Maybe a Fox (12 page)

“What is it?” asked Sam.

“You'll see.”

Elk set a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow. Was this the kind of pace they set in the army? Sam wanted to ask, but instead he just kept walking. He pushed his hand down deep in his pocket. A few minutes later and they were there, atop the bank at the curve in the river.

“Look,” Elk told him, pointing down.

Sam did. The water was quiet, still in the late afternoon. He couldn't see too far beneath the surface. Mostly what he noticed was the wavy reflection of the tall trees all around them, a few evergreens, and others just getting their new spring leaves. There were a handful of geese on the far bank, likely new arrivals from the south. But Sam didn't think that Elk had brought him here to see geese.

“What am I looking for?”

“You'll know when you see it. Keep looking.”

Sam kept looking. Paw prints. Deer. Raccoons. And then . . . wait . . . waitwaitwaitwaitwait! . . . there was no mistaking what it was. “Yes!” Sam sprang straight up and barreled down to the edge of the water. All his life he had waited for the catamount to return, and now, here he was!

Elk jumped down off the ledge and landed beside him, and Sam leaped right onto his brother's back, knocking both of them to the ground, Sam laughing and shaking his head. Elk grinned back.

“Looks like those wish rocks worked,” said Elk.

“I can't wait to show Jules and Syl—” Sam caught himself. “Jules, I mean. . . .” A small bit of happiness leaked out with the mistake of it. But not all of it. Sam looked up at the tall trees. Wouldn't Jules think this was a good thing? Wouldn't the proof of
Catamount return
count as a good thing?

But then he remembered the day she'd gotten so angry at him. And he couldn't really blame her. It
wasn't
fair that he had gotten both his wishes and Jules, well, Jules . . . Elk reached over and put his hand on top of Sam's head and rested it there.

“I know,” Elk said. “I know.”

And he did know, thought Sam, of course Elk knew. He had lost Zeke, just like Jules and Sam had lost Sylvie.

“The thing is,” Elk said, “sometimes I feel like Zeke is still out here, like he's watching me. If that's true, then who's to say that Sylvie isn't out here too?”

Sam pushed himself up off the ground. Elk was right. Who was to say? They both dusted themselves off and knelt back down to examine the gigantic print. Elk put his hand over it. It was almost an exact match.

“Grandma Harless used to tell us about special animals,” said Elk, “spirit animals—she said they were born into the world to help some other being.”

“Help how?”

“Don't know. She didn't either. She said it was beyond our knowing, something only the spirit animals knew. ‘Beyond our ken' was what she said.”

Then Elk moved aside and let Sam put his hand inside the catamount print. His hand wasn't that much smaller than Elk's anymore. A catamount! He could hardly believe it. And here they were, in the exact spot where the catamount had been. His second burning wish had come true. First Elk had come home. And now the catamount had returned. All those wish rocks.

“Did Zeke have a burning wish?” Sam asked his brother.

“Yeah. One.”

“What was it?”

“To come home to these woods.”

W
hen Jules got back to the house, she was relieved to see that Mrs. Harless was still asleep on the sofa. A small twinge of guilt passed through her. If Mrs. Harless had seen Jules cross the invisible line, she surely would have called Dad and he'd be here already.

Jules looked at the clock above the sink. It was almost five thirty. Dad would be home any minute. She ducked into her bedroom and tucked the headband underneath her pillow, just in time to hear Dad's truck rumble up the drive. After he gave Mrs. Harless a ride home—her hand over her eyes to keep out the sun—he stood in the doorway of Jules's room.

“Got something for you,” he said, both hands behind his back. “Guess which one.”

This was the same trick he had played on them when they were little, shifting the object, whatever it was, from one hand to the other. She pointed, and he held his closed fist out to her. She pried it open. On his palm lay a polished chunk of verde antique, dark green, with lacy white lines tracing the surface of the serpentine.

“That's
beautiful
,” Jules said. “Where did you find this?”

“At a construction site, if you can believe it. I saw it and thought of my rock girl. My strong-as-a-rock girl.”

