FOX, Book Three, Part 1, The Metropolis

Michael Gray Griffith

And so the great impossible journey begins.

That afternoon, the pair crossed the park's curling road twice. Fox seemed oblivious or apathetic as to whether the road was car-logged or not. Apart from a pause to drink, there were no stops at all until late in the night. The teeming night.

Still glowing with the fact that they were finally moving, Crow fastened his feathers tight to keep out the rain, while Fox curled up beneath the same She-oak. Crow had never known Fox to sleep in the open. Whether it was raining as hard as it was now or whether it was a sultry summer night, Fox had always slept in a den.

Later in the night, Crow woke to an extra downpour and discovered Fox sitting a short distance away, his tail wrapped around his legs, his face staring into the distance. Even in the dark, Crow could see the changes in Fox's face. There was little of the stumbling cub to be found in him now.

With the dawn, they were moving. During the night, in a time unnoticed by Crow, the clouds had flowed on, leaving only a saturated forest. The air was now damp and thick with the scents of humans.

Together, they passed piles of illegally dumped rubbish. The further they pushed towards the edge of the park, the more abundant the piles of rubbish became. Discarded plastic bags twirled in the breezes or flapped from where they were entangled in the branches.

But there was an odor in the air above the blend of paper and rust that was stronger than the resilient plastic. Fox salivated at its scent. He broke from his previously unbroken trail to follow the smell. He wove through small piles of thin grey wood, their ends eaten by termites.

Fox could detect the trails of rats and rabbits interweaving between the piles, but stronger still was this other smell.

Crow could taste the odor now. It excited him. He flew in broad circles, struggling to locate the source. It was Fox who found them. Their sickly presence wafted through the narrow tear in the black plastic bag that contained them. He sniffed the plastic for danger, then tenaciously took hold of the bag in his front teeth and tore it open. A litter of decomposed kittens poured out.

Crow was jubilant. He cawed, bringing the area alive.

Fox threw one of the disintegrating kittens over his head for the bird, then, despite the flies and maggots, he ate. Within a couple of minutes, Crow's belly was bulging.

"Blimey," Crow said. "Look at that!"

Crow was referring to something behind the pile of rubbish. Fox peered over the trash and was also flabbergasted.

Below a couple of gums, upside down in a cloak of spider webs, lay an automobile. It had no tires, no doors, and no glass to stop the wind from carrying insects in and leaving them floundering in the spiders' nets. It was a metal skeleton of rusting bones.

Fox approached, creeping up to the vehicle with his stomach on the floor. He sniffed the vehicle's skin, but the elements had long stripped it of its humans' odors. He could barely taste a smear of their existence.

The car towered above him, silent and bloated in all its awkward angles. He could see the sky piercing the upside-down floor through worn-away holes encircled with rust. Its usual vibrant colors had faded to rust.

He could find no tracks leading away from here. No road. Where it was from and how it got here was a mystery.

Finally, they left the monolith and headed on their way, passing other squashed pyramids of rubbish and more decaying cars haphazardly dumped amidst this cluttered cemetery of discarded things.

Chapter

The Spirit Fox watched the numbers leave. Through the crowds, he could hear the gossip murmuring. The ones who had been dead for a while didn't care and kept circling, churning this great illuminated soup, but the new dead, the precious hoards slain by the sickness, were all ears.

Whichever direction he looked, they were turning and leaving.

Beside him, the great pack waited.

"Find him," the Spirit Fox said. "Find him and kill him."

"How?"

"I don't know how. I don't care how. But do it, or not only will all this have been for nothing, but we'll be lost. And lost forever."

Obediently, they turned and vanished into the distance, leaving him to turn back to the soup. Was it dimmer? Just a shade? He didn't know, perhaps it was fear making him think so, but even the doubt was strong enough to deeply mark his face.

Chapter

When finally they arrived at the edge of the park, the afternoon was wearing away. They could see the forest's trees ending at a particular point. Fox could smell an odor of feces from an animal as yet unidentified. The rough grasses thinned, the number of grass-trees too, and the gums stopped abruptly in a rough crooked line that bordered a narrow road. Over the road, the landscape rose gradually in one flat stretch of green, broken by a few skeletal frames of isolated eucalypts and populated by a herd of immense slow-moving animals.

