{You claim to be a poet?}
"You claim to be a fox?"
The vixen tossed the chipmunk into the air with a flip of her head, caught the body, bit. Bone crunched. No chipmunk.
{If I am not a fox, what ate that noisy little windbag?}
"You've got an awfully big vocabulary for a fox."
A red tongue wiped the spatters clean. Then wicked eyes sparkled up at Maureen, mirroring the foxy smile.
{Who better? Although many things in this land are not quite what they seem.}
Maureen stared at emptiness where the fox had been. This time, she did step forward and kneel to touch the ground. She felt warmth, and her fingers found blood and chipmunk fur, but there was no sign of a den or burrow.
"I wish you hadn't left."
Damp cold touched her ankle. Maureen swallowed a scream and looked down. Yellow eyes glinted back at her. She felt almost as if the animal was teasing her. Or--courting her?
Slowly, carefully, she reached back along her leg and touched the cold nose. Her fingers traced the wiry whiskers and caressed the ridges over the vixen's eyes, then moved on to scratch between the ears. Soft fur, smooth fur, silken fur cool at the surface and warm beneath, delighted her fingertips. The vixen closed her eyes, like a cat, and gently leaned into Maureen's touch.
She felt a pulse, racing at twice the speed of her own. And then the fox vanished.
I'm hallucinating again. Got to get more sleep.
Maureen sniffed her fingers. Nothing--no smell of fur, no pungent fox-reek almost as strong as skunk.
{And the forest? Is this a waking dream as well?}
The fox looked down on her from a huge moss-covered boulder. The vixen licked one paw and cocked her head as if listening for a mouse.
Maureen listened.
She heard the wind brushing the tips of leaves, she heard the stealthy scuffle of beetles under bark, she heard the chitter of a distant squirrel. She heard her own pulse.
She didn't hear cars, or the thumping National Guard helicopters that made the Naskeag Falls airport their base. She didn't hear the constant background hum of civilization that might as well be distributed on utility poles along with electricity and phone.
No matter what time of day or night she went into Carlysle Woods, she never heard only forest. Even out in the puckerbrush beyond the last straggling villages of backwoods Maine, there'd always been the distant roar of jets overhead and log-skidders growling over their prey two ridges to the west.
Camped out in the middle of the mountains, you could hear the Maine Central diesel airhorns at midnight grade-crossings twenty miles away. The voice of man was noise.
Not this. This was the way forests had sounded before the first machine. Maureen felt peace wash through her. God knows, she'd earned it.
"I've dreamed of forests like this."
{The land is yours, if you choose to claim it.}
Maureen studied the forest, opening her professional eyes. Coming here, the land had been a blur--first the theater backdrop to Sean's glamour, then something vague red-tinted through her rage and fear. She'd never seen it.
She saw lichen an inch thick on the trees, carpets of reindeer moss on the ground between the bunchberry and the bramble, dens and rocky labyrinths and damp pockets of rotting leaves spiked with lycopodium. Oak. Beech. Maple. Birch. Others she did not know the names of or the uses, European trees she'd never learned. Fir and pine and cedar and spruce. Young trees, old trees, giants and scraggly dwarfs. Beautiful trees, trees with heart and history and character.
This land waited for her touch, her understanding, and her healing.
How much land had Dougal held? The view from his keep had shown forest for miles in every direction--rolling green out to the distant tilled fields and the pastures. She traced the furrows of watersheds in her mind, almost stroking their leafy fur with her hand.
This land was damned near empty. The Old Ones were loners, distrustful of each other and of humans, almost like Daniel Boone and the other American wanderers. It was time to move on when you could see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney on a frosty morning.
She remembered Fiona in Carlysle Woods, talking of the Summer Country. "Think of it as clay on the potter's wheel, and you the potter."
The fox offered her a forest to tend, tend by her own rules.
Old trees to talk to. New trees to learn. The mystery of that wrongness she'd felt, to solve and correct by careful stewardship--psychotherapy for an ecosystem.
No one to call her crazy when she talked of the soul of a tree. No stockholders to complain when she guided her decisions by what the land needed rather than by numbers on a ledger.
If some land-management firm in Maine had offered her this job, she'd have killed for it.
I already have.
She found her hand on the knife-hilt again, and jerked it away. The fox vanished.
Magic. Maureen wondered if it was the mundane magic of a red fox startled by her movement, or the true magic of the Summer Country.
She felt like a mystic blessed by the touch of God.
{Next time you come here,} the fox whispered, {bring your wooden flute. You'll find it plays a different kind of music in its true home.}
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maureen struggled to separate reality from illusion.
Had she conjured the fox out of sleep deprivation and a week of fasting? Could she hold a clear and rational conversation with a beech tree if she was still on medication?
How does this world define sanity?
First things first. She had to find Brian. He understood this crazy place.
She strode off through the forest, straight east. Her hand went to the hilt of the knife again and then massaged her belly underneath it.
A low
