On the brick walk, he shrugged on his sweatshirt and crouched to lace his boots. He straightened up and shouldered his rucksack. Then he took a moment to look around. The house behind him looked smaller than it had when he’d arrived, as if it were already receding into the past. Across the street, clouds scudded along the horizon, and a half-moon suddenly emerged, brightening the road ahead.
Pax was hungry and cold, but what had woken him was the sense that he needed cover. He blinked and edged backward. What felt like the comforting bars of his pen gave way in brittle snaps. He turned to find the stand of dried milkweed stalks he’d wedged himself against a few hours before.
He barked for Peter and remembered: his boy was gone.
Pax wasn’t used to being alone. He had been born into a squirming litter of four, but his father had disappeared before the kits had even learned his scent, and soon after that, his mother had failed to come home one morning. One by one, his brothers and sister had died, leaving his the only heartbeat in the cold den until the boy, Peter, had lifted him out.
Since that time, whenever his boy was gone, Pax would pace his pen until Peter returned. And at night he always whined to come inside, where he could listen to his human’s breathing.
Pax loved his boy, but more than that, he felt responsible for Peter, for protecting him. When he couldn’t perform this role, he suffered.
Pax shook the night’s rain off his back and headed for the road without even stretching his stiff muscles, straining for his boy’s scent.
He couldn’t find it – the night’s winds had swept the ground clean of any trace. But among the hundreds of odours rising on the early morning breeze, he found something that reminded him of his boy: acorns. Peter had often scooped up handfuls and sprinkled them over Pax’s back, laughing to see him shake them off and then crack them to get at the meat. The familiar scent seemed a promise to him now, and he trotted toward it.
The acorns were scattered around the base of a lightning-struck oak a few full-bounds north of where he had last seen his boy. He crunched at a few of them, but found only shrivelled, mouldy nubs inside. Then he settled himself on the fallen trunk, ears trained for any sound on the road.
While he waited, Pax licked his fur dry and clean, taking comfort in the lingering Peter-scent he found there. Then he turned his attention to his forepaws, painstakingly cleaning the many cuts in their pads.
Whenever he was anxious, Pax dug at the floor of his pen. He always shredded his paws on the rough concrete buried beneath, but he could not control the urge. In the week before, he’d dug nearly every day.
When his paws were cleaned, he curled them up under his chest to wait. The morning air pulsed with the noises of spring. The long night before, they had alarmed Pax. The blackness had quivered with the rustle of night prowlers, and even the sounds of the trees themselves – leaves unfurling, sap coursing up new wood, the tiny cracklings of expanding bark – had startled him over and over as he waited for Peter to return. Finally, as dawn had begun to silver the sky, he’d fallen into a shivering sleep.
Now, though, the same sounds called to him. A hundred times his sensitive ears pricked, and he almost sprang up to investigate. But each time, he remembered his boy and stilled himself. The humans had good memories, so they would come back to this spot. But they relied on sight alone – all their other senses being so weak – so if they did not see him when they returned, they might leave again. Pax would stay beside the road and ignore all temptations, including the strong urge he felt to head south, the direction his instinct told him would lead him back to his home. He would stay at this spot until his boy came for him.
Above him, a vulture cruised the thermals. A lazy hunter, it was searching for the lifeless shape of carrion. When it found the red-furred form of the fox, motionless but giving off no odour of decay, it circled lower to investigate.
Pax registered an instinctive alarm at the cool flicker of V-shaped shadow. He jumped from the trunk and scratched at the dirt beneath.
The ground seemed to answer with a distant rumble, like a growling heart. Pax stretched high, the danger from above forgotten. The last time he had seen his boy, there had been vibrations like this along this very road. He tore over the gravel shoulder to the exact spot where his humans had left him.
The vibrations grew to a roar. Pax rose on his haunches to be seen. But the source was not his boy’s car. It was not a car at all. As it loomed up, it seemed to the fox to be as large as the house his humans lived in.
The truck was green. Not the growing green of the trees all around, but a dull olive, a colour death might wear when it claimed these trees. The same dull olive of the toy soldier the fox had cached in the milkweed stalks. It stank of diesel and the same charred metal scent that had clung to his boy’s father’s new clothing. In a cloud of dust and sprayed stones, the truck charged past, followed by another and another and another.
Pax bounded away from the road. The vulture soared up and away with a single beat of its wings.
Not hunting for his grandfather’s torch – that was the first mistake of the trip. The moon had lit Peter’s way for maybe two hours before it had drowned beneath thick clouds. He’d stumbled along in the dark for another hour before giving up. He’d slit open the sides of a bin bag to make a long mat and cut the other to wear as a poncho against the cold mist, and slept beside a culvert, his baseball mitt for a pillow. Actually, “slept” was a wild overstatement, and when the first low sun rays stabbed his eyelids, he’d awakened cold and wet from whatever dozing he’d managed.
His first thoughts were of Pax – where was he this morning? Was he wet and cold, too? Was he afraid? “I’m coming,” he said out loud as he rolled the bin bags back into his pack. “Hold on.”
He ate a stick of cheese and a couple of crackers, slugged a long drink of water, then laced his boots and climbed up to the road.
He was stiff and sore, but at least his anxiety had relaxed its grip. He probably hadn’t travelled much more than seven or eight miles, but there was still a whole day before his grandfather would get home from work and even suspect he was gone.
According to the atlas map, he probably had another twenty miles to go before hitting the highway. After that, he could turn west for the shortcut anywhere that looked promising. He’d sleep deep in woods tonight, out of civilisation, the riskiest part of the trip behind him.
He wished he’d paid more attention as he’d driven with his father the day before – mistake number two – but he only recalled there’d been a single sleepy town right after they’d exited the highway, and then stretches of woodlands broken only by occasional farms.
Peter walked for five full hours. Blisters formed on his heels, and his shoulders ached from the rucksack. But every step brought him closer to Pax and the home he should never have left, and he felt hopeful. Until a little after noon, when he hit a cluster of buildings that passed for a town square.
Immediately, it seemed every person he passed was eyeing him suspiciously, wondering why he wasn’t in the school he’d noticed a little while back. When a woman dragging a toddler stopped to stare outright, Peter pretended to study the window display in the hardware shop beside him.
In the glass, he saw his reflection, and the remnants of his hopeful mood melted. His hair