Wide-eyed, Komu crouched farther back in his nest.
Mej sat on his own bed to remove boots and socks. “Mostly, though, she’s setting out to find foxes and she’s doing it in fur—and she doesn’t know where she’s going, or how far, or when she’ll be back. She’s only aiming to hunt until she finds someone, and of course that’s the plan of the season, so Demik and the wolf are going with her.”
“Oh…” Komu was caught up on the idea that his entire body curled up in fur was about the size of a moose’s nose.
“And they’re leaving right away. Getting ready to head out now. Because, obviously, why not? What could be better?” Tossing up his hands.
“Didn’t you tell them it sounds a little … uh…?”
“I told them I was coming.”
Komu gulped. “You did?”
Mej jumped to his feet and leveled a finger in front of Komu’s nose. “What would you have done? Confronted with that … that … that face. Those eyes? Earth Mother, those gorgeous, huge eyes like a night sky, owning your will and turning your resolve to mush. What would you have done?” Furious, almost shouting.
“You mean…” Komu gulped. “She even got Ondrog to stay?” The sullen, apathetic wolf who never seemed to care for anything? Who wouldn’t even keep a dog around his den? Only those ravens that talked to him. If even the wolf had succumbed to her charms there was no hope for the rest of them. She could declare they must sustain themselves on aquatic plants for the rest of their lives and they would probably do it.
“He’s not staying,” Mej snapped. “He’s going with her. He already has his fur on. Demik’s telling the family what we’re doing. They want to leave this evening so we can travel in the dark and skirt around the mines and men. Are you coming or not?”
“So…” Komu rubbed his head with both hands. “We’re going to … follow her around in fur? No clothes, no grub, no traveling outfit like a rifle, and do that for … how long?”
“No idea. A few days? Seasons?” Mej folded up his trousers and long underwear and stowed them away.
“Right… What about home and human trouble? Don’t they need us? Neeve and Qualin expect you to deal with the men.”
“They’ll manage. Everyone’s settled down now. Probably nothing will come of these mill ideas this summer. If it does… We’ll just have to take our chances. Finding shifters, if there’s any chance … we might as well try. She remembered her name, and the logging camp. Now she’s saying she was trapped somewhere and forced to wander alone. Alone for so long … who knows where her clan is? We’ll do what we can and…” Shaking his head violently. “What the hell?”
Mej stormed outside, vanishing from sight, but the horrible sounds of the shift came back to Komu as his mentor’s bones twisted and shrank and reformed with skin and organs.
Still a little dazed, not pausing to mull over the matter, Komu followed. He didn’t stop to make up the bed or select a gift for Summit. She wouldn’t be needing one now. He only changed, staggered, and shook himself.
It was indeed wet outside, bringing up fresh, strong odors in the earth. He paused to pee at the base of his own particular birch tree—which Mej nevertheless had a vexing habit of marking over—then dashed off after the orange dog-fox, thrilled to be setting out on another adventure with this very special vixen.
Chapter 28
Day 12
The cracking report of a rifle made me jump. Great jaws closed around me. With sharp impacts of teeth into my shoulder and scruff, the skin feeling it would rip away from my body, I was whipped through the air like a leaf on the breeze.
I shrieked, tried to keep quiet, and curled into myself—even my long, white-tipped brush tucked up. Still, the pain made involuntary little yelps burst from my throat as I swung helpless in those huge jaws.
Ondrog slid down a bank, leapt a stream, ran into the thick forest beyond, and crouched in shade of the spruce trees before he gently set me down.
I shook and staggered, whimpered and rubbed my neck on the ground—no dog puppy to be grabbed by slack hide without pain. I gave him a reproachful glare.
Ondrog wasn’t even looking at me, head up, ears pricked to the west, scenting after that shot. A shot from a firearm like Demik’s rifle—human beings out hunting for meat. They didn’t eat foxes. They ate deer and salmon and huckleberries like we did. And bonbons and apple pie.