Jules closed her fingers over the serpentine. It was still warm from Dad's hand. It might have made a good wish rock, even though Jules knew she would never have added it to the striped sock in her closet. Not this one.

Wish rocks.

Had Dad ever had a burning wish? She must have had a strange look on her face, because he tilted his head at her questioningly. She decided to ask him outright.

“Dad, did you ever have a burning wish?”

He smiled. “I used to,” he said. “I had two, in fact. When I fell in love with your mom, I had a burning wish that she would love me back. And then we both had a burning wish to have children.”

“But . . . Mom and Sylvie are gone now.”

He shook his head. “Doesn't matter, Jules. What matters is that I had two burning wishes, and they both came true.”

He reached out and wrapped both hands around the one of hers that was holding the chunk of serpentine. “And that makes me a lucky, lucky man.”

There was something in his voice that was quiet and true. She decided to think about it later. This new piece of serpentine would need its own spot. Maybe on the windowsill. Not under the pillow next to Sylvie's headband. She wasn't ready to tell Dad about the headband yet. Plus, how could she—he'd want to know where she got it! So she tossed the serpentine from hand to hand until he went to the kitchen to start dinner.

But when she set the rock on the windowsill, it didn't seem to belong there either. Nor did it fit with the other rocks on the top of her bookshelf. She didn't want to put it in her Christmas box of rocks, because it might get jumbled up in there.

She opened her left palm and with her right hand placed it squarely in the center. She felt the weight of it, the heft. She curled her fingers over it. It was warm from being handled. And old. So old. Jules knew that her rocks had been here for eons, maybe from when the Earth first formed. They'd been around since before the Abenaki and the Norse settlers, since before the mastodons and the woolly mammoths and the cave lions. Before all that.

Cave lions.

The word
cave
brought the Grotto to her mind. Hadn't Mrs. Harless told them that it had been a memorial, that for centuries people had taken rocks there to honor their dead? She thought about Elk and his twenty-one shots. She knew that it was his way of honoring Zeke.

Jules
had
to find the Grotto. Elk had honored Zeke with his twenty-one-gun salute, and finding the Grotto and placing the perfect rock there would be her way of honoring Sylvie.

I got your back, sister.

She would have to cross the line again. Just this one last time. She might not be able to do it tomorrow, or even the next day. She would have to wait for the right opportunity. And while she didn't wish for Mrs. Harless to get a migraine every day, she sort of wished that she'd at least get sleepy and want to take a nap. That didn't make her a horrible person, did it?

Besides, she would only break the one rule—she would still stay within earshot of the house, she would still not go to the Slip. The only rule she would break would be the one about the invisible line.

And another thing. When she found the Grotto, she would return the twin agates to Elk, no matter how much she loved them, so he could do the same for Zeke. With great care, Jules set the verde antique rock on her bedside table.

Sam's wishes had come true. Dad's wishes had come true. Even Sylvie's wish to run faster had come true, in a way. Hers would too.

T
he message had been given to Senna by the Someone—
danger, Senna
—and she was on alert
.
In the days and weeks after finding the headband, she kept returning to the old cave. She sniffed the dirt floor and scratched at the hard walls, but the Someone never reappeared. Senna called in her fox voice, whimpered for her. Where was she? And why didn't she come?

The gray-green bars shifted in the air around her.
Run, Senna. Run faster.
And Senna did. Her sturdy legs grew muscular and strong as she raced through the forest. She sought out the catamount as he shadowed his human, the man named Elk. She scented the whereabouts of the foolish young bear, who was still out there stealing human food, moving from one garbage can and farm to another.

She ran along the banks of the Reemergence. She ran through the pines all around her. And every day, she ran to the edge of the clearing and waited for the sun to begin its descent. That was when she was most likely to see Jules.

Maybe, thought Senna, if she could lead Jules to the cave, then she might find the Someone again. Maybe Jules was the key? Maybe.

