The Heart of a Fox

by T. Isilwath

  It took her a long time of careful, stealthy stalking, but she managed to approach the nesting site without the birds knowing she was there, and she snared three Japanese Quail. She boiled the skin and bones to make a broth which would be gentle on her patient’s wounded innards, but offer hydration and nutrition, and be easy to spoon into his mouth until he could feed himself.

  The meat she spiced and roasted on spits over the fire, eating her fill and storing the leftovers in a cool cache where it would keep for a day or two. In the warm, humid climate of the jungle, nothing lasted long before it began to rot.

  While the meat cooked, she worked on making more bandages from the spare clothing she had. Her guest’s wounds were still oozing blood, and she knew they would need to be cleaned and recovered. She took a pale yellow, geometric-patterned kimono that she had taken from one of the dead traveler’s packs and sliced it into strips which she then boiled and hung to dry. When she was done, she settled into the hollow to rest and observe her new addition.

  Lax in sleep, he looked painfully young, and she estimated that he was probably no older than sixteen or seventeen years of age. His face was beautiful, if a man could be called such, and he reminded her of a young fop. The Japanese would call him a Bishounen or “pretty boy” for his effeminate, fine-boned looks and long-lashed eyelids. His fox ears were drooped, almost buried by his thick reddish hair, and the only part of them that she could see were their black tips.

  She stayed awake long after nightfall, lighting the hollow with the tallow lamps so she could keep watch over him. He appeared to be resting peacefully and did not seem to be having any trouble breathing. He hadn’t moved or shown any sign of waking, but she considered that a blessing because she had no doubt that his wounds would be very painful if he were conscious.

  As she stared at him, she marveled at the strange turn of events. In the course of a single afternoon, she had not only broken her commitment to solitude and revealed herself to the people of the time, but she had also brought a stranger to her camp. Granted, there had been no way that she would have left him to die once she had saved his life, but the situation still had the potential to go very badly for her if he turned out to be an enemy. Not to mention the irony that the one she had saved was a kitsune, a fox, and the symbolism was not lost on her. Michael’s most powerful totem now snored softly in her hollow bearing a human face and mostly human body, and she wondered if he wasn’t what the dreams had been trying to tell her about all along.

  Silently she prayed to Spirit, hoping to be answered in her dreams. She prayed for her new guest’s health, for his survival and recovery; and she prayed for clarity, for understanding and acceptance of this new turn of events. She knew it was no coincidence that the fox had been sent to her, she just wasn’t sure exactly what it all meant. Hopefully the answers would come to her, but in the meantime she checked on his wounds before retiring for the night and was happy to see that they had stopped bleeding. Blowing out the little tallow lamps, she crawled into her own bedding and settled down to sleep. Even though she now shared her hollow with a stranger, she felt no fear. He was a fox after all, and Fox would never hurt her.

  Morning brought deterioration in her fox’s condition. He developed a high fever, and now his body burned as he undoubtedly did battle against his wounds and the poison. His little whimpers of pain woke her, but he did not seem to be regaining consciousness, rather he jerked restlessly in his sleep, his eyes darting madly underneath his closed eyelids. She checked his injuries and was happy to find no signs of infection or swelling in his belly.

  She managed to get a little bit of broth into him, mixed with some herbs for soothing and pain since she was afraid to use her aspirin or other medications because she had no idea how he might react to them. He drank the broth only sporadically, and she feared that he would become dehydrated as his temperature continued to rise unabated.

  His fever raged for two days and he thrashed in the bed, twisting the covers and crying out in delirium. Joanna was hard pressed to care for him and for herself at the same time, and she worried about him constantly. Her only hope was that the poison did not seem to be paralyzing him because he could kick and move all of his limbs as he struggled against demons only he could see.

  Several times he cried out the word “Haha-ue” which was an antiquated term for “mother,” obviously calling for a parent who could not answer. Sometimes he would scream, reliving some horrible nightmare fueled by his sickness.

