Pax: Chapters 1–4

No, no blood; not even the under-skin pooling of a bruise or the marrow leak of a cracked bone, which had happened once.

By its scent, the fox knew it held the boy’s clothing and the things from his room he handled most often: the photo he kept on top of his bureau and the items he hid in the bottom drawer.

He pawed at a corner, hoping to pry the suitcase open enough for the boy’s weak nose to smell these favored things and be comforted.

The father set the fox down, and the fox bounded out of his reach.

He streaked toward the woods without looking back at his humans.

The fox nudged the toy free, took it between his teeth, and rose on his haunches to allow his boy to find him.

As he loped out of the woods, a jay streaked in above him, shrieking.

He bounded at full speed, heedless of the briars that tore at his cheeks.

And as the car sped away in a pelting spray of gravel, the father cried out the boy’s name, “Peter!”

He plowed his fingers through the heap of plastic soldiers in the battered cookie tin—identical except for their poses: standing, kneeling, and prone, all with rifles pressed hard to their olive-green cheeks.

He turned his head and looked intently out the window, as if he had just caught sight of something in the darkening back yard.

He raised a hand to draw his knuckles up his jaw line, exactly the way his father rasped his beard stubble, and wiped surreptitiously at the tears that had brimmed.

He rubbed at the fringe of gray fuzz banding the top of his head.

He’d felt his own skin thrill in full-body shivers, and his own shoulders burn as though yearning for wings.

Now the coyotes were baying in his head, unearthing one of them.

Half of them were standing at attention, half of them splayed over the ground, their blossoms crumpling.

With a single finger, Peter had traced its ears, unfurling like ferns from its face, and its paws, miraculously tiny, and the soft fur of its neck, slick with his mother’s tears.

For a long time afterward, when Peter closed his eyes, he’d seen coyotes. Their claws raking dirt, their jaws snapping.

He touched them all, wishing he could take everything back home where it belonged, and then chose the smallest of the items—a gold bracelet with an enameled phoenix charm she’d worn every day—and tucked it into the middle of his backpack with the photo.

The house behind him looked smaller than it had when he’d arrived, as if it were already receding into the past.

What felt like the comforting bars of his pen gave way in brittle snaps.

Then he turned his attention to his forepaws, painstakingly cleaning the many cuts in their pads.

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.

A lazy hunter, it was searching for the lifeless shape of carrion.

Pax registered an instinctive alarm at the cool flicker of V-shaped shadow.

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 color death might wear when it claimed these trees. The same dull olive of the toy soldier the fox had cached in the milkweed stalks.

He’d slit open the sides of a garbage 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 mitt for a pillow.

In the glass, he saw his reflection, and the remnants of his hopeful mood melted.

A man in a blue jacket emblazoned with the store logo stood in the doorway, smoking.