Mine

A keeper should know the names of things, Nettie said, and there was a thing on the wall that did not have one.

The fox was on the coping with a spoon. It had brought the spoon up from somewhere in the night and set it beside the shoe, and was sitting with the two of them in the manner of a person at a small table who has ordered for a friend who has not come, and it was looking down at the hollow with the amused patience that was, Kit was beginning to understand, its whole face. It was looking, as it generally seemed to be, at her.

Tansy was on the wall beside it. Tansy was, since the frost, on the wall beside it a good deal, sitting in the hollow of its shoulder where the fur was thickest, and nobody in the hollow had remarked on this, in the way that nobody had remarked on the sack, by careful arrangement.

"What's it called?" said Kit, to the wall in general.

"Mine," said Tansy.

"Yours."

"Mine."

There was a pause in which the whole hollow, which had been listening, worked out what had happened, and worked out that it could not be undone, because a name once said in front of the fliskies is held, and fliskies hold. The fox's name was Mine. Tansy had named it after the one thing fliskies believe in, or had named it after herself, or had simply answered the question, and she would not say which, then or ever, and the fox, which had never answered to anything, turned its head at the word and looked at her, and the thing was done.

The difficulty came at once, and it was grammar. "Mine is on the wall," said Nettie, trying it, and stopped, because it sounded like a confession. "Mine has a spoon," said Wick, and looked pleased, and then troubled. Grizel, at the ledger, wrote "The fox, Mine, was on the wall" and looked at it and wrote "The fox (Mine)" and looked at that and wrote, finally, "Mine was on the wall with a spoon," and sat back, and said that the ledger had recorded stranger things, and could not, when pressed, think of one.

Mungo's contribution was made at dusk, when the fox came down the wall and sat on the far side of the gate, as it had taken to doing, and Mungo said "Nobody comes in," and Grizel, from the window, said "Mine included," and there was a silence that went on long enough for Kit to understand that it was not a Mungo but a different unit altogether, and then Mungo said, to the fox, very quietly, "Aye," and the fox went back up the wall.

Wick has been asked to make a sign for the wall. He is not sure what it should say. Nettie's suggestion was "MINE," and it is hard to see what else.