"Cows," Crow cawed.

A fence separated the paddocks, its cords of twisted wire and stunted posts stretching up and over the hill.

Fox studied the cows' ambling gait as their enormous heads dragged across the grass. Then he lost interest in them. He was desperate to leave the park, to end this part of the journey. The longer he left it, the harder he knew it would be to walk out of these trees.

Quickly, he checked the road for cars before scooting across the asphalt and sinking into the thick grasses that claimed the opposite verge.

Feeling safe, he looked back. He searched for a light, a spirit fox or foxes, or even an apparition of Vixen or Mother. There was nothing to see, only a plastic bag wafting upon the breeze.

He watched it for a moment, then turned and slid beneath the lowest strand on the fence.

The field was not as smooth as it appeared from the forest. The cows' hooves had left hoof-sized pot-holes. It was difficult to get used to at first. The damp ridges of the holes gave way even under Fox's weight. It was slow, careful going.

Crow, on the other hand, had flown far ahead to the closest eucalypt and was waiting in its dead, leafless branches like a single silhouette against the descending day.

Huge, odorous piles of delicious dung lay everywhere. Fox rolled in any that fell on his trail, smothering his fur until it was sticky and matted. The odor lifted his spirits.

The cows had noticed him. A few had raised their mighty heads to watch him pass, then Fox stumbled on the wet earth and hit his snout.

Crow sniggered.

Finally, as though one unspecified leader had ordered their retreat, the cows turned their immensity around and swaggered off over the slope of the hill.

Crow yawned.

Fox reached the eucalypt Crow was perched in. Looking back, he was stunned by how small the forest appeared from the top of this hillock and saw too, for the first time, the canopy's waves surge and swell to the wind. Waves which previously he had only heard surging and breaking from the forest floor.

CHAPTER

Fox was woken late in the night by a spirit. It was sitting a short distance away, lighting the area around it with its luminescence.

"Move!" it growled.

Fox was weary. The image was at first a blur. Immediately his heart leapt, thinking it was Vixen or Mother, but as the image became clearer, he realized he did not know the spirit.

"Move," it said again.

"Why?" Fox asked, and while annoyed at being woken, he was glad to have company.

"'Cause round here, you travel during the night and hide through the day. You won't survive otherwise," it said, turning to look at another spirit pacing nervously in the distance.

Suddenly, there were others, four in total, with the one talking here. One of them was so far away it appeared only as a dim, disconsolate glow. None conversed with the other. Each looked drawn and tired. Only this one spoke.

"The farmer who lives down there," Fox took in the few distant squares of window light. "He shoots any fox he sees. Others are the same. Sleep out here, like this, and one of them will catch you before midday."

"Is that what happened to you?" Fox, now standing, asked.

He shook his head. "I died of the sickness. You can't hide from that," and with this, he ignored any of Fox's further questions and faded back into the dark. Gradually, begrudgingly, the others followed him.

Fox felt abandoned. Studying briefly the waning moon, he had no idea how long he had before the dawn rose. Turning back to the farm's single light, he rose and, after waking Crow—who arose unimpressed—they set off across the pot-holed field.

Far in front of them, a dim dome of purple luminance claimed a portion of the horizon. It was the metropolis. The human forest.

Turning back, he found that the dimmest of the spirits had returned. An old vixen, she came closer and studied his face as if she’d never seen a fox before.

"Did they shoot you?" Fox asked.

Looking up to Crow, who was sleeping, she came back to Fox and nodded.

"They’re after you."

"Who?" Fox asked. "Man?"

She shook her head, looked back, found nothing, then came back to him. "Run," she said. "Run and just keep running."

Chapter

That night, with Crow constantly flying ahead and cawing like a beacon for Fox to follow, they crossed long fields, quiet country roads, and heard distant dogs from distant farms bark as cocks, just as distant, crowed. Together, they kept up a healthy pace, pausing at the narrow creeks to drink, eating from the sheep carcasses they found. One evening, Fox startled a large flock of sleeping galahs who shattered the night with their screeching calls. For a while, he stopped, unsure of whether it was safe to cross below the hanging wires dangling between the lines of immense pylons. But then there were always new things to see, to evaluate. And always there were foxes. Their bodies crumpled where the sickness had left them, some in the paddocks, some on the roads, some in the creeks, their fur alive and living in the currents. One fox was strung to a dead tree’s branch, its hind paws pierced by the same length of fencing wire that bound it to the tree.

