Pax, Journey Home: Chapters 1–10

This morning the fox ran because below the hard, matted forest floor, below the crusts of snow that remained in the deepest pine-shades and below the wafers of ice lacing the puddles, he smelled it: spring.

Pax canted toward the scent and found the warren.

Pax canted toward the scent and found the warren.

He adjusted the wheel of the plane until the blade projected only enough to shave off veneers thin as paper.

Peter liked planing—maybe best of all the skills he’d learned building the cabin. The plane was a real muscle tool, not like a screwdriver, say. You used your whole body with a plane.

Kind of a penance he’d devised, actually. Every time he slipped up like this and thought about Pax, he made himself go through the same exercise.

He visualized the afternoon when he’d found a dead vixen by the side of the road.

He took a piece of canvas off a trough in the corner. In it he had piled dried moss, woodstove ash, and clay slurry.

Then he troweled some into a pail and began chinking the spaces between the logs on the north wall.

She stepped up onto the cinder block he’d placed at the doorway for her—she got around really well on her prosthetic leg, but tall steps were awkward—and knocked on a log.

She smiled a conciliatory smile.

For hours, he’d encountered no intruders, but now he heard the approach of a familiar gait.

But he’d become a fine hunter—his eyes and ears seemed to have sharpened to compensate for the loss of quickness—and now he emerged from the brush with a fat quail in his jaws, which he dropped at the den entrance.

From across the room, Peter recognized the military insignia.

Pax turned to watch the kits. Their movements perplexed him—staggering around, collapsing without warning, springing up in unpredictable hops—but he was drawn to them.

He would patrol the perimeter of the play area full of bravado, and then lumber back to his mother.

Skittish and hesitant, he darted under the step at the slightest noise or shadow.

Bristle got up again, sending her sons sprawling, and retrieved her daughter.

The afternoon sun poured onto a rectangle of floorboards, burnishing them to a deep honey color, and he warmed with pride.

“You get the half closest to civilization, of course,” she added with a rueful shake of her head.

Pax meandered home, taking in the scents and sounds of the mild spring night.

The kits were beginning to venture farther from the den these days.

He would go along, because it took both parents now to corral them on an outing.

Pax felt his hackles rise, but then he saw: it was only a bit of fluff, moving with weightless jerks, not the low stealth of a hunter.

From there, she stalked slowly, paw over paw, to the clump of shadbush, then veered out to the raspberry thicket.

He would chastise her for the disobedience, then carry her back into the den.

He would do a stint with the Junior Warriors there, and be within walking distance of his own house.

If she left Pax, it was only to sniff or taste something he showed her. After a quick test of the novelty, she darted back under his chest, where she walked between his paws so that sometimes he tripped over her, slowing them down even more.

He showed her a hollow where the blackberries grew so thick that in summer they would stain her coat as she ate, and a field where apples would fall around her while she napped in the autumn sun. There is bounty wherever you look.

Presently they reached the chain-link fence that surrounded the reservoir, and Pax grew wary. The wire stirred deep memories of being caged, but it was the reservoir that made him uneasy.

But the water here traveled past no life at all: no fish swam in the depths, no crabs scuttled along the shallows, no clams studded the mud.

“Platoon, Water Warriors.” The old man swept a hand dismissively. “No right to use those terms, not real military.”

“Right, right,” he conceded.

He nodded grudgingly.

He patted his pockets for a pen and signed the note with a flourish.