed her. But, too excited, he blundered headfirst into the runner beans' wire, tearing the entire construction down and tangling himself in its wreck.
The Ranger aimed and fired. The bullet thudded into the fence post right next to Mother, who was tearing underneath the wire.
As the dog howled, as the Ranger reloaded, she felt the dark scrub call her home.
The second bullet knocked her forward and down.
The Ranger, cheering, descended, reloading as he did.
Dazed, bleeding, but stubbornly refusing to let the bandicoot go, Mother scrambled up to her unsteady feet and blundered into the trees.
The Ranger leapt the fence, then, rifle raised, ran into the same dark. Then he stopped. The fox was nowhere. Fuming, he closed his eyes tight and listened, preparing to fire at any sound he heard, but all he could hear was the howl of his dog. Cursing, he climbed back over the fence and took in the enclosure. Just a glance told him that some of the bandicoots were dead.
Mother could hear nothing but the dog's awful howling.
Still dizzy, she had trouble concentrating on where she was going and so crashed over a small rock. Lifting herself up, she dropped the bandicoot and yapped. The stars were deaf, but the dog heard, and the sound was all he needed to pull himself free from the last threads of the wire, which the Ranger was untangling. Slightly shaky on his damaged legs, the dog ran to the fence and attempted to slay the vixen with the aggression of his voice.
The Ranger grinned. Assured of the dog's hunting skills, he ran into his house to collect his things.
Fox could not hear the dog, but he had heard Mother’s howl. And although far and faint, he knew it was her. Ignoring his sleeping brother, he stood up in the opening and waited for another call.
Eyes glued to the cub, Crow moved another branch closer.
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Mother explored the wound with her back paws. The bullet had sliced across the side of her skull, taking with it a small section of her ear. The wound was numb but bleeding.
She looked back down her trail. She couldn’t see the drops of blood, but they must be there, and the dog would easily follow them. She needed to wash away her trail. She needed water. Fortunately, it was raining—it was always raining—but then, as she thought this, she realized it was not. Looking up, she found stars. The clouds were still there, but they had opened up in great parting rifts.
Mother couldn't believe it. But there was no time to be staggered. The dog was barking. Soon he and the Ranger would be coming. She had to lose her trail. Bleeding, these now-still puddles would guarantee nothing. Picking up the dead bandicoot, she changed her course and headed for the pond.
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The Ranger strung his rifle on his shoulder, checked his torch, and tightened his boots. As he left the house, he called the dog, and together they strode to the gate.
The dog followed the vixen's trail as though he was the vixen himself. Ploughing through the puddles, he paused only when he’d lost her scent.
Behind him, the Ranger followed, splashing across the saturated ground.
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Fox watched the night. Above, the stars appeared normal. The nocturnal birds' indecipherable calls were familiar, as was the wind whispering secrets that all ignored. But something was wrong. He knew it.
He wanted to leave the burrow. Wanted to move into the trees and begin looking for her. But the night frightened him. It was too big. Too full of everything and nothing. Pacing in the entrance, he whimpered.
Black eyes fixed on the cub, Crow did not move a muscle.
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After what seemed like hours, the clearing opened up like a gift to Mother's eyes. Although dark, the long silhouette of trees fell away to the smell of grass and water. Bandicoot in her mouth, she panted as she listened for danger. The only human sound was discarded paper rustling as it rolled in the breezes between the barbecues.
She entered the clearing and ran down to the pond. The pond was covered in a heavy mist. The mist was so perfectly white it looked illuminated.
Trembling, she reached the stone bank and found she could not see the other side. She could smell the ducks and swan asleep in the reeds and smell too the closed flowers of the lilies and the bird shit caking the stone blocks she was standing on. Somewhere in the mist, a turtle rippled the surface as it rose to breathe. Behind her, the dog bark sounded closer. Looking back at the trees, she wondered if there was any other way to lose him, then, knowing there wasn’t, she drew a breath, turned back, and leapt.
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Fox could no longer stand it. As Dint snored, he took his first few steps outside of the hole.
Sniffing the air, he whimpered again because he could not smell her. Looking around, he took a few more steps, then stopped and sniffed again.
Something black and heavy smacked into his side. Squealing, he found himself pinned to the floor. It felt like he was being attacked by the night itself.
