The Fox and the Boy (Fiction)

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In an unremarkable patch of forest, somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, a boy sat on a ledge of ancient, lichen-covered limestone. He was alone, and he was lonely. The ledge emerged midway up a gently sloping hillside of dirt and rocks and fallen leaves, in the part of their forest that the boy’s grandfather had once told him was “spooky” because it felt eerily unlike the rest of their hundred acres. Bereft of birdsong, the white oaks rising in cathedral stands were older here, casting a thickset canopy between earth and sky. From moist clefts, delicate Christmas ferns rose out of the leaf litter. In the spring, small, ground-hugging flowers bloomed in the faintest pink and blue, but no one could find their like in the guidebooks back at the cabin. Everlasting shadows covered the forest floor, for the sun touched this bosky slope only obliquely, leaving it cool and tenebrous even in summer.

The boy wore a red parka, a concession to the adults in his life, but he’d lost his orange knit cap somewhere in his ramble that morning. His father had found the cap in the all-purpose drawer in the cabin and tugged it onto the boy’s head, patting him kindly and sending him on his way. He may have snagged it on a low branch. Or tugged it off because he was hot. He may have believed he would go back for it or that he’d come upon it on a future hike. Either outcome was likely, and he thought no more of it.

The air was crisp on his cheeks and nose, the stone ledge cold through the bottom of his sweatpants, and he thrust his hands deeply into the pockets of the parka. He believed that if he waited, his friend would come, as she sometimes did when he left himself open and quiet. Perhaps discomfort, he considered with his boyish understanding, was the price he needed to pay for this visitor. Or patience—he sat for uncounted minutes with his eyes closed.

Wind rasped through the branches above him and troubled the fallen leaves on the ground. It teased the lank blond hair that hung before his face and over his ears. The boy felt the forest grow darker as a cloud passed before the sun. A numinous moment.

After a time, when he opened his eyes, he saw the orange knit cap resting at his feet. It was flecked with bits of leaf and twigs and what may have been saliva. He didn’t move to reach for it but slowly turned his head to see its silent deliverer.

His friend sat serenely on the ledge, beyond the boy’s reach. Not there, and then there. Poised and alert, her ears erect and her bib aglow. Her luxuriant, white-tipped tail curled elegantly before her black front paws.

The boy knew not to give her undue attention. A smile, a nod of acknowledgment, then he must turn away lest too much regard made her vanish. He was an interloper in the fox’s forest, and he knew to keep his place. What other fey creatures rollicked in these woods, he didn’t know, but he hoped to be worthy enough someday to learn.

“I heard Dad and Pop talking last night,” the boy finally began, directing his words to the chill air before him. “They thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t.” He didn’t reach for the knit cap. He wouldn’t until he knew their encounter had ended, whether the fox left, he left, or, as would happen this day, they left together. Then he would reach down in a fluid motion, with a crinkle of the stiff fabric of his parka, and maybe a small grunt, to snatch the cap from the ground and stuff it into his pocket.

“It was just like you said. They think you’re only pretend. Make-believe.”

He frowned, for he had not wanted to speak of her using those words. They were impious, and they might suggest a faltering of his own belief. As a profession of faith, the boy added, “I know you’re real.” His fingers twitched to reach over and touch her, perhaps betraying an unconscious desire to confirm her tangibility and thus his wish, but he only dared another glance at the fox, who sat unmoved and inscrutable.

“Thanks for bringing my hat. Dad would have been disappointed again.”

He was not yet clear why, of them all, the fox had chosen him. She told him she was called Scrapefoot, but he was hesitant to use her name, fearing it too familiar for the still insubstantial nature of their friendship. She came to him if he was by himself, and if he wished for her. And those times when she appeared, he no longer felt alone, no longer out of place. He no longer felt that he didn’t belong where he was or wonder where he should be instead. If there could be a proper place at all for a boy like him. During their fleeting time together he felt whole, and for this he was grateful, so he accepted whatever terms she set.

She asked nothing of him, posed no questions, made no demands. She would come when he sat quietly, or he might realize she was striding silently beside him as he hiked. He offered her his sandwich once, but she declined. Somehow, he knew she would not fetch a stick or a ball. She would never let him touch her. He realized she would always remain a mystery.

One summer day she showed him where a trickle of water seeped from under a rock far up their little hollow. Not even his grandfather had known about it. Another time, to a rotting walnut stump where a wild turkey had made her leafy nest. She led him to a pair of whippoorwill chicks, motionless and nearly invisible in the leaf litter as their mother feigned injury nearby to draw him away. The fox stopped and sat once, and thus did he, as a bald eagle alighted in a nearby tree, regal and aloof. She took him to a solitary catalpa tree, a non-native in their forest, which the boy recognized embodied his own adopted status. She brought his cap to him.

But if they were rambling, and he approached the cabin or happened upon one of his fathers at some chore in the woods, she would vanish as silently as she appeared. There, and then not there. She came for him alone, which he soon realized, and having witnessed her patronizing dismissal by his fathers the one time he had spoken of his forest friend, he understood that their kith was private.

She was no less real to him for this. In the folk tales that his Pop had read to him when he was little, there were often talking animals, many who approached unwary humans, even children, for good or ill. He happened to be a boy fortunate enough — or perhaps lonely enough? solitary enough? — to have met one of those fairy tale creatures.

