He sensed the woman moving on, but before he could leave, a shadow loomed over his shoulder.
“Need something, young man?”
Peter looked up. A man in a blue jacket emblazoned with the shop logo stood in the doorway, smoking. His arms were crossed over a sagging belly, and his hair was a thinning grey, but something about the way he was peering down his nose reminded Peter of a hawk he’d once seen searching for prey from the top of a cedar. He pointed to the window.
Peter looked back at the display – seed packets and gardening tools. “Oh, no, I was just … uh, do you sell torches?”
The man cocked his head and eyed Peter while he took a drag on his cigarette, and again Peter was reminded of the hawk. Finally he nodded. “Aisle seven. No school today?”
“Lunch break. Got to hurry back.”
The man stubbed out his cigarette and followed him inside, hovering nearby while Peter chose the cheapest torch on the rack and a pack of double As, and even shadowed him as he checked out.
Outside, Peter let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. He wedged everything into his pack and headed back to the junction.
“Hey, kid.”
Peter froze.
The man had followed him outside. He yanked a thumb over his shoulder. “School’s that way.”
Peter waved and smiled, trying to act dopey, and changed direction. At the corner, he risked a glance over his shoulder. The man was still watching him.
Peter took off, sudden trickles of sweat chilling the back of his neck. He didn’t stop running until he reached the school entrance, then cut through the parking lot.
All he wanted to do was hide for a couple of minutes – maybe crouch between a couple of pick-ups – and figure out an escape route. But beyond the parking lot and the utility buildings, he saw something a whole lot more appealing.
A baseball diamond carved into the lime-green spring grass. And tucked along the third-base line, facing away from the school, an empty dugout.
Peter stood at the top of the rise looking down at the sight. He argued with himself for only a minute. He’d like to be moving, for sure, making time. But what if that guy had called the police? Hitting the road would be risky. Any time he rested he could easily make up at night, since he had a torch now. And he was suddenly tired – bone-dead tired.
Mostly, though, it was the way the field looked so welcoming, as if it were inviting him in. Peter always felt good on a baseball field. And maybe that was a sign – he didn’t think he believed in signs, but after the coyotes last night, he wasn’t sure he didn’t. Peter adjusted his rucksack and loped down the hill.
In the dugout, the familiar mingled scents of leather, sweat, and stale bubble gum wrapped around him like a hug. Peter hurried into his other set of clothes and rubbed a handful of clay-red dirt through his hair – when he left here, he sure wasn’t going to look like any description the police might have. He filled his thermos from a water fountain, drank it all down, and filled it again. As he wriggled under the bench, he smiled, realising that Pax would have chosen this same spot – protected, but with a good vantage point – if he wanted a rest.
An hour, that was all, and then he’d cut behind the school and pick up the road again. Enough time that if the police had been called, they would lose interest. He arranged his baseball glove and lowered his head. “Just an hour,” he murmured. “I won’t even close my eyes.”
This is my territory.
Pax was so startled that he nearly toppled from the oak trunk he’d been drowsing on: all day he’d been keeping watch and seen nothing larger than a grasshopper, and now here was a bright-furred vixen. He had never seen another fox before, but he knew: younger and smaller and a female, but fox. Instinct told him also that the way she held her ears and tail erect meant she expected his submission.
I hunt here.
Pax felt an urge to run back to his crude nest and press himself into the remaining stalks, as if retreating to his pen, but he resisted it – what if his boy came back and he wasn’t here? He flattened his ears to show he meant no threat, but that he would not leave.
The vixen paced over, and Pax drew in her scent – as familiar as his own, but also exotic. She sniffed and bristled in distrust at the human scent on him.
Pax had been born with that same instinct as well, but distrust is no match for kindness administered consistently and unmeasured, especially in creatures new to the world. Pax had been only sixteen days old when Peter had rescued him – a fatherless, motherless curl of charcoal fur, his eyes barely opened – and it wasn’t long before he’d come to trust the quiet, gangly boy who’d brought him home.
The vixen poked her pointed snout in to sniff him more closely and bristled again.
The scent is my boy’s. Have you seen him? Pax shared the most important features of his human – the naked round ears; the towering legs, so improbably long that Pax always feared he would topple over when he ran; the black curled hair that grew to different lengths, then became short again.
No humans are here, but they are approaching. Just then, Bristle’s head rose as if jerked on an unseen wire. Her ears pricked, trained on a slight rustling in a nearby tuft of broom sedge. Her rear began to twitch, gathering energy. She sprang high and then, paws tight over her black nose, dived into the grass with a flash of white-tipped tail.
Pax sat up, alert. In a second, Bristle’s head reappeared, and in her jaws was a wood rat. She leaped clear of the grass, bit through the rat’s neck, then dropped it to the ground.
Orphaned before he’d been weaned, Pax had never eaten raw prey. His hunger rose at the blood-scent, and so did his curiosity. He took a cautious step closer. Bristle growled, and Pax retreated to watch from a safe distance.
He grew hungrier as she crunched bites. He thought of the brimming comfort of his kibble bowl, the pleasure of Peter’s hand-fed treats and the ultimate reward: peanut butter. He needed to find his boy. His boy would feed him.
Before he could ask about the approaching humans, Bristle picked up what remained of the rat – a single hind leg with its long tail – and stalked off with it dangling from her jaw. Pax watched as she wove her way between the grass tufts, becoming only flashes of flame and white. Leaving. He was swept by the memory of his humans’ car roaring away in its stinging spray of gravel.
Just before she slipped into a fringe of ferns at the wood’s edge, she paused to glance at him over her shoulder. At that moment, a sharp snap from the fallen oak startled her. It was followed by a red streak of fur that hurtled from the dried foliage, flew over the weeds, and landed on her back.
Pax flattened himself. He could hear the vixen’s yips as she scuffled with her attacker, but they sounded more irritated than afraid. He poked his head up. Bristle pounced on a ball of fur and bit it hard. To Pax’s surprise, a smaller, skinnier version of herself unfurled at her paws.
Pax was stunned. Never had he suspected that foxes might soar like birds, whose swooping arcs were not like any movement he himself could achieve.
The little fox flipped to his back and gave his belly in submission, but this seemed only to make Bristle angrier, her chattering now punctuated by jabs and nips. Pax bounded over, overcome by curiosity.
The skinny fox startled at the unfamiliar human scent and looked over Bristle’s shoulder. His eyes widened when he spied Pax, and he