Scary Stories for Young Foxes

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  The groan sounded again, and Uly realized it was coming from his own stomach. He hadn’t eaten a thing since that baby squirrel. Mud clung to his fur, and his skin clung to his ribs. He remembered his mother’s warming words. Maybe he was so skinny that no hunters would want to eat him.

  He sniffed the morning air for her scent. Nothing.

  His stomach grumbled again. He had to eat something. Soon. He marked the roots of the tree so his mom could find him. Then he took a deep breath.

  “Come on, paws.”

  And for the first time, Uly set off to hunt for himself.

  * * *

  “The forest is a feast,” Uly said aloud in a reassuring sort of way. “And foxes are clever, above all, above all.”

  Unfortunately, neither statement brought any squirrel babies tumbling from the treetops.

  He searched his memory for the hunting lessons his mother had taught his sisters:

  Listen for rustlings and gnawings in the brush.

  Stalk quietly until your prey flees into the open.

  Match your movement with its movement.

  Low muzzle for a bird or squirrel. High muzzle for a mouse.

  Bound from afar.

  That last part didn’t really work for a fox with three legs. Uly wouldn’t be able to bound over a fire ant if a whole heap of mouse guts was waiting for him on the other side.

  He swiveled his ears, listening with one and then the other. The forest was filled with scrabbles and nibbles and tiny digging paws. The delicious sounds skittered through his muzzle, curling his lips. How could he catch them? Prey lived high in the trees or buried deep in the ground, guarded by burrs and thorns and bugs that would bite his eyelids.

  He tried sniffing out a stream of scent along the forest floor, just like his mom had taught him. He sniffed and sniffed until his nose grew so dry he was afraid it might crumble off.

  It was no use. All he smelled was dirt and leaf mulch.

  He plopped down again, ready to give up and make everlasting pals with the centipedes.

  “Tasty hiding! Tasty hiding!”

  Uly perked his ears.

  “Tasty hiding! Tasty hiding!”

  A bird sang in the treetops. Uly had spent so much time alone in the den’s entrance while his sisters fought one another that he had come to understand many birdsongs. He’d listen to the birds sing and then watch as they swooped up some delicious morsel.

  “Tasty hiding! Tasty hiding!”

  He sniffed in the direction where the bird’s bill was pointed. A coppery scent laced the wind, leading him to a split in a tree trunk. His stomach gurgled. He licked his whiskers. There were warm things in there. And they were moving.

  Uly crouched behind a shrub. Unless his nose was lying, the critters inside that trunk were small and helpless and wouldn’t be able to put up a fight. He bent low on his foreleg and wiggled his hips in a way he’d seen his sisters do a hundred times before. He made a mighty bound toward the tree, his forepaw thumping along the ground.

  He hadn’t smelled the mother possum. She scurried down the trunk and into the split, reappearing a moment later with three baby possums dangling from her mouth. She flashed Uly a murderous look and then scampered away.

  Uly was so upset that he fell over. His stomach whined as several other edible critters fled the area, running from the kit whose pawsteps were as loud as crashing boulders.

  THREE

  EVENING FELL AGAIN. Branches chewed the sky. Uly lay, head in the dirt, blinking dully. His stomach had stopped growling—as if even it had given up on him.

  Ever since he was a tiny kit, Uly had known he would spend his life alone. He’d never meet a vixen. Never start a den. He’d starve somewhere all by himself. He’d just never thought that day would come this soon.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the spiders and centipedes to make a home out of him.

  Snff snff.

  A scent caught him by the nostrils.

  Snff snff snfffff.

  It was so strong and succulent that it rolled him up onto his stomach. This was not the smell of just-born bodies, furless and helpless and ready for eating. It was warmer.

  Uly got to his paws and followed the scent. He had smelled fire once before when the firs had smoldered in the distance, casting a smoky shadow over the Boulder Fields. He had smelled entrails, steaming in the open air when his sisters ripped open a groundhog. But this intoxicating scent lay somewhere in between, singeing his nostrils as much as it enticed them.

  Snfffff.