Scrapefoot jumped down from the ledge and landed nimbly in the leaf litter without a sound. She walked several paces to the west then turned to look back at the boy, beckoning him to follow. He eased himself off the ledge, swept a hand to the ground to grab his orange cap, then turned his feet to follow the fox. The crunch of the leaves beneath his boots seemed the only sound in the forest. Scrapefoot paused and turned again to assure herself the boy was following. She would do this several times, which told the boy that she was leading him to something important.

He wasn’t old enough to understand that he shouldn’t believe in her. Such an inimical thought was a part of the adult world he never wanted to enter. Being a child adrift was difficult enough, as he told her many times, so he wanted to keep the one friend he had. He’d heard Pop say that children often create imaginary friends because they felt unsafe. And then Dad countered that childhood imaginary friends were common and didn’t need a cause, and that their son would grow out of this phase soon enough. But he didn’t feel unsafe, and he didn’t want to outgrow the forest’s gift. And so, he told her, his fathers’ overheard thoughts convinced him even more that he’d been adopted into the wrong family. He had never fully become their child. He was their project. Their assignment. Their obligation until he was an adult and found his own unique ways to be lost. Maybe she was his real family, he suggested. Scrapefoot had told him he was too young to be burdened with such thoughts, but they weighed on him no less, and so she let him pour his sorrow into her ears.

She loped silently ahead of him, as though floating above the rugged ground rather than treading on it. Her fur blended with the russet leaves. The boy stumbled and crunched behind her, their destination, whether near or far, somewhere ahead and somehow important.

They crossed the waterless streambed and then ascended the opposite slope. This was drier ground, for it received more direct sunlight. The scrub here was mundane, the trees thinner and more scraggly. Scrapefoot took him past skeletons of cedars, struck down by storms long ago. Around blackberry brambles that never flowered or fruited. Through scrub that hid rocks for stumbling over. Land to be crossed but not visited. Yet she led him on, and he followed, for he wanted to believe.

She finally stopped in a small clearing. He knew the place from his rambles. The soil here was often spongy under his boots after a winter thaw, though not so in this dry season, and his grandfather, who also knew the clearing, had speculated that maybe a wet-weather spring was trying to emerge but didn’t have enough gumption. The best it could do, he guessed, was keep this small patch of ground moist during the rainy season but nothing more. The boy saw deer here sometimes. And turkeys that clawed the ground for insects or acorns. He had daydreamed here many times.

Scrapefoot began pawing the ground near the center of the clearing. She looked up at the boy then pawed again. He approached the spot slowly, allowing her to back away and blend into the tree cover. He understood he was to look for something on the ground, and so he fell to his knees and began pushing aside the leaves and duff and wispy grass, exposing the thin Ozark soil. His fingers scraped across small rocks and twigs, and he might have begun digging if he had brought a shovel, but he hadn’t, so he guessed that what Scrapefoot intended him to find was not buried deeply.

He widened his search, clearing more leaves and sticks, exposing more cold dirt and stone.

And then he saw what he had been brought there to see. Easily overlooked by the uninitiated, dismissed for what it was not, mistaken because unexpected, and, for more than a century, waiting for him. A dull-gray stone, hardly bigger than his thumbnail. Knapped and shaped to a point long since blunted. Thin and double notched. A tiny arrowhead. With a dirty fingernail, he prised it from the soil then held it in his palm. Perfect in form and use. Delicate and yet enduring. Its facets showing the craft of human hands, put to important use. Bird points, his grandfather had called them when he had confessed that he hoped to find one someday. If this discovery fulfilled his grandfather’s sacred wish, the boy wondered, could it be a sign he was really connected? That he was truly part of a family?

He looked up at Scrapefoot as though to ask her his questions of belonging, to learn if this understanding was what she’d intended by bringing him to this place, but she merely pawed the ground once more.

The boy turned back to the exposed earth before his knees. He cleared more leaves, tugged spindly clots of grass free, dislodged deceptive bits of stone. He worked with faith and fingers, kneeling on the cold, rough ground, beneath the benevolent gaze of a fox that spoke to him in quiet moments.

And in the dirt, he saw a black stone. Glossy, unlike any he had ever seen in their forest. He knew intuitively that it had come from far away. A second bird point. Similarly sized as the first and shaped roughly the same, though more worn. Also waiting for him.

What would his grandfather say of these two treasures? For that is what they were. Would he praise his grandson for his find or be envious that it had not been him? Had Scrapefoot never come to his grandfather? Was he not worthy? Or insufficiently troubled? Or not alone enough? Did this mean he was not to discuss his treasures with others just as he was not to discuss his friend?

The boy held the two arrowheads in his palm, trying to puzzle their meaning. He could feel their prick as he closed his fingers over them. No one could dismiss them. He admired their ancient beauty but knew he must protect them, must hide them from unworthy eyes. He rose and looked for Scrapefoot, but she was gone, as though she had never been there at all.

Paul Lamb lives near Kansas City but escapes to his Ozark cabin whenever he can. His stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and his novels, One-Match Fire and Parent Imperfect, are published by Blue Cedar Press. You can read more about him at paullambwriter.com.