Maybe a Fox (4 page)

From forever, Jules had known that Sam's burning wish was for the catamount to return. But when Zeke and Elk went to Afghanistan, Sam's wish had changed.
Elk return.
And Elk did return, which meant that Sam's burning wish had probably gone back to
Catamount return
.

Before he left for Afghanistan, Elk had come by and taken Jules aside.

“Listen, Jules,” he had said. “I'm going to ask you to do something for me.”

He had put both hands on her shoulders and looked right into her eyes. Elk was usually quiet and serious, but when he laughed, everyone else around him laughed too, especially his best friend, Zeke. They used to set each other off. But there was no laughter about him just then. It was only her and Elk, on the porch of Jules's house.

“Sam's going to be throwing wish rocks into the river for me until I get back,” Elk said.

Jules nodded. Of course he was. She waited while Elk shifted from one foot to the other. Finally he said, “If we don't come home, would you take these to the Grotto?”

He reached for her hand and placed two agates into it. Agate was one of her favorite rocks. She brought them up close to her eyes and studied them. They were nearly identical, in size and shape and color and markings. Had she ever seen two rocks so closely matched?

Then Elk took a breath and let it out slowly. “To honor Zeke and me?” he said.

He pressed her fingers around the agates. For a second Jules didn't understand what he was asking, then she did.

“Can you do that?” He looked directly at her, then tapped her fingers, curled around the twin agates. Jules wasn't sure what to say. She was proud that Elk had trusted her with them. But she had no idea where to find the Grotto, or even if it really existed.

So far as Jules knew it was just a myth, a cave of sorts, rumored to be somewhere in the woods of the Sherman tract. It had been there for centuries, hidden. “Some think it might have been used by the Abenaki,” Mrs. Harless had told them. “Others think the Norsemen . . . the Vikings . . . thought of it as a sacred space. It wouldn't surprise me.”

Legend had it that the cave was filled with rocks: rare rocks and ordinary rocks, rocks collected and brought there from all over New England, and even beyond, from Iceland and the Arctic Circle and Russia.

“A kind of memorial,” Mrs. Harless had added. “Whether to the living or the dead, no one knows. There's supposed to be a significance to every single rock in it. Even if we don't know what that significance is.”

That made sense to Jules. Every single rock in her own collection was significant, each for a different reason. But how could she make a promise when she didn't know how to find a place that maybe wasn't real?

“Rock Girl,” Elk had said. “If anyone can find the Grotto, it'll be you. That's why you're the one I'm asking.” Then he smiled, one of his rare grins. And Jules couldn't help it. She smiled back at him.

“So I have your solemn word?”

“You have my solemn word,” Jules promised.

But it was a promise that Jules hadn't kept. She still had the twin agates, so similar to each other that they looked practically identical. She knew that she should return them to Elk, but she hadn't. And Zeke?

Mrs. Harless's burning wish that her grandson would come home safe had not come true.

A
s for Sylvie? Sylvie had only one wish, and it burned so hard that Jules was sometimes afraid to touch her sister's wish rocks, afraid they would scorch her from the force of that one wish, which was always the same:
Run faster.
Sometimes she would add
faster than a deer
. Sometimes she would write
faster than a comet
. And sometimes:
faster than a rocket
.

But why? Why did Sylvie want to go so fast? Jules had asked her a million times.

Jules: “Why?”

Sylvie: “So that . . . ,” she began, as if she was thinking of the best way to answer Jules. But she never did. Jules waited and waited, but that was all Sylvie said, that first time and every time thereafter.
So that.

The lack of an answer did not keep Jules from asking, and sometimes Sylvie would say something like, “So that . . . I can break the sound barrier” or “So that . . . I can leave a vapor trail behind me” or “So that . . . I can win the Kentucky Derby.” Jules knew that none of those answers were true, and Sylvie knew she knew.

So what was the truth? Jules didn't know and Sylvie wouldn't say.

Now Jules stood on the porch, looking at the trail to the Slip. Less than fifteen minutes ago, Sylvie had leaped right over the new little snow family, right over the miniature snow dad's stick arms spread wide to stop her. She should be leaping back any second now.

The woods felt hugely quiet. Too quiet.

Then, in the very thick of the silence, Jules heard the quick, high-pitched cry of a fox. She recognized it immediately. There was no other sound like it, a “vixen's cry,” was what Mrs. Harless called it.

A fox! Foxes meant luck.

Jules jumped back off the porch and over to the little snow family. She took her mittens off and with her bare hands—yikes, cold!—patted together a miniature snow fox and set it next to the arms-out snow dad. She admired it, the bushy little tail, the alert tilt to its head. Sylvie would like it too.

“Sylvie!” Jules shouted to the empty trail. The Slip wasn't
that
far. Jules crouched next to the new little snow fox and trained her eyes down the path, willing her sister to appear. The groan and wheeze of the school bus came to her ears. Then there it was, at the bottom of the driveway. Oh no.

“SYLVIE!” she yelled again. “COME ON!”

They were going to miss the bus for the first time ever, and not because of Jules. How would they explain this to Dad? The anger she had felt earlier returned full force. Enough of this.

She took off down the trail, jumping right over the new snow family, the tiny snow fox next to the tiny worried snow dad. She ran right next to Sylvie's tracks, which were clear and fresh in the brand-new snow.

“Sylvie!” Jules cried again.

But there was no answer. There were only Sylvie's empty tracks, quickly filling up with wet snow. Now Jules could hear the river. The sound of it grew louder. She was almost there. She would see her sister any second now. Sylvie would be standing by the river.
If we keep our feet dry, we'll be safe.
That's what she always said. It was the Sylvie Sherman Motto. Sylvie Sherman was about to get an earful from her sister.