  The smell twined between the leaves, tickling Uly’s nose and pulling him along. It got his stomach rumbling again, and drips of drool pattered the dirt.

  Snff snff snff.

  Soon the scent was all around him, so thick it was almost filling. The air became hazy, and he saw coils of smoke twine through a clearing. Uly froze. No birds sang. No mice bounded through the elder trees. As if the creatures knew to keep quiet in this place.

  But then …

  Creeeaaak THUMP! Creeeaaak THUMP!

  He crouched low. His sisters had never told him stories like this before. What smelled this enticing but sounded so strange?

  Creeeaaak THUMP! Creeeaaak THUMP!

  He glanced back into the tangled forest and the starvation that awaited him there. Then, as quietly as possible, he hopped toward the clearing, moving from tree to tree. He peeked around a trunk and was so confused by what he saw that he had to blink a few times.

  The thing in the clearing was as big as a boulder and half as tall as the trees. Its sides were perfectly flat, save the top, which was sloped with dead grass. Something like a rocky trunk stuck out of the grass, spewing the delicious-smelling smoke. In the boulder’s side was a hole, flickering bright as a firefly. It cast a yellow haze through the dying dusk light.

  Uly quirked his head. This boulder was hollow. And something was living inside it.

  Creeeaaak THUMP! Creeeaaak THUMP!

  The sound was coming from the far side of the hollow boulder.

  Uly licked his lips. His pounding heart and grumbling stomach played tug-of-war inside him. His stomach whined.

  “Okay, okay,” Uly whispered. “I get it. Shh.”

  Keeping low, he hopped into the clearing, whiskers alert. He sniffed along the boulder’s flat side, rounding the first corner. Flies buzzed around a pile of something dark and wet. Uly hopped closer and found entrails. Rotting entrails, just sitting in the grass. Above them, the skin of a rabbit dangled from a stick—as if it had snagged its ears on a branch and spilled its guts out.

  Creeeaaak THUMP!

  The sound wasn’t coming from the rabbit.

  Uly left the entrails and slowly peeked around the next corner.

  Creeeaaak THUMP!

  His heart went cold. It was the skin of a little girl fox—dangling just like the rabbit’s. She hung from her muzzle by what looked like a vine. Her body swung back and forth, her hind legs striking the side of the hollow boulder.

  Creeeaaak THUMP! Creeeaaak THUMP!

  Uly backed away. The boulder must be a trap for foxes. Any moment, a vine was going to swoop down, snag him by the muzzle, and—

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when the fox opened her mouth and dropped to the ground. He froze as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The fox was more than just skin. And she hadn’t been hanging from the vine at all. She’d been tugging at it. It was still wrapped around her neck.

  The girl fox stared at Uly, wide-eyed. He stared back, holding perfectly still, hoping she hadn’t seen him in the low flickering light.

  “Are you”—she said—“stuffed?”

  “HIC!”

  Uly ran from the clearing—forepaw slipping, chest thumping—scrambling along the grass until he leapt into a bush, where he froze and held his breath.

  “Hello?” the girl fox called. “Hello?”

  Uly crouched in the bush. Not all foxes were nice, he knew. Not even if they were related to you. And foxes who w
eren’t related to you could be even worse. Territorial. That was the word. If he went back out there, the fox might seize him by the throat and shake him to death.

  “Are you still there?” the girl fox said.

  Uly’s stomach whined. Then again, if he grew any hungrier, he might vanish with a small pop. Maybe this fox would share some of those entrails. He’d even take the chewy bits.

  “Um, yes—hic!” he called out. “I’m here.” Hearing the sound of his own pathetic voice made him wince. So he said, growlier, “And me. There’s two of us.”

  This was the brave voice that made his mom laugh. He hoped it sounded menacing now.

  “And you can’t hurt us!” he said. Then, growling, “Because we’ll chomp you to pieces.”

  The fox in the clearing was quiet a moment. “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “You’re right,” he responded. “You don’t. Because my claws are as sharp as—hic—slivers.” Then, “And my teeth are as long as icicles. They’ll freeze you and you’ll shatter into a mi—hic—illion pieces.”