Silently, Crow jabbed his beak at the cub's face. He was aiming for his eyes. Once they were gone, the cub was his.
Fox felt a claw on his belly, another trying to trap his scraping front legs. He yelped as the beak smacked his snout, then smacked harder into his ear.
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The water devoured Mother and the bandicoot as though it were a frozen, liquid mouth. Its icicle jaws inflamed her skin. Its chilled appetite imploded her brain, causing her horrified heart to miss a beat. Flailing up to the surface, she let go of the bandicoot and, sucking for air, inhaled algae, water, and mist. Coughing and gagging, she felt panic overtake her. Stealing control of her actions, it sent her splashing back to the wall she had just leapt from. It forced her, struggling, up its slimy stones, left her flat out and shuddering on the grass. Behind her, the bandicoot’s body bobbed in the resettling water.
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As Crow managed to pin Fox's face, he knew Fox's left eye was his. Bringing back his head, he thrust down his beak and . . .
Something slammed into Crow's side. Before his beak could reach the cub's eye, Crow found himself on his side, with whatever had barreled him over now tearing at him.
Free, Fox scrambled and found Dint biting at the side of Crow’s head.
Flapping his wings as he struggled to get back into the air, Crow cawed and cawed. He could see Fox scampering back to the den. He knew that when this cub regained his composure and joined in the attack, he’d be finished. He had to get back in the air.
Moving toward Dint, instead of pulling away, Crow successfully forced Dint to fall back on his bum. In falling, Dint let go. As soon as he did, Crow bounded up, took two blundering steps, then, with a growling Dint on his tail, lifted awkwardly into the air.
The trees hid him. Roosted, he tried to shake off the shock and fear. Inside, his heart was racing, and down the side of his head, feathers were missing.
Back in the den, Fox, his tail wagging, licked and licked his brother, as Dint, head up, allowed him to.
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Panting and shivering beneath the mist’s weightlessness, Mother, saturated, lay on the damp grass and listened to the dog barking his way closer.
She needed to find the energy to stand and the power, or at least the hope, to keep running. But as she searched her exhausted being for either, she found herself empty. Mosquitoes buzzed around her ears, looking for somewhere to drill. Closing her eyes, she pressed her damaged ear to the grass. The cold was numbing, and as she listened, she almost believed that, between the dog’s barks, she could hear the world’s heart beating. A welcoming, mothering beat that seemed to know she was here. The dog also knew. By the way it was barking—faster and ever more viciously—she could tell that it was no longer bothering to smell the ground for her scent.
Then something saw her open her eyes. An instinct. Glancing up, she found the covering mist was changing.
Long tendrils were coagulating as they searched to form. As Mother sat up, she watched whiskers appear, then ears and eyes. Following these, a slender snout was born that gave the rest of the face a foundation. Around this face, other, smaller foxes were emerging. A decoration of suspicious foxes around the countenance of the Spirit Vixen.
The Spirit Vixen was old. Despite its white gentleness, the mist couldn’t soften the fierce lines of her face. With a disinterested expression, she kept her eyes on Mother and lifted an ear to the dog's approach.
"I can't do it,” Mother said. “It's too cold."
The Spirit Vixen glanced over at the water, but her thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
"What can I do?" Mother asked, and could hear the desperation in her own voice.
"You can give us one of your cubs," the Spirit Vixen replied.
“What?” Mother gasped.
“Backtrack, now, then, once you reach home, choose one of your cubs and head for the towns.”
“And the other one?” Mother asked.
“Leave it. By the time they’ve finished with it, you and the other cub will be safe. Once you are safe, the surviving cub is ours.”
“No,” Mother said, and shook her head. “No, I won’t do it.”
“Then stay here and die. Because you will, and after you do, your cubs will die too.”
The dog was so close now his voice was beginning to shake the air.
“Please,” Mother said as the dog barked and barked.
“Backtrack,” the Spirit Vixen replied. “Backtrack and choose.”
Nodding, Mother lowered her head and set off: each new track planted upon one of the old.
“Wait,” said the Spirit Vixen, and Mother turned around. “And if you are thinking of not giving us the cub, then whichever one you choose, we will tell them how you sacrificed his brother.”
These words, like a second bullet, sliced into Mother’s heart.
Turning back, she stopped again as the Spirit Vixen said:
“Don’t forget your bandicoot.”
