Zac (Storm Foxes)

(I've posted a few excerpts from this one, which is circling in various forms in my head. This repeats some of the plot points of previous iterations, but in a different form. It's... getting there. Slowly.) 

I remember the anger most of all, driving me through the freezing, early snow. I couldn’t feel my toes in my boots and my ears hurt like they’d fall off, but right at that moment, I hated my father so much it didn’t matter. I hated him enough that I brushed aside the early nips of the storm foxes’ teeth. I hated him enough that, striding through the bush, I wasn't even scared. I hated him. He was going to pay. 

I reached the old, rust-red railroad, abandoned in the bush decades ago, the faltering line demarcating native eucalypts and wattles from plantation pines. Unlike the eucalypts, the pines looked natural in their coverings of snow. ‘Look at us,’ they seemed to say. ‘We were made for adversity.’ 

So, it seemed, was I. 

It was anger that propelled me through the darkening forest as wind spat snow in my face. It was anger that drove me deeper and deeper into the trees that loomed overhead, blocking the light that glinted in storm foxes’ eyes. But it was grief, when at last I reached the Winter King’s clearing, that brought me stumbling to my knees. 

I was eight, and Mum had gone.

“Fix it,” I told him, the Winter King, with his great stag antlers and all-seeing eyes. “Bring her back.”

He smiled sadly. “You know I can’t.”

I challenged his gaze. “Send your foxes. Find her.” The storm foxes, riding invisible on the wind, nipped at my ears, my nose. I ignored them. 

His smile vanished. “They are not my foxes any more. They no longer do my bidding. I could not send them if I tried.”

“Then make me one.” My heart hammered in my chest; this was it, this was my father’s punishment, the thing I’d set out to do. He’d driven my mother away, and now I would leave him too. “Make me a storm fox, and I’ll find her.” If I could ride the winds as they did, I’d find my mother wherever she was. Nowhere in the whole wide world would be too far. I’d find her, and I’d bring her back. 

The Winter King’s eyes glazed up with tears. “Is this really what you want?”

My jaw ached. “I do.” Cold burned my fingertips. Alive. I felt alive, so damn alive; nothing could touch me now. 

The Winter King bowed his head. “So be it.” 

I stood, too agitated to kneel, robbed of the fight I’d expected. “I hate him,” I said, though it was none of the Winter King’s business. The storm foxes circled me, red fur and cream throat, black eye and white tooth, glimpses magically visible in the gloom. “I never want to see him again.”

The Winter King laughed without mirth. It sent shivers down my spine. “Be careful, child. You’ve lost one parent already.”

I scowled and swatted away a fox that nipped at my ear. “I’ll find her.” 

The Winter King bowed and faded away.

The foxes’ nips grew restless, daring—a toothy, masochistic leer. For the first time, fear trilled along pathways that anger had made. 

I didn’t scream when they tore into me—I’d asked for this—but I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face. It didn’t take long before blood joined them, trickling from my eyebrows, dripping off my earlobes, oozing from wounds on my neck and scalp. 

I closed my eyes, alive. It hurt, but in a way that was normal, natural: the physical response of a body being torn apart. For the first time since Mum had walked out, the pain in my heart dulled. 

The sharp, sweet iron of blood overtook the crisp smell of the pines. My pulse rushed in my ears until I couldn’t hear the quiet yips of the foxes any more. Slowly, I sank to the ground, fighting against the impulse to shelter my head. 

Maybe something had gone wrong. Maybe the Winter King had left me to die. Walked out on me, just like everyone else eventually did. 

I tried so hard to be good. 

Under all the pain, something began to itch. I opened my eyes. At first all I could see was a haze of red—blood, maybe, or fox fur? It was hard to say. But then the musk of fox grew stronger, the iron of blood faded into the background just a little, and I realised the trees were taller than they had been. 

No. I was shorter. 

I swiped blood from my eyes—

Ow. I had claws. I stared at my hand—paw—hand? I had paws?

Oh. I realised the storm foxes had withdrawn a little, and that the pain had changed. Instead of the sting of open wounds, I ached like I’d run to Melbourne and back. And I had paws. 