  The voice in the clearing fell silent. “Guess I shouldn’t mess with you, then.”

  Uly’s jaw fell open. The scary voice had worked. No one had ever believed he could hurt them before. His sisters used to tease that he was so harmless mice camped in his mouth at night. This fox hadn’t so much as snickered at him.

  “Will … will you help me?” she said. “I got caught by a human, and I lost my mom, and now the human’s gonna boil me up and stick me in a page, and I’m—I’m stuck.”

  Uly’s ears pricked. He didn’t know what a hue-mun was, or what boiling was—in fact, he hadn’t understood most of the sentence. Only that this fox had lost her mom. He was about to tell her he’d lost his mom too when he caught himself. You didn’t get tricked by your sisters a thousand and one times without learning a thing or two.

  He remembered how the fox had swung by her muzzle from that vine, and his ears folded back. “How do I—er, how do we know you aren’t a dead fox who’s gonna gobble us up?” Then, growlier, “Yeah—hic—how do we know that?”

  The fox huffed, frustrated. “’Cause dead foxes can’t talk, duh!”

  She had a point.

  Then again, this fox had been dangling one minute, and the next, she was on her paws.

  “How do we know you aren’t lying?”

  “I can’t prove to you that I’m not dead other than by talking to you!” the fox said. “Besides, you’re the one who’s lying!”

  “Wh-what do you mean?” Uly asked. “Y-yeah, what do you mean?”

  The fox snorted. “Hiccups aren’t contagious!”

  A stone turned over in Uly’s stomach when he realized how he’d given away that he was just one fox instead of two. “Hic! Um, uh, I gotta—hic—go,” he said, hobbling away. “Um, I mean we’ve gotta go. Yeah, good luck with—hic—with everything—hic!”

  “No, wait!” the fox called out. “Please don’t leave! I’m sorry I called you a liar. I’m sorry I said ‘duh.’ I’m going to die here! Miss Potter’s going to kill me! The water is boiling, and she’ll be back any second, and—and—and—please!”

  Uly stopped. “What’s stuck you?”

  “A rope,” the fox said.

  Rope? Uly peeked into the clearing. From high on the boulder grew the brown vine that wrapped around the fox’s neck. So she’d been trying to free herself …

  The fox’s eyes pierced through the dusk. She looked softer than Uly’s sisters. Chubbier. Her fur smelled of unripe apples.

  “If I help you,” Uly said, “can I eat those innards?”

  “Yes!” the fox said. “They’re all yours! Just hurry!”

  Uly hopped a few tails into the clearing. By the flickering light of the hollow boulder, he got a good look at the fox. Her fur was as light as pollen, with gray stars sprinkled through her coat. She was a little pudgy—something Uly didn’t even know was possible for a fox—and the tip of her tail was hairless.

  “Can you”—the fox craned her head, trying to nibble at the vine around her neck—“help me get this thing off?”

  Uly’s first thought was, No. No, he couldn’t. No one had ever asked him for help before, because—well, he wasn’t good at things. Now and then, his sisters had used his back as a boost to get on top of a rock that they never invited him on. But beyond that, he wasn’t any help at all.

  The fox stared at him with her blue-swirl eyes. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  Uly still didn’t move. He wasn’t so worried about that anymore. Just of making a fool of himself.

  “You have your friend to keep you safe, right?” the girl fox said. She roughened her voice. “The one who sounds like this?”

  “Oh, right, yeah,” he said, searching out a believable place his fake friend could hide. “He climbed a tree. He can drop from above like rain made of teeth.”

  “Fang rain.” The fox nodded. “Got it.”

  Uly hopped forward, head low. “What do I do?”

  The fox took the vine in her mouth and gave it a tug. “It squeezes my neck whenever I pull on it. I need you to hold it still so I can slip out.”

  Uly did what he was told. He took the hairy vine in his teeth and pulled. The fox wiggled and jerked her neck.

  “Pull!” she said.

  “Ah’m twying!” he said, mouth full.

  “Come on! Pull! Pull!”

  “Ah’m twying! Ah’m twying!”

  And then the vine fell loose in his mouth, and the fox was free.