  His pleas and cries were heart-wrenching, and she did her best to calm him.

  She heavily doped the broth, but it wore off in a few hours as his body burned.

  Other times, she just sat beside him, talking to him, crooning and singing softly, and petting his sweat soaked hair. He seemed to respond to soft sound and gentle touch, and he liked to have his ears stroked. His eyes would open sporadically, but the pupils were so dilated that she could barely see the color of his irises, and he just stared blankly through them, unseeing.

  Numerous times she brought him outside of the hollow and wrapped him in cloth that had been soaked in cold water in an attempt to bring down his temperature. For two days and two nights she tended him without rest or relief, aching and praying that he would either die or be released from his fever.

  Finally, in the early morning of the third day, his fever broke and he began to pour with sweat. It rolled in droplets from his forehead and body, soaking the “sheets” until she had to replace them with reed straw that absorbed the wetness but stuck to his skin. Repeatedly she pulled him out to wash his body and change his damp bandages, wrapping him back up in recycled, cleaned cloth and covering him with as many blankets as she had from the supplies she had scavenged and her own blanket shawls. He shivered for hours, but by mid-afternoon the worst of it seemed to have passed, and he fell into a fitful sleep.

  She cleaned him up again, and freshened his bed, then tucked him back into it.

  For the first time in three days, Joanna felt as if she could relax and take a break. She desperately needed a bath, and she had to change the infusion set on her insulin pump lest it get infected, so she went to bathe in the nearby stream.

  When she was clean and dressed, she set out to make a new fishing spear to replace the one the man had broken, never venturing too far away from camp and sending inquiries to the trees about her guest’s condition.

  ‘Fox?’

  :Sleeps.:

  ‘Good.’

  She worked on the new spear until it was finished, then used it to catch dinner. Now that Fox’s fever had broken, she anticipated that he would wake soon and be hungry. She brought two small fish back to camp and spitted them to roast over the fire. There were two quail from a previous hunt baking in packed clay in the coals, but they wouldn’t be ready for a while. She ate wearily, then pulled out her fox’s cleaned clothes and set about mending them since it was the first opportunity she’d had to sew the tears in the fabric.

  After she had finished with the clothing, she had intended to meditate and pray for a bit before banking her fire and retiring for the night, but she must have dozed off because the next thing she knew it was full dark and the fire had burned low. Rubbing her eyes and shaking away the exhaustion that tugged at her mind and body, she crawled to the hollow and lit the tallow lamps so she could see. She checked her blood sugar to make sure she didn’t need to eat, then decided to examine her patient one more time before she went to bed.

  His forehead was cool and dry when she placed her hand upon it, and she was very pleased that his fever had not returned. She gave him a tender brush over his skin and an ear rub before peeling back the blankets she had piled on him. She intended to make sure that none of his wounds had reopened or showed signs of infection, but she had no sooner begun to lower the coverings when he suddenly shot up with a cry of alarm and gripped the blankets tight to his body, his eyes wide with shock and concern.

  “Nani shiteiruno! Yamete!” he cried, his cheeks flushing de
ep red with embarrassment as she stared at him, stunned.

  Clearing the cobwebs from her brain, she managed to make out enough to know that he was telling her to stop what she was doing. “Yamete” meant

  “Stop!” and “Nani” meant “What?” so it was a fair bet that he was saying something along the lines of “What are you doing! Stop!” and judging by the blush tinting his cheeks, his nakedness had something to do with it.

  He skittered backwards, dragging the blankets with him until he hit the wall of the hollow, and stared at her with his amber-brown eyes, his breath coming in frightened pants.

  “Kutsurogu,” she told him, trying to sound soothing.