Fox rose to his hind legs and sniffed it. Then, spinning around below it, he smelled the earth and growled to himself.

"What is?" Crow asked.

"Man," Fox replied. "A man and a dog."

Chapter

Drew, the farmer’s son, had shoulders that sloped as if he was always carrying weights that were too heavy. He had dirt in the cracked creases of his hands that washing couldn’t remove and blue eyes that mirrored the morning sky.

He’d been born out here. He knew how to handle sheep like town guys knew the inner workings of their mobile phones. This morning, the sun was brushing the fence posts and warm on the side of the farmhouse where his father and younger brother were standing around the tractor that had decided not to work last night.

They had been having trouble with rogue dogs killing their sheep. Being the best shot in the family, it was his job to do the rounds and see how they fared during the night.

On his trail bike, with the dog sitting in the tray attached to the back, he set off, throwing his grimacing father a wave.

Their property was set in the low hills that bordered the city of Perth. His grandfather had cleared the six valleys that comprised their land. Their father had bought more land as farms next to theirs came up for sale. In the summer, the land was dry and the creeks and dams dried up; in the winter, it was often not much better. But the winter before last had been a drought breaker, and the dams were still half full.

Drew loved pausing on the rises and looking back down at the dams that waited like mirrors joined by the brown sheep trails and the clumps of trees they let live or had planted to try to halt the wind erosion. They were planting more all the time.

The dog’s name was Sally. A blue healer, she’d been Drew’s dog since she was removed from her mother. They had their own unspoken language that overrode the few commands he taught her.

She wasn’t the greatest sheep dog, but she got by.

Barrel down in a specially built holster, Drew’s .22 rifle remained strapped down and snug.

Last year, he’d taken out that German Shepherd. It had been infamous in the area, it and the few feral crossbreeds that had run with it. No one was sure where it had come from, but it was a lethal sheep killer. On one night, it and its pack had killed over twenty sheep and lambs. Many farmers had seen it, taken potshots at it, but even though many had claimed to have hit it, the next sighting proved them liars.

When Drew and Sal had seen the pack, the dogs had been on the far side of the valley furthest away from the farmhouse. With no way to call the others, Drew had told Sal to stay with the bike, then, with the wind blowing this way, he started the long journey towards the dogs.

Crouched and sticking to the trees, he realized that there was no way he was going to get close enough before they detected him and ran.

Finally, taking off his t-shirt, he folded it up and placed it on a rock, then placed his rifle on the t-shirt. With no telescopic sight, he’d had to rely on the rifle’s sights. Taking his time to line up the shot, he’d taken a deep breath, breathed out half of it, then aimed a foot in front of the running dog. He didn’t know if a foot in front would be enough or too much; it was just an instinctual guess. Slowly squeezing the trigger, he absorbed the slight recoil, then yelled in celebration as the dog stumbled.

Then the yell died. The dog was still alive. He could hear its yelps from here. He could see it looking around as it searched for him. The rest of the pack looked lost. They ran around their wounded leader, barking as they struggled to figure out what to do.

Back on his motorbike, with his t-shirt pulled roughly on and Sal on the back, he tore down the hill.

Some of the pack realized and left. Others stayed and watched him approach. The shepherd was back on its feet and limping towards the closest group of trees.

Drew felt like he was death flying towards them with a single fear in his soul. The bike tore up the dirt and sheepshit. He flew over bumps he couldn’t avoid and saw Sal struggling to hold on.

Finally, they reached there. Parked the bike, and as Sal barked and the three dogs that had remained barked, Drew pulled out his .22 and fired.

As soon as the first dog fell, a bullet in its head, the others ran, leaving only the shepherd.

It didn’t yelp or whine. It didn’t tuck its tail between its legs. Instead, with its blood on the dirt, it turned to him and, with its eyes on fire, it bared its teeth.