  “Run!” she cried. “Forget the entrails!”

  She darted into the wood, leaving Uly with the rope. He dropped it with a thunk.

  “Um?” he said.

  A section of the hollow boulder smacked open, and something screamed in a high-pitched shrill. “Gobs and naping! Sheez froke thuh ropplin!”

  The creature had wild gray hair that stuck out at all angles and a loose skin that swept all the way around two knobby knees … Uly’s heart nearly stopped when he saw that the thing walked on its hind legs. Its forelegs hung high on its body. And instead of claws, it had long fleshy appendages that wriggled like fat worms.

  “Fye!” the wild thing screeched. “Pather!”

  Uly bolted after the girl fox. And even on only three legs, he was too quick for the creature with two.

  FOUR

  ULY CAME TO A STOP in a grove of birch trees. Panting, he looked back to make sure the horror on two legs wasn’t still following him. The forest was still.

  “Um … fox?” he called quietly. “Ch-chubby fox?”

  No response.

  He sniffed the air. Now that the haze of smoke was gone, he was able to pick up the fox’s unripe-apple scent. He followed it to a puddle and found her staring at her own reflection. She didn’t look up when he approached.

  He hopped closer, sniffing warily. “What are you doing?”

  The fox’s head snapped up, and she came at him in a flash. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for her teeth to sink into his throat. When he felt nothing, he cracked an eyelid and found her face pressed close to his.

  “What color are my eyes?” she said.

  “They’re”—he gulped—“gold. Blue and gold.”

  The fox nodded. She returned to the puddle and again stared at her rippling reflection. She seemed surprised by the fox staring back at her.

  “Um,” Uly said, “what’s your name?”

  She kept staring at the puddle.

  “Mine’s Uly.”

  The only response was a loon in the distance.

  Finally, the girl fox took a breath. “I was in there so long I thought I’d missed it.”

  “Missed what?”

  “My kithood.” The fox stared at her reflection and blew out her cheeks. “I got kinda chubby, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I … didn’t know you before.”

  She sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter.” She quirked an eyebrow. “I’m free.” She took off, darting this way then
that, weaving through the trees. “It feels so good to be out! My legs are all long and … springy! Ha ha!”

  She zoomed circles around Uly, growling and making little nips at his ears and tail.

  He cowered. “Wh-what are you doing?”

  “Making up for lost time!”

  Uly ducked as she bounded over his back and then bounded over it again.

  “Are you being mean?” he said, ears flattened.

  “No! Playful!”

  He tried to stand upright just as the fox’s paws landed on his back. She performed a fancy kickflip, sending his body thumping to the ground.

  “Ow!” he cried.

  “Oops!” she said, giggling. “Sorry!” And she took off running again.

  Uly did not like this fox’s playfulness. Not one bit. He would have thought twice about helping her escape from that vine if he’d known she was going to act like this.

  He started to hop into the forest.

  “Hey!” the girl fox called after him. “Where ya goin’?”

  “Er, nowhere?” Uly said, sitting back down. “Please don’t jump on me again.”

  “I’m Mia,” she said, tail wagging.

  Uly nodded slowly. “I’m still Uly.”

  He wondered what Mia saw when she looked at him. He was small for his moons, he knew, and it was hard not to notice his withered front paw. His legs were as skinny as sticks, and his fur was ragged from too much scratching. His mom had told him he had a violet tinge to his fur, like he’d been “smooched all over by a blackberry bush.” But his sisters teased him that his eyes were always wet and shiny, like he was about to cry any moment.

  Uly widened his eyes, drying them out so Mia wouldn’t think he was scared.

  “Nice to meet you, Uly!” she said, not seeming to notice his paw or his fur or his eyes or anything. She got low on her forelegs and wiggled her hips. “What should we do?”

  Uly’s stomach pinched and let out a gurgle.

  “Um,” he said, wavering. “A-a-a-are you hungry at all?”

  “Nope!” Mia said. She did a spin. “But let’s hunt something!”

  His stomach whined again. “Um, yeah. Okay.”

  “Oh,” Mia said, seeing his withered paw for the first time. “What happened?”