So we didn’t need Ondrog panicking each time we passed some miner out after a deer. Only Ondrog didn’t seem to agree.
I rubbed my aching neck on Ondrog’s tree trunk of a foreleg. Still, he did not apologize—didn’t even flatten his ears.
He remained so watchful I stopped to listen as well. A dark red dog-fox dashed through the trees, scenting us, saw us as he almost passed, swerved, and ran up to me. He lashed his brush, puffing tiny pants of air in joy and excitement for finding me. He clucked and pawed, licked my face, then also snapped his head up to listen beside Ondrog.
No one seemed to desire my opinion so I crouched against their paws and waited.
The two remained perfectly alert, only their ears pivoting, until another shot. Both started, then kept motionless.
Very, very distantly, right to the edge of hearing, I heard the babble of men’s voices. They must be a mile away, and speaking English. Still, the meaning was plain: they’d hit something.
Demik tensed even more, muscles in all four legs bunched and ready to run.
Quick paws, swish of undergrowth, and two more dog-foxes, paler, one stocky and one a sapling, leapt the stream and dashed up to us. Like Demik, both were pleased to see me. Unlike him, they did not pause to listen. As soon as we were reunited, Demik gave a gruff bark, then led us off south, a silent figure padding ahead with his black paws lifting high and his stupendous brush straight out behind, never touching the forest floor.
We did not scent or hear the men again. Even so, it was sunset before Demik and Ondrog calmed down and breathed normally.
The rest of that first full day and night went well, making good progress south with no more rifles.
We even had plenty to eat. Demik had just presented me with a marmot when Mej and Komu turned up a hare and, thanks to Komu’s burst of speed, caught it.
In among rocky tunnels of whistling marmots, I lay flat in the shadows until the curious and territorial little animals came out for a whistle. Then I snatched them like duck eggs, quick as a humming bird. They must never have seen a black fox, and could not catch the shape of me in the rock shadows as they could with the white markings on the muzzles of the other three.
I gifted Ondrog with four fat marmots before the little beasts grew wise and showed their grizzled heads no more.
Marmot and deer mouse hunting did not seem to be areas where Ondrog excelled. Yet we could not help him bring down a mule deer or stone sheep. I hoped rodents would be enough.
Komu found a delightful, fresh patch of grass for me to feast on after our supper. It was the nicest, most moist green grass. I went for the middle of the patch, where Komu was already chewing. He snapped at me, putting back his ears. I had to scream in his face, gekker, gape, and sit on him before he remembered he’d found it for me. Then he nibbled the edge with the others.
After our salad, we trotted through the gloomy hours following midnight. Right through the night, grabbing the rare vole or woodrat as we moved from forest to open plain. We traveled down the Yukon River, seldom catching sound or scent of a human being, but avoiding them when we did. Mostly, we cast for scent of shifters, any sort, and kept alert for sight also of any fox or wolf in either form. But no. We passed trails of many total foxes, and even a pack of total wolves before that second night was over. No more.
Again in rocky ground and high ridges of marmot country, with sunlight returned, but a gray drizzle to the day, we curled up in a former mountain lion lair. There had been no kittens here this season and the scents were old, the few remaining bones from prey bleached.
We slept for hours in the coo
l shade, curled on top of our brushes around Ondrog, then pushed on through a light rain that brought old scents to the surface.
Thus began a frustrating trail as we went on searching that day and the next. And the next.
Chapter 29
We traveled to the coast, all the way to Skagway. We roamed beaches and mudflats, and dug up clams. We watched steamers stranded until the tide changed. We teased muddy sled dogs tethered behind town until scores of half-wild barks and howls made the gray night hideous.
Komu brought me a chicken one night. It was delicious. The trouble was, Demik was so displeased he flew at Komu. Nor would he let him go until I finally had to intervene and placate Demik. No more chickens.