Bringing it home, draped over the petrol tank, was difficult, but it was also the defining moment of his young life. At sixteen, he made the front of the local papers.

A few months later, he made the front page again by winning the local shooting competition.

Both pictures and the adjoining articles were framed and hung on their games room’s wall. His trophies and ribbons around them.

Up the bike went, racing up the hills along a route only Drew knew, before lowering into the following valley and following the fence line past the old ute that had died there and had never been towed back and past the fox he shot yesterday. Its body hanging from the dead gum.

Chapter

"You think he can do it?" the Spirit Fox asked.

"He shot me," one of the spirits said.

"And me," offered another.

The pack was impressed. Amassed together in the shadows of a small group of trees, they watched the teenager tear across the landscape.

The spirits who had been killed by the boy were new to the pack. Individuals plucked from the waning numbers that constituted the soup.

The Spirit Fox studied Drew’s face and the butt of his rifle.

"But how do we get him to come this way?" one of the pack asked. "Humans can’t see us."

"Humans can’t," the Spirit Fox replied, "but their dogs can," and his eyes turned to Sally.

Chapter

Crow, perched further up the crest of the hill, was ignoring Fox, who was climbing his way up, because he was busy with something else.

Far to his right, he could make out the rising and falling black specks of other crows. In a small murder, they were flying over the field, most of them in pairs. As Crow watched, he saw them scrounging the earth for worms and geese, stepping around the bleached bones of a sheep carcass. But one crow held all his attention. Time and again, he watched her stop and heard her caw, a cry that informed the valley that she was looking for a mate. Crow couldn't remember the last time he had been touched. As she rose and descended, he felt like she was rising and descending inside of him.

As Fox, tired from another long night of traveling, paused on a steeper part of the slope to regain his breath, Crow imagined calling to her... flying to her... stroking necks, making love, and building a nest with her. But as every new picture of happiness blossomed in his soul, the "Eyes in his Head" stirred.

He came back to Fox. Fox was moving again, climbing the bare hill with his head down to the effort.

If only he hadn’t have come back, Crow thought, his memory returning to when he left Fox alone that first afternoon after they’d fed on the rat.

If he had stayed away, left Fox to his fate, he’d be free now. He wouldn’t even have known what it was like to lose your freedom.

For hours, he’d watched Fox, as a thirsty cub, deliberating about what to do. Sat a great distance away, watching him through the trees as Fox prepared to cross the road. Alone, he would have never found water. He would have died of thirst somewhere in the undergrowth and would have been just a forgotten meal.

It all seemed so long ago.

The distant crow cawed, her voice carrying across the valley. As he watched her again, long and hard, he knew that she had no idea he was here.

Fox strove beneath the rising sun, which he felt was a golden finger pointing him out to the world. All he’d done, all night, was climb hills only to run down and then start back up. Each one seemed steeper than the last, with this tree-stripped rise the longest.

He paused again, the third pause on this rise alone.

"What are you doing?" someone growled.

It was the Spirit Vixen.

"Get going!" she snapped. "Now!"

"Leave me alone," he growled back, sick of spirits and her especially.

"I said run!" she growled again, then looked into the distance behind him.

"Oh no," she said. "They did it."

"Did what?" he asked and looked back at the valley and its few sheep.

"Run," she implored. "Run like you have never run before!"

He heard it now. It was an odd crackling sound. He looked back again. At first, there was nothing to see, just the minor folds of the earth that made up the valley. But the noise grew, identifying itself as it did.

She was gone by the time Fox was running, and he was running by the time Drew tore his bike over the far crest and careered down to the narrow creek at the base of the valley.

The fox stopped running. Weary as it was, he knew he’d never make the rise without being seen. Instead, with his brain working overtime, he made himself as small as he could and hid behind a barely adequate rise in the earth. A rise he peeked his eyes above and proceeded to follow the man and the dog.

Drew parked the motorbike in the middle of the valley and dismounted with Sal. After stretching, he took a piss while asking Sal:

"Well, come on. You were the one that wanted to come this way. What is it?"

As Fox watched, the dog sniffed the ground in large circles. It seemed confused. As the circles became larger, the man seemed to lose interest. Fox relaxed a touch too. The dog was circling nowhere near where he had passed. He felt the wind too. It was blowing this way and blowing strongly, keeping him safely downwind of the pair.