And then, suddenly . . . a tree root, barely jutting up in the new snow. And just beyond, Sylvie's tracks became a wide gash, a gash that shot straight into the Whippoorwill. Water rushed in front of Jules and disappeared into the Slip. The roar of it filled her ears.

“SYLVIE!”

Jules turned in a circle, stumbled in her wet boots. She screamed her sister's name. And screamed it again. The air above the water was empty, a hole that Sylvie had fallen through.

Jules turned away from the awful emptiness and looked back down the path. Boot prints. Her own and Sylvie's, side by side. She looked toward Mrs. Harless's place. Nothing. Only new snow. She looked across the river at the Porters'. Nothing. She forced herself to look down again. The barely jutting-up root, the gash. Water streamed into the opening of the Slip, rushing over the ancient stones, stones that looked like jagged teeth.

Jules's knees buckled. She gulped in the frozen air. But she knew: there was not enough air in the whole entire world that could make the river give Sylvie back.

T
he mother fox pressed herself as hard as she could into the leaves.

Three kits were growing inside her, a girl and two boys. She could already sense the personalities of the brothers. One was agile and focused, the other calm and strong.

But the third, the female, she was a mystery. Her physical body was forming itself—was nearly formed now—but her spirit still lingered somewhere else. Aloof. That her daughter's spirit was so late in arriving made the mother fox anxious. Why had it not happened yet?

The babies pushed against her rib cage and she licked her belly, as if to reassure them. She wished again that her little girl's spirit would hurry.

Then she startled. Something, unexpected and unplanned, was happening to a creature nearby. She crouched low, scenting the air. Whatever was happening was chaotic and full of fear. The fact that it was happening to another creature, that she and her unborn kits were safe tucked into the underbrush, didn't help her unease.

The two brother kits inside her squirmed and pushed, nearly full term and ready to be born.

And the girl?

The mother fox focused on the blood and bones and beating heart of the mysterious female kit inside her. She tried to ignore the confusion and panic floating all around her in the freezing air.

Then a sudden, weary peace rushed through her.

Her daughter's spirit had arrived. The mother fox sensed it, swift and nimble, finding its way to the little body waiting within. But as she sighed, she felt a deep, deep stirring. A thousand years of fox knowledge washed over her, knowledge of the hunt, knowledge of the seasons, and something else. In her ancient memory, she heard the ancestors whisper,
Kennen
.

Kennen.

There are, in the animal world, those who are known as totems. They serve as bearers of luck and good fortune. People carve their likenesses into teak and bone and serpentine, then carry them in their pockets or wear them on chains around their necks.

There are stories also of familiars, creatures who serve their masters in matters of magic and spells. Witches, we're told, are particularly fond of cats and frogs.

And then there are the rarest of all, the Kennen.

It's said that before any creature is born, it is linked to something. Some are linked to trees, some are linked to sky. Still others are linked to rain or wind or stars. But the Kennen? They are linked to the spirits. No one is sure why. Some believe that the Kennen are meant to finish something that isn't finished, to settle something that needs to be settled. Others say that a Kennen's true purpose is to help in some way, big or small. It's hard to tell, so rare are they.

What is known is that the Kennen come to this world for reasons beyond our knowing, and once their missions are done, they return to the haven of their ancestors. In an instant, the mother fox understood that her daughter would not belong wholly to her or these Vermont woods. She also knew that it didn't matter. She would love her little girl fox as hard as any mother could, maybe harder.

But for now, her kits safe inside her, she lifted her face toward the sky and cried into the morning air, a greeting to the day and the new knowledge that the falling snow had brought with it.

T
he sheriff and the bloodhounds stood for hours and hours beside the Whippoorwill, at the place where the water reemerged from its underground path, to see if Sylvie's body would float up on the tumbling currents.

The sheriff even requested additional help farther downstream in case his crew had missed her. Finally they all gathered in the Sherman kitchen, and Jules heard them tell how they'd dragged a net across the river, but all they snagged were tree limbs and a piece of rusted metal that looked like it had been in the water for decades. They had all tromped back and forth from the house to the river so many times that the new snow family had been obliterated. There was no sign of them, not even the little snow fox.

The sheriff sat down at their kitchen table. “There's nothing, Chess,” he said. There was not a single article of her clothing, either. No boots. No headband. No single orange mitten. No pajamas. Nothing.

“We'll keep looking,” Jules heard the sheriff say.

A small bead of hope filled Jules's chest. They'd dragged the river. They hadn't found anything. They
hadn't
. As long as they hadn't found Sylvie in the river, she could still be alive, couldn't she?

But where? And what about the hounds? Wouldn't they be able to track her? As if in answer, the sheriff said, “Hard to track on snow, especially after it's melted.” He paused, then added, “We did flush out a young bear. Sidetracked the hounds for a bit. Looked like it might be injured. Or just dumb, sticking too close to humans.”

A bear,
thought Jules. Maybe Sylvie had been attacked by a bear? But the hounds . . . the small bead of hope rolled away. She knew in her heart there was only one place that Sylvie could be. Jules had seen the root sticking up in the path, she'd seen the gash in the snow that led past the stone teeth. The men knew it too; she had led them there.

Yes, she nodded. Yes. She had even told Dad about Sylvie's wishes.
Run faster,
every rock said. Every single one. Always.
Faster than an osprey. Faster than light. Faster than a cheetah.
Jules had told them everything.