  “Nani?” he replied, eyes even wider, then said something else that she didn’t recognize but probably meant, “What the hell do you mean relax!” She sighed heavily and shook her head. She really was too tired to deal with his modesty, especially since she’d seen him naked repeatedly over the past three days, but at the same time the way he was clutching the blankets to his chest made him look like a blushing virgin who feared he was about to be ravished, and she couldn’t help but chuckle. He gasped, no doubt thinking that she had to be insane to laugh, but that only made her chuckle more, and his next near-hysterical statement made her break out into full giggles.

  She knew most of her humor was fueled by her exhaustion; her mind’s way of reacting to the situation when she was tired almost beyond reason. The very fact that she could even make out a fraction of what he was saying with her muddled brain was a miracle in and of itself. She really would rather not have had to deal with him when all she wanted to do was sleep for eighteen hours straight, but there was naught to be done for it.

  Her fox was awake.

  Chapter Three

  He couldn’t say that awareness came to him all at once. Rather he experienced a slow rise to consciousness that began as a slight nagging in his mind and culminated in his opening his eyes. It took him a moment to focus in the darkness, and he had to blink a few times because it felt as if sand had been thrown in his eyes, but eventually his vision adjusted and he was able to see.

  What he saw confused him because he had no idea where he was. Far from the Shinto shrine where he was sometimes allowed to seek refuge, this shelter had a roof of solid rock, and it smelled of earth and forest. There were other scents too, foreign scents, and the scent of a strange human whose smell was different from any human he had ever met. He wasn’t even sure it was a human scent at all, but it did not stink of demon, nor did he feel any demons nearby.

  Since he’d been running from them for most of his life, his sense of smell and perception for demons was fairly heightened.

  Sound from outside the shelter made him turn his head, and he saw that he was in a hollow underneath a tree. There was a fire outside of the shelter, glowing faintly as it burned to coals, and he could clearly smell the scent of the burning wood along with the fresh scent of the strange human underneath. The human did not appear to be moving, and he perked up his ears to catch its breathing and heartbeat. The sound and nuances in the scent led him to believe that the human was female and appeared to be sleeping.

  ‘If she sleeps, then maybe I can slip away without being noticed…’

  He began to sit up, but pain in his belly stopped him and he lay back down.

  For the first time, he turned his attention to his own body and tried to figure out what had happened to him. Feeling under the blankets, his hands touched cloth that had been wrapped around his abdomen. He felt similar wrappings across his shoulder and thigh.

  ‘Bandages? Was I injured?’ He struggled to remember what he had been doing the last time he had awareness, and slowly the memory of his last day came back.

  ‘The stupid exterminators had raided an oni-gumo nest for the poison egg sacks, and flushed the demons out of their cave. Ichiro asked me to go with the men to make sure the spider demons didn’t come to the village. I went, but when we got to where the exterminators were running the oni-gumo into a trap, the men ran away and I got pinned between the spider demons and the exterminators who were hunting them. I tried to run, but they chased me and two of them flushed me out with stink-smoke. When I tried to get away, they shot me with arrows dipped in oni-gumo poison. I screamed and fell but no one came to help. The villagers had abandoned me. I… I was certain I was going to die.’

  He paused. Obviously, he wasn’t dead, but what had happened?

  ‘I was so scared. I ran as far as I could, but the poison made me slow and weak. They threw nets over me and I was trapped. There was no one…’

  He suddenly remembered a wild animal yell, and the vision of the exterminator about to kill him was replaced by a blur of tan as his executioner was knocked down. A woman, wild and ragged, had burst out of the forest to come to his rescue.

  ‘I… I was saved. She… she saved me. She helped me.’

  He blinked in confusion.

  ‘Why?’

  He looked around the shelter, lit softly by light from the fire outside. It was full of supplies for living, but also had many strange things that he had never seen before, and he had no idea what they were. Even some of his blankets were like nothing he had ever seen. Two of them were thick and very heavy, but also brightly colored with bold patterns he didn’t recognize. They smelled funny too.

  As he turned his attention to his bedding, something else came to his awareness as he realized that he was feeling the blankets just a little too keenly on certain parts of his body. Lifting the covers, he peered under them and gasped when he realized that he had not a stitch of clothing on.