Drew lifted his face to the winter sun. It was his favorite season. This summer, he was going to Europe with his girlfriend. Traveling their winter because he was hungry for snow. He looked at the hills around him, tried to and tired to imagine mountains dwarfing them, their white-capped peaks. He had never seen snow.

"Well, Sal?" he asked and came down to his confused dog. "What is it?"

Sal looked up at him, then around them, then whined and looked back up at him.

"Sal was sure she’d seen the spirit of a fox running over into this valley. A spirit in the day was a rare sight. So rare, she’d never seen one in the day before and was now wondering if she’d been mistaken.

"Come on," Sal said. "Let’s check the last valley and then go home."

Fox saw a shadow before him. It was a silhouette of his face on the small rise he was hiding behind. But this didn’t make sense. The sun was before him; any shadow he cast should have been behind. He turned to look for an answer and found the Spirit Fox. His face looked grave. And glowing, he was glaring at Fox, then blinked and looked over the rise.

Before Fox could utter a word, he heard the dog bark.

Fox swung back. The dog was now charging up the hill directly towards him.

From his perch further up the hill, Crow watched Fox break from his hiding spot and run this way. Behind Fox, the young man was busy unclipping his rifle. Meanwhile, the dog was effortlessly catching up to Fox. It was clear it knew the hills and was used to climbing them.

Drew pulled the rifle free and brought it round to bear. The shot was a long one. Hard too, because the Fox was small and harder still because Sal was climbing in his direct line of fire. He aimed anyway. Closing one eye as he squinted through the sights.

"Shoot," growled the Spirit Fox as now invisible to the eye, he waited for the bang.

"Shoot!"

"Run!" the Spirit Vixen cried from deep inside Fox’s head. "Run!"

Fox was running, his lungs all but exploding with the effort.

Evan lowered the rifle. With Sal so close, he wouldn’t fire. Instead, he rammed the rifle back into the holster and jumped on the bike. A moment later, earth was fanning out behind his wheel as he joined in the chase.

Fox broached the crest. Starving to find a forest to hide in, or a hole to run down, he stopped instead. The preceding valley was as bare as this one. Before him, the field cruised down to a few trees at the valley’s base that were too far and too few to help him.

With no other options other than to run and hope, but what hope? Heart sinking, and with her in his head suddenly quiet, he sprinted down the slope.

Crow watched the dog closing in on Fox. Watched too, the bike tearing up the hill. The young man would be upon Fox only moments after the dog, yet Fox was running faster than he had ever seen him run.

Then calmly, he looked over to the other crows. The lone female was looking this way. Her interest held by the barking dog and motorbike. Even though from here she did not look more than the size of a burnt match head, to Crow, she looked beautiful. Inside his head, the "Eyes" stirred.

Suddenly, Fox was no longer frightened. As he heard the dog getting closer, heard too the bike surmounting the hill, he turned ready to fight.

The dog was ready too. All trapped foxes fought in the end. Teeth bared, it continued racing towards him.

"Sal!" Drew yelled. "Wait!"

And then Drew gasped as Crow flew within a breath of his face. So close, his wing feathers brushed Drew’s nose. Drew was not wearing a helmet, and shocked by Crow's sweep, he involuntarily twisted the handlebars.

The bike dug its front wheel into the earth, somersaulting Drew over the handlebars. As the motorbike flew up into the air, cartwheeling as it did, despite shoving his hands out, the force was too great: his elbows buckled, and he landed face down. He felt his cheek being badly grazed. Knew his nose would bleed but hadn’t broken: wondered how the hell he’d get home: thought perhaps he could send Sal: and all these realizations and thoughts while still sliding along to a halt. Upside down, the bike landed on top of him, the center of its handlebars thudding against the rear of his skull. The bike tumbled off and stalled, its front wheel spinning to a gradual stop.

Inches away from Fox, Sal stood quiet. Fox too, was stunned.

But only they stopped. Above, clouds moved on, and around them, as if death to death, grasshoppers lifted from the grasses and the dirt and found other grasses and dirt.