I tilted my nose to the sky and yipped with delight. I was a storm fox, and now I’d find my mother quick as breathing. 

I leapt off the ground, ready to soar with the winds and the snow. For a heart-buoying moment I flew—

The ground smacked into me like disappointment, and I discovered the truth: I was a fox. Not a storm fox. Just a fox. 

Foxes couldn’t cry. I was glad.

Fox Red: An Interlude

Seventeen: An Interlude

Imagine, if you will, a young boy—about seven, say—who thinks he’s the cleverest thing in the whole damn world. Sadly for him, he’s not far wrong—but clever doesn’t mean wise.

This kid, this boy—this genius—has played in the bush behind the house forever, wandering all the way down to the pine plantations that line the highway that’s the lifeline of this little two-bit town called Jilamatang. Regional Victoria, back of the Snowy Mountains, over an hour to the nearest thing they’ve got to a city. He’s outgrown the place and he isn’t even in double digits. Good thing they have the internet, even though the connection’s slower than the post from Melbourne.

He wanders far and wide, spends the whole day exploring while his parents think he’s a good lad in school—an easy ruse because school’s also easy—and one day, he discovers something worthwhile. Not far from town, a couple of kilometres or so, there’s an old train line. Barely anyone remembers it, and even the real old timers hardly know it’s there. But he knows. It’s always been a sort of demarkation, the eastern border of his domain, and he’s had it in mind that he probably oughtn’t cross it. Crossing it, he feels, is maybe a step too far from his parents’ world.

But of course, one day, his curiosity gets the better of him and, breath held by tightly pressed lips that quiver with anticipation, he skips across old rails rusted to the colour of fox’s fur. At first, nothing seems to have changed. The air tastes the same, the same wind blows against his skin, and the same sun beats down upon his shoulders.

But then the trees overhead grow denser, gnarled eucalypts and wattles give way to lofty, straight-trunked pines, needles flared against the bright sun and crisp air of early autumn. Their leaves will not succumb to the on-coming cold. Never mind that neither will the eucalypts’; the pines would have everyone know that needles, at this altitude, this close to the highest mountain in the whole entire country, are superior, which is why their trunks are so tall and straight while the poor little natives twist and bend, backs crooked in submission to the wind.

The thick mat of rust-coloured needles devours the boy’s footsteps more effectively than any carpet, and for a while it’s eerily quiet. It grows colder, too, and the boy shivers, even though summer still lingers in the air in long, hot afternoons and the true bite of winter is months away.

Through the trees, something shifts, and he catches glimpse of something moving, something big—something alive. And although his heart pounds like it wants to escape his chest and run right back home to the safety of his kitchen, the boy continues. This, he knows, will be a sight worth seeing.

He follows the half-glimpsed beast for maybe thirty minutes, though it seems that either seconds or hours have passed, and then—at last—he reaches a clearing in the pines where granite boulders pile up high like someone has torn away the skin of the world and exposed its spine. And there, atop the boulders, head thrown high against the sky, antlers broad and strong enough to tear apart the clouds, stands the last thing he’d have expected to find in alpine Australia: a giant grey deer, easily as tall at the shoulder as the boy is himself—and he is hardly short for his age.

The stag tosses its antlers, and the boy can feel—feel—the words the stag would say, if it could talk—if it would talk.

Welcome, the stag says. Welcome to the home of the Winter King.

The boy bows politely, because it seems like that is a thing that should be done, and when he straightens up again, the stag is gone.

But he knows, now, the boy, where this Winter King lives, and now he'll never leave it alone.
Time after time he returns, at any hour of the day: the crisp, bright light of of a dew-covered morning, the frosty bite of a late autumn evening, the blazing hot midday summer sun as he runs through the bush, wild and free while school is out.

Time after time, the boy returns to the Winter King, and slowly, he begins to love him. Both hims, that is, come to love the other him, and they stand with each other for hours, foreheads pressed together or flank to flank, saying all the things the Winter King would say if the Winter King decided he wanted to speak.

The boy rubs the knot at the end of the Winter King’s spine, right before it turns into a tail, and brings him sweet carrots and apples and old-fashioned lumps of cane sugar. The Winter King whispers secrets into the little boy’s heart, right before it turns into his consciousness, and feeds him joys and delights too subtle for words to make out. Probably the Winter King enjoys it as much as the boy does, for although the boy is lonely—at school, at home—at least his has his parents, and they love him very much.