Yet we ate well anyway: Ondrog followed the ravens to a fresh wolf kill of a well-grown elk calf. A total wolf kill—not the wolves we were after.
I remembered, it seemed, as we ranged about human towns and human trails where they cut their way from the coast inland and gradually worked to Dawson City, where they panned for gold and gambled and baked apple pies. I remembered trails like these. I remembered towns like those. I remembered … trying to get away.
Which town? Which trail? Where might my people have been nearby? That part I couldn’t remember. And I couldn’t find their trails.
After days drifting around the beaches and mudflats, I led us west and north. We skirted the coast and traveled inland to another city. A terrible place of men and dogs and mud where I had been before, only … was it just because it was like the others? All these white man domains seemed the same. Whiskey, tobacco smoke, mud, noise, stink… How could I really have been in a place like this? And why did the idea send my heart pounding and my breaths short?
If I’d been to such a city, I’d have been in skin, right? Yet, if there was one thing I felt sure about in my recent past, it was that I’d been in fur for a long, long time.
Not recent then? Had I lived in a place like this when I was a kit, perhaps? Then gone on once I’d been old enough to change and seek a life in the wilderness? If so, it still didn’t account for my missing people.
If I really had grown up among human towns, why didn’t I remember English better? Why didn’t I remember chemists’ shops and store-made clothes and card games if those had been my life? And where did the logging camp, 400 or 500 miles away, come into my memory if I’d lived somewhere like these cities?
I’d felt the pull to come south from Dawson to find answers. Once we reached the coastal towns, I only wanted to run north.
Demik wouldn’t let me keep fleeing, however. One sunny night, he changed, asking me to join him, and we huddled together with the others in the forest in our naked skins to talk, them close in fur, keeping us warm.
“What is it? You’re scared?” He stroked my hair, face against mine.
I shook my head.
“Then what’s wrong? You led us all the way down here, but shy away? Have you been to Skagway? Dyea?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let’s push on a bit more. Juneau?”
I shuddered, the word like a knife in my ears. I tucked my face against his bare chest.
“Summit?” He kissed me. “What is it? Have you been to Juneau?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered—yet even the word left me nauseated. “I want to go home.”
“We’ve only started looking…”
“I know. I’m sorry, Demik.”
“Something bad happened to you in one of these towns?”
“I don’t know. Not … not in skin. It’s all right in skin. The dogs … in Dawson, and your dogs at home … they don’t scare me in skin.”
“But they do in fur? And the towns themselves?”
I nodded, trembling against him.
Demik hugged me tight while Ondrog leaned into my back, his thick coat a warm robe.
“We’ll look after you, Summit.” Demik stroked my hair. “You don’t have to be afraid when we’re with you. If you remember something that’s frightening, that’s all it is—a memory. You can always change and we can talk about it. What do you remember now? When the dogs scared you, what does that make you think of?”
I sniffed as I struggled to come up with an answer. “Cages.”
“Were you trapped? Or did you see your family trapped? Put in cages?”
“I don’t know.” I shivered, burrowing in closer against him.
“That’s all right.” He kissed my hair. “Keep hunting. We’ll be with you. Find somewhere that you know, then follow that to somewhere you know. Keep doing it and we’ll find your family before long. Or other shifters.”
Another not. I held onto him a long time before I had my breath back and we returned to fur.
We went to Juneau. It was ghastly. The smells, the noise, sight of the place. I’d barely sniffed the far end of main street before I was fleeing. Running and could not stop for a choking fear that pounded after me.
Demik tried to talk to me again that night. I had nothing to say. Still trembling, I couldn’t change. I didn’t have a memory to give him or a story to tell. All I knew was what he did; the terror of Juneau kept me running for days. But I couldn’t have told anyone, not even myself, why.
I led us back up the coast, through a dozen human settlements, then into the mountains north and west, and began to note the change.
The sun set truly now. Days and nights were each their own. Mosquitoes were almost gone. Green trees started to show yellow. Though the temperature remained hot during the day, the nights were chill, the seasons changing.
