The Fox

There is a particular quality to the silence of a hollow that has noticed something large, and the Occupant woke into it on the third morning the way you wake into a room where everyone has just stopped talking. The mushrooms were quiet. The hedge, which normally conducted its business at dawn with the discretion of a market, was quiet. Even Nettie's beard was quiet, which meant Nettie was standing perfectly still, which meant something had happened to the mushroom patch, or something worse than the mushroom patch, and it took the Occupant a moment, coming out onto the path in the grey light, to see that everyone in the hollow was looking in the same direction, and that the direction was up, and that on top of the wall above the hedge, seen through the tangle in pieces the way you see a hill through cloud, sat a fox.

It is difficult to explain the size of a fox to someone who has not stood at the height of a boot and looked up at one. It is not that it is large. The Above is large. It is that it is large and amused, and has not yet said by what. It sat on the coping of the wall with its tail wrapped round its feet and its ears up, the colour of a struck match, and beside it, set down with care on the stone, was one of the Above's shoes, a white one with the laces still in it, which the fox had apparently brought along in order to have something to sit next to. It looked down at the hollow with the patient attention of a creature that has all day and knows that nobody else does.

"It's considering," said Grizel, who had the ledger open and was writing, which is what Grizel does when she is frightened, and also when she is not, so that nobody has ever been able to tell.

"Considering what?" said the Occupant.

"That is what one considers," said Grizel. "Whether to say."

Nettie had already left a mushroom out. She had left it at the exact spot where the hedge was thinnest, on a flat stone, the way you leave a thing out for something you are not sure is a god, and she had stepped back from it a respectful distance and was standing with her arms folded and her beard clicking very slowly, one acorn at a time. The fox looked at the mushroom in exactly the way it had looked at the hollow. Then it came down the wall, not so much climbing as being poured, and took the mushroom in its mouth, and went back up the wall the same way, and set the mushroom down beside the shoe, and did not eat it, and looked at the hollow again, and the hollow understood that it had just been added to a collection.

"Well," said Nettie, and nothing else, and it was the most uncertain anyone had ever heard her be.

The treaty, when consulted, had an opinion about foxes, and the opinion was that there were not any. Grizel read Clause Seven again, in case a fox had got into it since yesterday, and then read the whole treaty, all thirty-one clauses and the schedule about mushrooms, and found no provision for anything larger than a grumlin, and wrote "oversight" in the margin and underlined it twice, which for Grizel is shouting. If a fox were to say the Occupant belonged here, she observed, it was not at all clear who in the Anunder would have the standing to disagree, or the speed. Then she looked up, over her spectacles, at the wall, and it was the look of a woman who has been keeping a record of a world for fourteen winters and has just realised the world has a piece she never knew about, and is, in spite of herself, delighted.

Something had to go over the hedge and find out what the fox wanted. It could not be Mungo, whose position on going anywhere was well documented. It could not be Nettie, who would not leave the mushroom patch while there was a thing on the wall that collected. It could not be the Occupant, who did not yet know which end of a fox to address. This left Sorrel, whom the Occupant had not yet met, and met now, because she dropped out of the hedge onto the path in front of her in the manner of something that had been listening the whole time, which she had.

Sorrel was a fliskie built entirely out of angles. Where Pettigrew was tall and Mothy was wide, Sorrel was lean and quick and never quite still, shifting her weight from foot to foot like a runner who has been told the race will start at some point and has decided to be ready for all of them. Her wings were two blades of leaf, green going brown at the edges, and around her neck on a cord she wore a single thorn, long as her forearm, which was a weapon or a tool or a keepsake depending on the day, and today, from the way she touched it, it was a weapon.

"Fox," she said. "Old wall. Back before dark." And she was gone, over the hedge, in the time it took Mungo to say the first word of "Nobody goes out," which he then finished anyway, to the empty air, for the record.

She was back before dark, as stated, and she was limping, and she had a report, which she gave to Grizel and not to the Occupant, in the manner of someone reporting to the proper authority. The fox would like it noted that it did not start anything. Sorrel would like it noted that it did. Both accounts went into the ledger, one above the other, and neither was complete. The fox would also like the thing it had been getting, and would like it to continue, and had not said what the thing was, because foxes do not explain themselves, and neither, it turned out, did Sorrel, who, asked what the thing was, said "Ask me again later," and went to sit in the hedge with her leg up and her thorn across her knees, looking pleased with herself in the way of someone who has come back with a story and intends to make it last.

The small one with the pockets, asked whether she knew anything about a fox, was not there. Grizel recorded this as "relocated" and, after a moment, underlined it.

The shed is where the Occupant finally met Wick, who is the only thin grumlin anyone has ever seen, wiry as a pipe cleaner, with goggles made from the lids of two jam jars strapped over his hat and a beard he keeps tools in. He was building her a chair, because keepers have chairs, and it was a stool, and it had three legs, and he said the fourth was a design choice, probably, and it was nearly ready. Pettigrew's scroll of grievances was briefly relocated that afternoon and returned with a note on it in a hand nobody would identify, and Grizel, who had begun timing everything Mungo did not say, gave up recording where the lantern was and began recording where Mothy was instead, "as a proxy." Gnomesby's third letter arrived by beetle at dusk, and the beetle's hat had a feather in it now, small and jaunty and undeniable, and Grizel began recording the hat too. The letter was a single paragraph and used the word "regrettably" in the way people use it when they do not regret anything at all.