like he could shave off a hundred of them by taking the shortcut, so say around two hundred. If he could walk at least thirty miles a day, he could make it in a week or less.
They’d left Pax at the head of the access road that led to the ruins of an old rope mill. Peter had insisted on this road because hardly anyone ever used it – Pax didn’t know about traffic – and because there were woods and fields all around. He’d go back and find Pax there, waiting, in seven days. He wouldn’t let himself think about what might happen to a tame fox in those seven days. No, Pax would be waiting at the side of the road, right where they’d left him. He’d be hungry, for sure, and probably scared, but he’d be okay. Peter would take him home. They would stay there. Just let someone try to make him leave this time. That was the right thing to do.
He and Pax. Inseparable.
He glanced around the room again, resisting the urge to just run. He couldn’t afford to miss anything. The bed. He pulled the blanket off, rumpled the sheets, and punched the pillow until it looked slept on. From his suitcase he took out the picture of his mother he’d kept on his bureau – the one taken on her last birthday, holding up the kite Peter had made for her, and smiling as if she’d never had a better present in her life – and slid it into his rucksack.
Next, he pulled out the things of hers that he’d kept hidden in his bottom drawer at home. Her gardening gloves, still smudged with the last soil she’d ever lifted; a box of her favourite tea, which had long ago lost its peppermint scent; the thick candy-cane-striped kneesocks she wore in winter. He touched them all, wishing he could take everything back home where it belonged, and then chose the smallest of the items – a gold bracelet with an enameled phoenix charm she’d worn every day – and tucked it into the middle of his rucksack with the photo.
Peter surveyed the room a last time. He eyed his baseball and glove and then crossed to the bureau and stuffed them into the rucksack. They didn’t weigh much, and he’d want them when he was back home. Besides, he just felt better when he had them. Then he eased the door open and crept to the kitchen.
He set the rucksack on the oak table, and in the dim light from above the stove, he began to pack supplies. A box of raisins, a sleeve of crackers, and a half-empty jar of peanut butter – Pax would come out of any hiding spot for peanut butter. From the refrigerator, he took a bunch of string cheese sticks and two oranges. He filled the thermos with water and then hunted through drawers until he found matches, which he wrapped in tinfoil. Under the sink he scored two lucky finds: a roll of duct tape and box of heavy-duty garbage bags. A tarp would have been better, but he took two bags with gratitude and zipped the pack.
Finally he took a sheet of paper from the pad beside the phone and began a note: DEAR GRANDFATHER. Peter looked at the words for a minute, as if they were a foreign language, and then crumpled the paper up and started a new note. I LEFT EARLY. WANTED TO GET A GOOD START ON SCHOOL. SEE YOU TONIGHT. He stared at that page for a while, too, wondering if it sounded as guilty as he felt. At last, he added, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING – PETER, placed the note under the saltshaker, and slipped out.
On the brick walk, he shrugged on his sweatshirt and crouched to lace his boots. He straightened up and shouldered his rucksack. Then he took a moment to look around. The house behind him looked smaller than it had when he’d arrived, as if it were already receding into the past. Across the street, clouds scudded along the horizon, and a half-moon suddenly emerged, brightening the road ahead.
Pax was hungry and cold, but what had woken him was the sense that he needed cover. He blinked and edged backward. What felt like the comforting bars of his pen gave way in brittle snaps. He turned to find the stand of dried milkweed stalks he’d wedged himself against a few hours before.
He barked for Peter and remembered: his boy was gone.
Pax wasn’t used to being alone. He had been born into a squirming litter of four, but his father had disappeared before the kits had even learned his scent, and soon after that, his mother had failed to come home one morning. One by one, his brothers and sister had died, leaving his the only heartbeat in the cold den until the boy, Peter, had lifted him out.
Since that time, whenever his boy was gone, Pax would pace his pen until Peter returned. And at night he always whined to come inside, where he could listen to his human’s breathing.
Pax loved his boy, but more than that, he felt responsible for Peter, for protecting him. When he couldn’t perform this role, he suffered.
Pax shook the night’s rain off his back and headed for the road without even stretching his stiff muscles, straining for his boy’s scent.
He couldn’t find it – the night’s winds had swept the ground clean of any trace. But among the hundreds of odours rising on the early morning breeze, he found something that reminded him of his boy: acorns. Peter had often scooped up handfuls and sprinkled them over Pax’s back, laughing to see him shake them off and then crack them to get at the meat. The familiar scent seemed a promise to him now, and he trotted toward it.
The acorns were scattered around the base of a lightning-struck oak a few full-bounds north of where he had last seen his boy. He crunched at a few of them, but found only shrivelled, mouldy nubs inside. Then he settled himself on the fallen trunk, ears trained for any sound on the road.
While he waited, Pax licked his fur dry and clean, taking comfort in the lingering Peter-scent he found there. Then he turned his attention to his forepaws, painstakingly cleaning the many cuts in their pads.
Whenever he was anxious, Pax dug at the floor of his pen. He always shredded his paws on the rough concrete buried beneath, but he could not control the urge. In the week before, he’d dug nearly every day.
When his paws were cleaned, he curled them up under his chest to wait. The morning air pulsed with the noises of spring. The long night before, they had alarmed Pax. The blackness had quivered with the rustle of night prowlers, and even the sounds of the trees themselves – leaves unfurling, sap coursing up new wood, the tiny cracklings of expanding bark – had startled him over and over as he waited for Peter to return. Finally, as dawn had begun to silver the sky, he’d fallen into a shivering sleep.
Now, though, the same sounds called to him. A hundred times his sensitive ears pricked, and he almost sprang up to investigate. But each time, he remembered his boy and stilled himself. The humans had good memories, so they would come back to this spot. But they relied on sight alone – all their other senses being so weak – so if they did not see him when they returned, they might leave again. Pax would stay beside the road and ignore all temptations, including the strong urge he felt to head south, the direction his instinct told him would lead him back to his home. He would stay at this spot until his boy came for him.
Above him, a vulture cruised the thermals. A lazy hunter, it was searching for the lifeless shape of carrion. When it found the red-furred form of the fox, motionless but giving off no odour of decay, it circled lower to investigate.
Pax registered an instinctive alarm at the cool flicker of V-shaped shadow. He jumped from the trunk and scratched at the dirt beneath.
The ground seemed to answer with a distant rumble, like a growling heart. Pax stretched high, the danger from above forgotten. The last time he had seen his boy, there had been vibrations like this along this very road. He tore over the gravel shoulder to the exact spot where his humans