It was August, somehow, all in a blink. If I was to carry a kit through the winter, that choice had to be made soon. That could mean no more fur after September. Which meant no more searching.
We roamed the southeastern mountain ranges of Alaska, leaving me feeling both at home and a million miles from anything I knew or remembered, when I turned us north.
We’d been gone half a season. The closest thing we’d sniffed to a shifter in all that time were villages of the humans who lived in nature akin to ourselves: the Tlingit on the coast and Tutchone north.
It was time to start home.
Chapter 30
Komu took another chicken from a white man’s trading outpost for fur trappers and prospectors. These places along wide rivers were no more than a few permanent cabins, one a store, where boats came in, men traded goods, and eggs could be sold for vast sums.
Komu, with me following, opened a latch with his paw that no total fox should have been able to manage, then slipped away with a hen in the true dark of night. Noise of the flapping, domesticated birds brought a man with a shotgun that we escaped in a flash.
Yet we could not escape Demik. He attacked Komu again when he smelled the chicken, while I crouched and flashed my brush, crooning, trilling, but failing to distract Demik.
Snarling, Ondrog also went for Komu, cracking him across the side of the head with a sideways blow from an exposed canine tooth. He sent Komu tumbling, shrieking with pain and surprise.
That wasn’t fair at all. It would take at least ten of Komu to make up one Ondrog. I screamed in Ondrog’s face, took the brown speckled hen, and bounded off with her.
Mej—who remained neutral in the whole thing—and Komu plucked her with me and we reveled in the feathers and sweet, soft meat, untroubled by developed muscles or gamy flavor of a wild animal’s flesh. Like the difference between saltwater and fresh water.
Demik and Ondrog went hungry that night, Demik not even able to turn up a shrew as far as I heard.
It was next morning, up the river, a long way from the trading post, that we discovered why there were such locks on the chicken coop.
I was ahead on the trail with Komu, both of us straying, following a total fox scent. Here was the fox who stole chickens.
Komu teased me with a wing feather, whacking my muzzle with it and bounding off. I chased but he was a blur through the dawn gloom, the white tip of his skinny brush flashing away. Then: snap, yelp,
Komu screamed. I jumped and crouched, ready to run.
He sprang in the air, one forepaw jerking him to the ground when he should have been clear. Yelling and twisting, he thrashed against the thing holding him. Bite, shriek, twist, and fall over. The shock and terror made him fight, though I could see in a flash it was no use. He was held by the same sort of leg-hold trap that had gripped the wild lynx. Perhaps meant for foxes. But still huge and iron and impossible to escape. It would sooner sever his delicate limb than free him any other way.
I dashed forward, remembering the way Demik had pinned down the crossbar to open the two jaws. I changed, still moving, willing the skin form, the growing of my own body, stretching of limbs, vanishing of brush and triangular ears. By the time I reached Komu on my knees, I had hands and thumbs, hardly noticing the pain of my own change as I grabbed him.
“Shhh…” I caught his body, holding him flat on his side while he panted, wide-eyed, tongue curling up in his mouth. “Still … be still…”
I stroked him and Komu obeyed, only trembling and panting as he lay stretched before me.
Mej and Demik dashed up, then froze as they saw what was happening.
“Go!” I called. “Stay off the fox path! It’s trapped!”
They jumped back, fur bristling, as Ondrog also ran up.
“Shhh,” I whispered to Komu. “I’ve got it.”
I turned his limb, flattening the trap on the ground, and pressed down the bar with one palm, leaning all my weight into it. The jaws opened while I gripped his right forelimb and lifted him clear. I let the bar ease back and the jaws clack closed, then pulled Komu to my chest in the shroud of my own hair.
I stroked my hand down his foreleg, then felt again with my fingers, down to the smallest details.
Fox's Quest: A Foxy Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (Foxes of the Midnight Sun Book 2) Page 14
