Pax: Chapters 8–13

There it was, behind the woman, its contents strewn across the floor.

She pitched the ball and glove away and crouched down to eye him, one hand wrapped around a clutch of feathers she wore on a rawhide strip around her neck.

Crazy or not, the woman standing over him had a wall full of hatchets and scythes behind her, and he was one foot short of a running pair.

But the woman began to probe his foot, calling commands.

“Then he didn’t have to do anything. If there’s a draft, it’s for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds. Still kids, easy to brainwash. So if your father went, he volunteered. It was his choice. Let’s start this story off with the truth. That’s the rule around here.”

“Such bad manners, Vola,” she chided herself.

“You wouldn’t make it two miles now. You’d be nothing but bear bait out there—that is if you didn’t die of hypothermia the first night. You won’t be able to move enough to keep warm.”

The workbench took up a whole gable wall of the barn.

Another convulsion of shivers shook him, this time not from cold.

The poultice felt cool and soothing as she eased it over the hot, tight skin.

Bristle and Runt stood together, their black-tipped ears pricked forward warily toward the other two, who faced each other on a ledge of rock, halfway down.

The other was a large male with rough, tawny fur.

Runt retrieved the toy and displayed it between his teeth, defiant.

She blocked him, and when he tried to slink away in another direction, she restrained him with a heavy paw until he stilled in defeat.

Pax’s fur ruffled in a shiver at the scene Bristle conjured then: wind, cold and howling and heavy with the threat of snow.

There was blood already—he’d stumbled and ripped open the tender web of skin at the base of his thumb on a jagged splinter—and buckets of sweat.

It wasn’t even the prospect of returning to his grandfather’s grim house.

The scene she conveyed was of two foxes, bonded by both an old love and a new fear, the fear so terrible that their eyes rolled back in their sockets, so vivid that Pax could smell its sharp scent.

Lost, we crawled under a sweep of pine boughs, and I curled myself around my sister, who was so much smaller.

What would it feel like to make something so...so consequential?

The pain that movement caused was searing, but he bit his lip.

His right foot throbbed, his left leg ached from the extra burden, and his shirt was sweat soaked from the exertion of hobbling the hundred yards from the barn, but he stood his ground.

“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw, provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream and not at crosscurrents,” he read aloud from the one with an 11 scrawled over it.

He ducked his head and set to work cutting six thick, even slices of bread while Vola slapped a chunk of butter into an iron skillet and snapped on a flame beneath it.

She gathered the bread he’d cut with a curt nod of approval.

Two blue-striped armchairs flanked a stone fireplace, and a trunk stacked with books served as a table between them.

There were photos on the mantel, a few paintings on the walls, and a basket of yarn beside the armchair.

“Of course not. I wear it. Sometimes. Right now, it’s in the garden, on the scarecrow. Scares the devil out of the crows, too, apparently.”

Farther out, a few gnawed-over carcasses were discarded to be scoured clean by lower-ranking scavengers.

Too rancid and gristly even for the crows, it was crawling with maggots.

Too rancid and gristly even for the crows, it was crawling with maggots.

He opened his jaw, but the smell sent him reeling back.

He swallowed and then began to feed tentatively.

Pax mustered as much dominance as he could.

The quail egg Runt had brought was smaller, its speckled shell flecked with dried grass, and it smelled gamier than the ones his humans ate.