  ‘I’m naked! Where are my clothes?’

  He cast about frantically, but there was absolutely no sign of his garments anywhere in the shelter.

  ‘She stripped me and took my clothes. What does she intend to do with me?’

  There were several things he knew that women could do with helpless, naked males, and all of them terrified him.

  ‘Does she intend to defile me?’ was his next thought, but he pushed it aside roughly. No female, be it human or demon, would want a worthless half-kitsune such as himself for any type of bedmate, no matter how evil her intentions. No, her reasons were probably much darker in nature and most likely involved pain.

  Another part of his brain pointed out that her intentions might not be evil since it was obvious that she had saved his life and treated his wounds, but he shoved that notion aside and returned to worrying about his predicament.

  ‘I’m wounded, but the oni-gumo poison is almost gone. I could get away, I’m sure of it, but I need clothes…’

  Just then, he heard the woman wake up and begin to move around. He froze, wondering what he should do, and he decided to feign sleep as she came into the shelter. With his eyes closed, he couldn’t see what she was doing, but he kept his ears trained on her as he tracked her movements around the hollow.

  He heard a strange hissing noise and smelled something burning, then the unmistakable scent of tallow filled the shelter.

  ‘She’s lit a lamp. Weak human eyes can’t see in the dark.’

  There was more movement, and he heard a few alien sounds that he couldn’t identify, then she began crossing over to his side. He steeled himself to stay very still as her scent and the heat of her body told him she was only a breath away. His heart began to pound in his chest, but of course because humans were deaf (as well as having dead-noses) she couldn’t hear the thundering. She was moving, leaning over him by the smell of it, and he clenched his fists under the blankets. Then a hand, warm and tender, placed itself on his forehead. He stopped himself from jerking away and remained motionless as the hand moved across his brow in what could only be interpreted as a caress, then the fingers worked their way up into his hair and found his ear. Shock shot through him as she gently rubbed his ear, and he almost whimpered.

  ‘No one has rubbed my ears since Haha-ue died…’

  As abruptly as it had come, the hand pulled away, and he he
ard her moving again. Then the hand was back, only this time it was on the blankets, taking them and tugging them downward. He panicked.

  “What are you doing! Stop!” he cried, bolting up and grabbing the covers.

  His molester was a human female who looked very surprised to see him awake. He snatched the blankets and scrambled backwards, but he unexpect-edly hit the shelter wall. Momentarily trapped, he pressed himself against the wall and clutched the blankets to his chest as she stared at him, speechless.

  She was silent for a long moment then she finally responded, “Relax.” Her accent was very strange and that only confused him more.

  “What? Relax? What do you mean relax? Where are my clothes, woman!” Her answer was a deep sigh and a shake of her head. Then she looked at him as one looks at an errant child, and he gathered the blankets even closer to his body for protection. Not that the flimsy cloth could really do anything at all to shield him, but it made him feel better.

  She laughed. It was just a small laugh, but a laugh nonetheless and he gasped. She laughed more at his stunned expression, and he was certain that she had to be completely insane to laugh at the situation.

  “What are you laughing at?” he demanded.

  Her laugher increased, her dark eyes sparkling with mirth only she understood, and he could do nothing but stare at her, dumbfounded. After a moment, she shook her head again and motioned for him to wait.

  “Wait,” she said and turned around.

  His eyes darted to the entrance to the hollow, and he wondered if it would be all right for him to bolt out of there naked. He could take the blankets with him and use them as coverings until he got back to the shrine. Ichiro would probably give him some clothes from the rag bag once he knew what had happened. The woman chuckled again, and he was certain that he had to get away from this crazy person, when she pulled out a large square thing and brought it to his side. Still clutching the blankets, he watched her open the square thing and realized that it was a huge book with strange writing in tiny script. His sharp eyes recognized some of the symbols, but he’d never seen most of it before.