“Would you . . . please, please, promise you’ll take care . . . of my kits? Show them some . . . kindness? I love them so much. They’re not old enough to take care of themselves . . . yet.”
“But . . . oh, chipped cheese on monkey mold,” Ereth growled, feeling sick to his stomach. “I suppose . . . I . . . could . . . for a bit. But only a bit,” he added hastily.
“Thank you,” the fox said. “They will be . . . so . . . appreciative. And so . . . will I. You are a saint to do so.” The fox’s eyes were closed now. Her breathing had become more difficult.
“Zippered horse zits,” Ereth swore as he realized the fox was doing worse and worse.
“My den . . . is about . . .” the fox said, paying no mind to Ereth, “. . . a mile from here. Due east . . . in a low bluff. Behind . . . a pile of boulders. Just behind . . . a big blue rock.”
“Blue?”
“A little . . . bit.” The fox was fading rapidly.
“Low bluff . . . due east . . . blue rock,” Ereth repeated.
“Thank you,” the fox murmured, “thank you . . . so very much.”
“I’ll do it,” Ereth sputtered. “But only for a short time, you understand. Only until their father gets back. I mean, I’ve no intention, none whatsoever, of taking the place of real parents who have the responsibility to—”
Ereth stopped speaking. It was obvious—even to him—that the fox had died.
For a long while Ereth stared at the dead fox. Twice he swallowed hard and sniffed deeply.
The smell of death filled the air. It frightened him deeply. “Jellied walrus warts,” he mumbled as he hastened away from the scene.
For a while he went on silently, only to suddenly halt, lift his head, and bellow, “Dying! It’s such a stupid way to live! It makes no sense at all!”
Taken aback by his own outburst, Ereth gave himself a hard, rattling shake. “It has nothing to do with me. Nothing!” he added savagely. “I’m going to live forever!”
He gazed up at the sky. It had stopped snowing. In the darkness a dull moon revealed rapidly moving shreds of clouds. It made the sky look like a torn flag. Stars began to appear, cold and distant. “Waste of time, stars,” Ereth complained.
He went on, only to stumble into a ditch and sink up to his neck in snow. “Suffocating snow!” he screamed with fury. “Why does it have to be cold and wet?” With a furious snort he hauled himself up and shuddered violently.
Grudgingly, painfully, he recalled his promise to the fox, that he would help her three kits. His heart sank. He groaned.
“Oh, why did I ever say I would do it?” he reproached himself. “I didn’t mean it. I only said it to make her feel better. Fact is, I should have ignored her cries. I’m old enough to know better. Help someone and all you do is get into trouble. Always. I don’t even like to be my own friend. But then I befriended Poppy. And accepted her husband. Then I was nice to their children. I should have kept to myself. Better to be alone. To stay alone.
“Helping others,” he snarled viciously. “Being good! It’s all broccoli bunk and tick toffee. Oh, pull the chain and barf three buckets. What am I going to do?”
CHAPTER 8
Following and Moving On
MARTY THE FISHER had been as surprised as Ereth when the fox’s call came out of the woods. He looked from Ereth to the woods, from the woods to Ereth, wondering what he should do. Of course, Ereth had made the decision for him. When the porcupine broke away from the cabin and went lumbering through the snow toward the sound of the call, a puzzled Marty followed from a safe distance.
Then he saw Ereth disappear behind a mound of snow and heard low voices.
Alarmed, he swiftly, silently crawled up a tree and out along a branch, then looked down. When he saw the trapped fox, he was so startled he almost fell out of the tree.
As the fox and Ereth talked, Marty watched. He could not hear what they were saying. Then the fox slumped down, and the porcupine backed away. The next moment Ereth hurried off.
Staring at the scene below, Marty was filled with anger. The fox was dead. He knew who she was, too. Leaper. He knew of her kits, and her husband. “Humans . . .” the fisher hissed with fury. Then he saw where Ereth had gone, and his anger redoubled. “Look at him! He thinks he’s beyond all that! Just runs off, the self-centered good-for-nothing . . .” More than ever, Marty resolved to catch the porcupine.
“Most likely I’m only going to get one chance,” he reminded himself. “It has to be right. As long as he stays beneath the trees I’ll be fine.
“Be patient, Marty, be very patient,” he told himself as he resumed his stalking.
Ereth plunged on through the thick, soft snow. “She said they were kits,” he mumbled to himself with disgust. “Three months old. Babies. Nothing but poop and puke, puke and poop. Helpless. Brainless. Useless. The only thing I hate more than children is babies. Babies,” he sneered with contempt. “Never could figure out why there are so many babies. They can’t do anything . . .
“Right,” he said, halting in his tracks. “And that means I should forget the whole thing, head back to the salt, and for once, do something nice for myself!”
Then Ereth had a terrible thought. The traps. Hadn’t the humans said they had staked out many of them? With so much snow the traps would be as invisible and odorless to him as they had been to the fox. They could be anywhere. He could be caught.
Engulfed by rising panic, he began to move forward again, but now each step he took was a cautious one.
Now and again he paused nervously to check over the trail he had made. It looked as if someone had dragged a bulky bag through the snow. “I could follow my own trail back,” he told himself. “Safe once, safe twice.” He turned around.
“Except . . .” he muttered, “I suppose somebody needs to tell those kits what happened to their