Senna waited underneath the old wooden bridge each afternoon. Cars and trucks rumbled over the thick wooden planks, but Senna stayed hidden until she could hear the sigh and groan of the school bus. Then she scampered up the graveled bank, to wait in the tall grass as the bus lumbered past. Jules's face would be in the very last window, peering out. Would Jules see her? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

But on the yes days, her bright eyes behind the window flashed light down at Senna. Jules. When Jules got off the bus, she usually walked right up to the trail that led to the Disappearance. Then she stopped. Sometimes Jules was aware of Senna's presence, sometimes not. It was almost as if they were playing a game of hide-and-seek with each other.

But Senna wasn't really playing games. She wanted Jules to follow her, wanted Jules to help her find the Someone again. Day after day, Jules left her house and walked right up to the beginning of the trail that led into the woods, and day after day, she stopped.

Sometimes Older Brother came with Senna, but she knew he didn't like being so close to the humans.
It's against our fox nature,
he said. Senna knew that was true, but she also knew that while she was fox, she was also Kennen, which was something that Older Brother didn't understand. So more and more often, she came alone, hiding and seeking, waiting for Jules to step onto the trail. But day in, day out, she walked only to the edge. Nothing changed.

Until the day that Senna smelled something besides the familiar scents of Jules and the T-shirt she always wore.

Bear.

And a human, following the bear.

Danger, Senna. Run faster.

Just then, as Senna's heart began to beat faster—
danger, Senna
—Jules walked up, almost on top of her.

H
ello, little fox,” Jules said. “Were you waiting for me?”

Maybe it was a weird thing, talking to a wild animal, but she couldn't help it. Besides, she kept running into this same fox, the fox who'd had Sylvie's headband. The sight of her felt like huge good luck, especially right now. Jules was taking a chance. Mrs. Harless was back in the house in the living room, reading a book. All these days, Jules had been patient, waiting for her chance, waiting and waiting and waiting, and finally, she couldn't wait anymore.

A person could explode if they thought about something too hard, couldn't they? Hadn't she read that somewhere? And finding the Grotto was all she could think about. So she waited for Mrs. Harless to settle onto the sofa, waited to hear the turns of the pages, counted to one hundred to see if Mrs. Harless was going to put the book down or keep reading. At the end of one hundred, Mrs. Harless kept right on going. It must be a good book. Jules grabbed the twin agates, the green serpentine that Dad had given her, and her mother's headband.

She jumped right over the invisible line. She had to hurry. Dad would be home soon.

And then, luck! Right in front of her was the fox, almost as though it were waiting for her. Jules bent down, taking precious seconds, and spoke softly so that she wouldn't scare it away.

“Hi, little fox.” The fox sat down, waited, ears pointed straight up. Jules paused.
Do not mess with wild animals.
It was one of her father's Do Nots. But her father had also said that a fox was lucky. Shouldn't that count too? Jules knelt down and held out her hand. The fox stayed still. She met Jules's eyes with her bright, steady gaze.

The sun slanted down through a gap in the pines and landed on the fox's fur, lighting it up. She looked up at Jules, turned and began to trot down the path, then paused and looked back. Did she want Jules to follow her?

At first the fox just trotted along the trail, making it easy for Jules to keep up, but then she picked up her pace. Jules thought she might have scared her, so she tried to slow down, to put some distance between them. The fox would then wait, and as soon as Jules almost caught up, she sped up again.

It was crazy, but the little fox seemed to be leading her somewhere, toward something. Jules followed. They made their way down the path, the fox a few feet ahead of Jules, in the direction of the Reemergence. Then the fox ducked into the underbrush beyond an enormous white pine and disappeared.

Where was she?

Jules had never ventured off the path at this particular place before. The white pine was so huge that it had obscured a tall outcropping of mossy rocks. Vermont was a land of rocks and trees. Like snowflakes, no two rocks ever looked the same, the exception being the twin agates that Elk had given her. The rocks hidden behind the white pine, however, were each similar in size and sat in a neat row, resting one atop the other.