As Mother returned to the stones, bent down, and fished out the body, the spirits melted back into the mist. All except the Spirit Vixen, who was waiting as Mother looked back up.
The Spirit Vixen’s eyes appeared cold, and yet they burned: her empathy and her condescension impossible to separate.
“I know you’re useless,” the Spirit Vixen said. “But for your cubs’ sake, try to be more than you are.”
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The cubs both came to the entrance. They looked for Crow. They looked, smelt, and listened for her. The clouds were leaving, and the stars, capitalizing on their retreat, were reclaiming the sky. The boys could suddenly see further than they had before. Yet the newer distances were as empty as the close ones.
Fox pressed himself against his brother’s side, and as Dint studied the night, Fox felt the claws’ ghosts clawing his flesh, and he shivered.
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Mother frantically sniffed the damp ground, making sure she located each previous print before placing a paw down.
Before her, the dog barked: each bark an explosion. Driving her teeth deeper into the bandicoot's body, she held on to her panic and pressed on. Then, after what seemed an eternity, she left the clearing and moved back into the trees.
She could smell the dog now. She could smell the Ranger too. They were only a few trees before her and thumping over the damp ground. Thumping this way. Looking up, she saw the sword of the Ranger's torch slicing through the trees.
It was now or never.
From the center of the first wide puddle, she crouched, then, with one almighty effort, she leapt out of the puddle and, spring-released, reached as far as she could with this single bound. Grounded, she hid in the scrub, the dead bandicoot in her jaws, and waited.
The dog broke into her view. Alone, he splashed through the puddle, then stopped, turned, and came back.
For the first time, he stopped barking.
As Mother glared at him, the Ranger appeared. Stooping on the edge of the puddle, he stood and puffed as he waved his torch over the water.
Time and time again, the dog broke through the beam as its nostrils sucked up the puddle's damp shore.
The Ranger was enormous: larger than she had remembered.
The dog paused, looked up, and then looked around.
"What is it, boy?"
A sword of light cut over the scrub. Finding, lighting, and losing trees, it sliced over Mother’s head. She closed her eyes just in time.
The dog barked. Then it barked again, but this time it also careered off toward the pond. As if physically connected, the Ranger followed him.
Before they had reached the clearing, Mother was already running.
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The dog was flummoxed. Three times he'd circled the enormous pond. Disappearing from the Ranger's view within the mists. Three times he'd returned, unable to find her exit trail.
The Ranger stood on the bank and listened to his dog sniff. He had known foxes to use creeks before in efforts to escape them, but never a freezing pond as wide as this.
As he studied the expanse of fog, he wondered if, come tomorrow, he'd be back here, wearing his waders and fishing out a fox.
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Fox and Dint could hear Mother approaching. She was tearing toward them. Both were just back from the hole's mouth, their eyes split: one moment watching the dark's distance for Mother, the next watching the trees for Crow.
Mother broke into view, and to their excited yaps—to their bouncing and whining and uncontrollable pissing—she barged into the burrow.
Before she had even sat down, the starving cubs had moved from frantically licking her to tearing into the bandicoot's corpse.
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On a full belly, Dint slept. Fox, also full of the ripe bandicoot's flesh, was sniffing the strange scents that painted Mother.
In the dark, as she watched him, he found tears scarring her pads. Some were full of dirt and tiny stones. He began licking them clean. Tasting, as he did, water mixed in with her blood. Yet, as he cleaned, he could sense another, more prominent odor of blood.
Moving up her front legs, caressing his nose through her fur, he uncovered and cleaned the grazes as he found them: bathing them in the antiseptic saliva of his tongue. In some places, whatever she had hit had torn away her fur.
As the night wore on, he cleaned his way up onto her body and found the bullet wound.
It wasn't bleeding now. Her blood had coagulated and formed a scab. Still, eyes heavy with approaching sleep, he licked it.
On the floor next to them, the bandicoot was nothing but a few heavily chewed bones.
It was overwhelming; so much food, fear, relief, and new scents. He had to sleep. Despite something telling him to remain awake, he curled into her belly and slept.
Mother didn’t sleep. Eyes and ears wide open, she prepared. They would be coming soon. Soon, in the distance, unless they were all very, very lucky, would come the sound of the dog.