Sal whimpered. Sal continued whimpering, but it was no good. Drew wouldn’t move. Tucking her tail beneath her legs, she moved to Drew.

Crow landed, yards away, thrilled by the outcome. Fox, still too flabbergasted for thoughts, watched as Sal, now whimpering pathetically, sniffed the man.

Drew’s spirit emerged. Alone, he lifted out of his spent body, floated, looked down once at his own corpse, glanced over to Fox, then, as his Sal cowered below him, turned and took in Crow.

Crow puffed out his feathers.

Fox could not move.

Drew's light left, and Sal’s whimpering paled beneath Crow’s jubilant caws. Lifting into the air, he cawed and cawed so joyfully that the other crows eventually flew over the rise.

Sal was too shattered to chase the birds off. Curled up beside Drew, she rested her head on his back and watched the black birds land.

The crows cawed in shock: in amazement: in celebration.

The single female landed close to Crow and listened as he told and then retold the story of the kill: continually. Finally, they flew up and together landed a short distance away from the onlookers and after some long tender moments of neck caresses and soft caws, made love in the field.

Fox started to come back to his head. He took in Crow’s frolics, the corpse, and the cawing crows teasing the dog, the clouds passing and re-forming as they did.

He left them all. Crossed the field to the trees at the base of the valley and found a pile of fallen branches to hide in. A hide from where he could watch the spectacle.

Chapter

Fox woke to the sound of a distant car. Somewhere, out of view, it was crossing and re-crossing the fields. He could hear the engine struggling to climb the rises. Saw their searchlights sweeping the rim of the hills.

But there were more lights. Spirit foxes were sitting around the corpse. Their combined luminescence lighting the dog, who was growling at them all from beside the corpse.

Chapter

The severed end of the trail wavered and shuddered as though its base was enduring an earthquake.

"He killed a man!" one of the now smaller pack said.

"The bird killed him," the Spirit Fox replied.

"But he and the bird are like one. They talk. They survive... When has that ever happened before?"

"And remember the Dog Fox," another tossed in.

The Spirit Fox did not reply. His transparent eyes were reflecting what was left of the soup as the soup continued to thin.

"Some even say he has the sickness. The sickness! And he’s still alive!"

"They’re all leaving," was all the Spirit Fox would reply, as though he was engaged in a conversation with some fox who wasn’t here.

"Around him, the lesser pack nodded. Came to him like sons to a confused father.

"They believe," one said.

"He’s made them believe."

"Do you believe in him?" the Spirit Fox turned to them and asked.

They looked at each other. They grimaced.

"Well?"

"It’s hard not to," one said, and again, as one, they nodded.

He looked at them all, and then went suddenly distant.

"He’ll be in the city in a few days," he said.

"Let’s help him," one replied. "He’ll need all the help we can give."

"No," he replied. "It’s pointless..."

"Why?" one implored. "How can you possibly know that?"

"She knows. Why don’t you ask her?"

Chapter

The four-wheel-drive ripped up the earth as it skidded to a halt next to the corpse, startling the crows into the air.

Sal, exhausted, leapt excitedly at the two humans who were alighting from the vehicle.

The woman ran to the corpse, then once there, broke into enormous wails. As Fox watched, she collapsed on top of the man. This was the first time Fox had heard and seen grieving.

The man stood next to her, glaring down at them both. Even from here, Fox could see he was trembling.

Fox pulled himself further under cover and watched the man turn to the crows' low-toned cries. Storming back to the four-wheel-drive, he pulled out a rifle and began shooting the birds.

The woman yelled at him, but he kept firing, and one by one, the fleeing crows began falling from the air: each with a blunted squawk.

Her energy back, Sal, the dog, ran to where they fell. Grabbed them violently in her jaws and shook what life was left out of them.

A bullet struck Crow’s new mate, shattered her wing. She squawked in pain, then floundered across the earth as she tried to lift into the air on her undamaged wing.

Crow cawed.

Incensed, Sal, her jaws all feathers and blood, charged towards her. Crow faced the distant man and cawed.

The dog did not falter.

A bullet sliced past Crow's head. Crow felt its buzz of air. The injured female attempted to run. Another bullet rose a spout of earth as it crashed a feather's width away from Crow. The dog was now only meters away.