The Winter King has no one.

Well, that is not quite true, the boy learns. The Winter King has his storm foxes, ethereal spirits that ride the winds like hawks, soaring and diving and tumbling. The storm foxes love the spring storms best of all, when thunder splits the sky like canons and the lightning flashes strobe-like across the forest. They love the storms because storms bring freedom: the Winter King cannot contain them when the heavens open and rage, and through spring and summer his power wanes almost entirely.

Then, one day, the boy has no one either. His mother and father fought, and although that wasn’t unusual, the fact that his mother left and didn't come back was.

He didn’t realise until years later what the little plastic stick in the bathroom bin had meant; why his mother had cried for three days straight before the fight that ended it all; why his father had been so relieved to see her go. Not that he ever said he was relieved, and the boy knew his father missed his mother—but he also walked as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. An important weight. A weight of about seven or eight pounds, if the boy understood things correctly, that would last some eight or nine months and then the rest of their lives.

The boy thought he might have quite enjoyed that weight. It might have been just heavy enough to hold his family together.

But alack, the weight had vanished—from his father’s shoulders, his mother’s body—and so his mother vanished from their family, and the boy felt all alone.

That was the night it happened. The night he told the Winter King what he wanted—and the night he learned that sometimes, what we want is the worst thing we can imagine.

He was supposed to fly.

Instead, he thudded to the ground. And he learned that even foxes can cry, if they’re really, truly sad enough.


If you enjoyed this story, check out the That Moment When anthology, which contains the first part of Fox Red!

Fox In The Snow

Long ago, a boy made a wish to be one of the quicksilver foxes he saw in the woods. He was one of the few who could see them, darting hither and thither between trees like spirits of the air and earth – which they were, the stormfoxes. However, when his wish was granted – for it was, for he had taken an offering to the Winter King – he found it was not as he’d expected: instead of becoming a sprite like them, he was stuck between worlds, both man and fox – a werefox. In winter, when the Winter King held sway, he was a fox, but in summer the power of the Winter King waned and he became human once more. And even while he was a fox, unless it was in the weeks around solstice when the King was at his peak, the boy was merely a fox – not a stormfox like the ones he’d seen.

Worse, the stormfoxes resented his change, and harassed him, abusing him, nipping, biting, bullying. Year after year he sought to be accepted, but all in vain, for never would they accept a human so brazen as to assume he could become one of them.

One year, they killed him. They’d driven him mercilessly for days, and it was the time between winter’s true start and solstice when the Winter King was strong enough to keep the boy in fox form, but not strong enough to make him a stormfox – so he was hungry, and weak, and after four days of being hunted without rest his body gave in. The stormfoxes caught up with him in a small clearing where his fur bristled red against the snow, and they killed him – not quickly, not gently, but mauled him to death with nips like needles, letting the life drain from him slowly, like oozing blood.

He died, and then the girl found him.

She was only eight, and her dog back home had just been put down, and her grandmother had died of cancer, and she couldn’t bear any more death. She’d been walking in the woods behind their house, her mother too grief-stricken to care, her father too bound up with caring for Mother to worry, when she saw him, blood already turning brown.

She lay down and curled herself around him, weeping tears that burned her face in the cold. The snow seeped its way into her clothes, her gloves, her hat and shoes, and she shivered with cold that was warmer than grief, and thought about how much she’d loved her grandmother, how much she’d loved her dog, how much she loved her mother and her father and how she never wanted anything to die again.

She was an ordinary girl, perfectly ordinary, but she had that rare and special talent instilled in some at birth: when she loved something, it grew. The fox shuddered beneath her arms, a rattled intake of breath like dead leaves across the road. He twisted, turned, and licked her face.

The girl lay stunned just long enough for the fox, the boy, the creature who’d been dead, to squirm out from her arms and away.

Later, she told herself it must have been her imagination. The fox must not really have been dead, only cold, and her body warmth had defrosted it enough for it to recover.  And she forgot that though she was ordinary, when she loved things, they grew.