She looked at Fox. His face was twisting as he dreamt. She could see the minor wounds where the crow had attacked him. He smelt just like his father. There was a sprinkle of her odor in him, and plenty of his own, but his father’s scent was unmistakable. His father’s features were there too. Again he twitched. Twitched and whined. He was probably dreaming about the crow. She went to lick him but found she could not: just studying him, as he slept, hurt so much. With her soul shivering, as though it could crack, she grabbed Dint and dragged him softly closer to where, as soon as she heard the dog, she could pick him up and go.
Outside, far away, a bird called, and another echoed it. Head up, Mother listened intently. No: nothing, it was just birds. Perhaps for once, just this once, reality would turn away and ignore the three of them.
Chapter
To the distant barks, Mother snapped awake.
As the cubs yawned, she clambered to the mouth of the lair and listened and sniffed.
The scrub kept the dog's distance a secret, but not his direction.
Dint and Fox ambled up to her side and mimicked her sniffing. Despite being able to hear the barks, each was wondering what they were sniffing for. Mother didn't notice them; all her attention was on the one voice: the unmistakable implosion crackling the morning's air.
Eyes burning, she looked down at her Fox, who, sitting next to his brother, was listening to the dog.
Snorting, she returned her attention to the distance.
And then, miraculously, the dog stopped barking.
Silence followed. Then more silence, so much more, it was almost possible to believe it had never been there.
'He's sniffing the ground,' she whispered.
'Who's sniffing?' Fox asked.
Mother didn't reply; her senses were too busy evaluating. She was trying to figure out how far away he was. How quickly he was approaching.
It was not raining. That was bad. But the puddles of all previous rain were still on the ground. That was good. Last night, all the way home from the pond, she had purposely stuck to the puddles. This tactic must have been what was slowing the dog now.
Then the dog began barking again.
Ears pricked, she scrutinized each bark.
No, he was no closer. He had moved to his left, and there, without her scent, was barking again.
She understood now. These were frustrated barks.
'He's lost it,' she whispered.
'Lost what?' Dint whined.
Perhaps he'd lost it for good. Perhaps, last night, he’d only happened upon a section of her trail.
The dog stopped barking again.
Silence followed.
Leaves breathed, trees gossiped, but not one would reveal the distance of the dog.
More frustrated, angry barks followed.
"He can't find it," she whispered. "He's looking, but he can't."
'Can't find what?" Fox asked.
Silently, she swung her head round to Fox and bared her teeth. "Quiet!" she growled.
Fox didn't understand why he had to be, but did what he was told. But as his little ears latched onto the barking, his eyes remained on Mother as she paced before their den.
Mother turned from the dog and looked into the opposite distance. It was the best way to go. No creeks to cross. No rocky outcrops or even hills to surmount. With the bandicoot’s flesh to power her, she could run for hours, even days, stopping only to put Dint down and let him rest.
Then something snagged her peripheral vision. Turning, she found Fox.
He was staring at her as if he knew. She waited for him to ask: to tell her. But he did not ask, and he said nothing. He just looked at her, his tiny head cocked to one side.
She forced herself to look away, then, moving to Dint, she stood next to him and listened to the barks.
‘Give up,’ she whispered. ‘Give up!’
But the dog would not. There was anger in every bark: anger, but no forward motion. He had lost her trail. Then, from nowhere, that pride all foxes enjoy when they realize they’ve outwitted those that were hunting them filled her. Turning to her boys, she exhaled, completely, and felt the warm promise of their combined future.
Above them all, dark and coldly, Crow cawed.
To Crow's caw, the dog stopped barking.
Mother swung from the Crow to where the dog was silent. Straining to hear, she waited for the sound of the dog and the Ranger crashing through the undergrowth.
But this sound did not come. No sound came.
‘He’s listening,’ she whispered.
Crow cawed again.
Furious, Mother ran at the tree and tried to climb it. She managed a few strides up the trunk, but this tree offered no footing for a fox, and so gravity pulled her back down.
Grounded, she swung back to the distance. She had not realized that Crow’s voice had sent Fox scurrying back into the den.
Still, the dog was silent.
“It’s only a crow,’ Mother whispered. “Ignore it, it’s only a crow.’
A moment of silence followed. A moment filled with the beating of her heart, and a moment broken as the dog began barking and heading this way.
Swinging down, she picked up Dint.