Crow cawed at the man again, cawed at the dog, then cawed at her before lifting into the air.

On the ground, the female crow turned to Sal and squawked. The dog grabbed her, shook her, then ran to the next.

Another bullet flew past Crow’s head as Crow flew in a small black circle above the dead female, then, without calling anymore, he looked and flew off over the opposite hill.

Alone, Fox watched him go.

CHAPTER

As the crows had arrived to Crow's jubilant calls, other humans arrived to the sound of the gunshots.

As the crows lay where they had fallen, uncollected and torn, the humans picked up the young man's corpse and gently placed him in the rear of one of their vehicles.

They were all silent except for the sobbing woman, yet even her grief had mellowed. Two young men grunted as they picked up the motorbike and tossed it on the back of a ute. By the time they did this, the others were already leaving. Fox expected these two young men to leave too, but they stayed.

The smaller one sat on the ground and lowered his head into his knees, and the other sat next to him and stared out over the valley.

Chapter

Once these last two men left, Fox searched for Crow, but the bird was nowhere to be found.

Fox was starving. Despite the daylight, he left the safety of his hide to creep across the ground to the nearest crow and dragged it back.

As he ate, he could hear the cows' voices filtering over the hill and reclaiming the empty fields, but no caw. No beacon.

Some landed next to the corpses, and some of these cawed, as well as the might seeing how crows often mate for life.

Eyes on the horizon, Fox waited: wondered.

Policemen turned up in a four-wheel drive. The man who had shot the crows was with them. He pointed out where the corpse had been found, then stood alone, arms crossed as one policeman photographed the scene and the other took measurements.

After they left, Fox, anxious to find the bird, took a risk and began traveling in daylight.

Over the next hill, a new farm started. Also a sheep farm, its fields were green, but the majority of trees were grey and bare, like tortured hands sticking out of the ground.

On one grey branch, Crow was perched.

"Which way?" Fox asked after he reached the tree’s base.

Crow didn’t reply.

"Bird," Fox called up. "Which way?"

But Crow was unreachable.

Unsure what to do, Fox waited, finally he turned to his direction, and headed off expecting the Bird to follow.

"This was all like the park once," Crow cawed.

Fox stopped.

"All these hills from the park to the ocean were covered in trees," Crow said, his black eyes on the horizon. "And then humans came... Now look at them."

Fox tried to imagine these hills and undulating valleys covered in a thick forest, teeming with life. He tried, but couldn’t.

"I could have mated with her," Crow told the view. "And that's what I should be doing. That’s what you should be doing too," he said and looked down at Fox. "Living, no matter what."

Fox did not reply.

"In a few nights, we’ll reach the city. If you keep going, they'll kill you. One way or another, they'll find you and they'll kill you."

Crow waited a moment, as if waiting, hoping that his words would sink in. Then he said: "I wanna go back to the park. Why don't yah come with me?"

"Which way to the city?" Fox asked.

"The sickness can't kill all of you," Crow cawed.

"Which way?" Fox repeated.

"Don’t... Please."

The two stood their ground, clouds passed unaware, then Crow saw the answer in Fox’s eyes and grumbling under his breath lifted into the air and flew towards the city.

Fox followed.

Chapter

More humanity turned up.

Fox found his first town. It was a small town: no more than a dozen houses attached to a single street-lit road. There was dog barking: seemingly out of boredom. The smells of wood burning, of rubbish rotting, of flowers and grasses.

In the distance, a highway bypassed it, its artery alive with a pulse of growling trucks and cars. Fox watched their headlights streaming by.

More farmhouses broke the dark. Larger and larger towns and roads and highways that serviced them. Roads and highways that once would have frightened him: sent him racing home, but did not. Each truck tearing by, each car’s headlight that brushed him, strengthened his resolve, just as each dead fox he came across left him burning.

And there were foxes. All of them dead, some, as yet not found by the farmers, were laying where they'd fallen. Others were strung from fences, hanging from trees, or piled together on a load of charred wood their bodies smoldering. He was yet to cross the path of a live fox. As they pushed on towards the ever-nearing metropolis, Fox felt more like a ghost.

Book 3, Part 2 . Next