Whining, Fox appeared at the entrance of the den. She looked at him. He was shivering.
The dog barked. Crow watched. She turned in a circle, Dint struggling in her jaws. Again Fox whined.
‘For your cubs’ sake,’ she heard: ‘Be more than you are. More.’ The memory was so clear, it was as if she was hearing it for the first time. The dog barked closer. She turned from its voice and faced the distance that was calling her to it.
‘Choose one,’ she heard, ‘And leave the other for the dog.’
She took a step. She took another, and then, lowering her head, she stopped. Putting Dint down, she raced back to her smallest cub and licked him frantically as if she’d been missing him for years.
As Dint raced up for his share, she told them both to stay here and then, after looking back at the barks, she entered the burrow. Reaching the back, she immediately began digging a hole. The soil fanned out behind her in thick clods of earth that rained onto the walls: onto her boys.
It bothered Dint. All he wanted was food. To have a grotesque sound on one side, a crow above, and Mother destroying their home on the other, was more than he could bear. He began yapping: tiny complaints that fell deaf under the ever-increasing volume of the barks.
Mother ceased her digging. Studying the small trench, she swung around and, in two sharp motions, wrenched up each cub and tossed them into the hole.
Upon landing, Dint growled. But as Fox landed, he turned and found Mother's face full of dread and knew it was connected to that awful silence. The knowing stilled him.
"That’s a dog!" she said. "Dogs kill foxes. But he won’t kill us. After I bury you, I’m going to lead him away and then come back for you. So stay here, understand?! Stay here and don’t move until I come back!"
Dint didn’t want to stay: he wanted to go with her, but she shoved him back in and then, swinging around, began burying them both.
Instinctively, despite their terror, the boys curled up, plunging their snouts into their bellies as the soil concealed them. Around them, the air itself was exploding to the barks.
Finished, Mother swung back and checked their soiled ceiling.
With a great thump, the head of the dog crashed into the mouth. As it struggled to get its shoulders into the den, the roof of the lair began to collapse. With the roof caving in, Mother snarled. Leaping onto the dog's face, she sank her teeth into its nose.
The dog's yelp could have shattered glass. Panicked, he ripped his head out of the den, with Mother clinging to his face.
Yelping, he scratched at her body with his immense front paws. Growling, she held on, driving her teeth deeper. Desperate, he gave one almighty heave of his head and tossed her free. Somersaulting through the air, she landed before a tree, her ears filled with the sounds of the dog’s yelping.
Leaping back to her feet, his blood in her mouth, she saw that his nose was torn. Good, chances were he wouldn’t be able to smell her. She turned to run but stopped to the sound of metal clicking. Looking back, she found the Ranger. His rifle was raised and pointed at her.
The gunshot was so loud and vulgar, Dint involuntarily yelped. Bursting up through the shallow soil, he found the den destroyed and yapped at it all.
The injured dog turned to the lair and growled. The Ranger understood. Leaning his rifle against a tree, he stormed toward the den, laying flat on his stomach as he shoved his hand in.
Below the soil, Fox heard his brother’s new growl become a brief yelp and then . . .
For a while, there was nothing, then the hand came back. The stench of the man swallowed their odors. Even from under the dirt, Fox could smell the Ranger's sweat as the man scraped and searched the den.
From the trees, the odd breeze dropped: its passing chill quietening the barking dog. Softer than silk, the breeze entered the den and wound itself around the Ranger's arm. Separating, it slipped through the channels of the man's fingers, passing through the soil to enter, effortlessly, the shivering consciousness of Fox. Inside the cub's terrified mind, the breeze transformed itself into the Spirit Vixen. Formed, she allowed Fox's terrified dream-self to latch his mouth to one of her aged teats. Attached, he drank. Her calming, ephemeral milk dropped the cub into a deep, relaxing sleep.
Above, the Ranger grunted as his fingers went through one more search of the walls and the floor. Finished, he pulled out his hand and told the dog:
“That’s it, mate, just the one.”
Standing, he brushed the dirt from his hands against his shorts and rubbed his dog’s head.
“Who’s a good boy,” he said: “Aye? Who’s a good boy.”
"Come on," he said as he lifted the vixen over his shoulder.
Obediently, the huge dog answered: bounding between the trees and careering through the undergrowth, with the cub dangling from its enormous jaws.