Pax Read online

  The trap lay on its side at the bottom of a freshly scraped crater at least five feet across. Inside was a baby rabbit, dead. There wasn’t a single mark on its little body, but the cage was scratched and dented, and the ground all around clawed to rubble.

  “Coyotes,” his father said, joining them. “They must have scared it to death trying to get in. And none of us even woke up.”

  Peter’s mother had opened the trap and lifted out the lifeless form. She held it to her cheek. “They were just tulips. Only a few tulips.”

  Peter found the carrot, one end nibbled off, and threw it as far away as he could. Then his mother had placed the rabbit’s body in his cupped palms and gone to get a shovel. With a single finger, Peter had traced its ears, unfurling like ferns from its face, and its paws, miraculously tiny, and the soft fur of its neck, slick with his mother’s tears.

  When she’d returned, his mother had touched his face, which burned with shame. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

  But it wasn’t okay. For a long time afterward, when Peter closed his eyes, he’d seen coyotes. Their claws raking dirt, their jaws snapping. He saw himself where he should have been: keeping watch in the garden that night. Over and over, he saw himself doing what he should have: rising from his sleeping bag, finding a rock, and hurling it. He saw the coyotes fleeing back into the darkness, and he saw himself opening the trap to set the rabbit free.

  And with that memory, the anxiety snake struck so hard that it stunned Peter’s breath out of him. He hadn’t been where he should have been the night the coyotes killed the rabbit, and he wasn’t where he should be now.

  He gasped to fill his lungs and sat bolt upright. He tore the photo in half and then in half again and pitched the pieces under the bed.

  Leaving Pax hadn’t been the right thing to do.

  He jumped to his feet—he’d already lost a lot of time. He fished some cargos, a long-sleeved camouflage T-shirt, and a fleece sweatshirt from his suitcase, and then an extra set of underwear and socks. He stuffed everything into his backpack except the sweatshirt, which he tied around his waist. Jackknife in his jeans pocket. Wallet. He debated for a minute between his hiking boots and sneakers and decided on the boots, although he didn’t put them on.

  He looked around the room, hoping to find a flashlight or anything resembling camping equipment. The room had been his father’s when he’d been a boy, but aside from a few books on a shelf, it was clear his grandfather had cleaned all his things out. The cookie tin had seemed to surprise him—an oversight. Peter bumped his fingers over the spines of the books.

  An atlas. He pulled it down, amazed at his luck, and flipped through it until he came to the map that showed the route he and his father had traveled. “You’ll only be three hundred miles away.” His father had tried to bridge the silence of the drive a couple of times. “I get a day off, I’ll come.” Peter had known that it would never happen. They didn’t give days off in war.

  Besides, it wasn’t his father he was already missing.

  And then he saw something he hadn’t realized: the highway snaked around a long range of foothills. If he cut straight across those instead of following the highway, he could save a lot of time, plus reduce the risk of being caught. He started to rip out the page, then realized he couldn’t leave his grandfather such an obvious clue. Instead, he studied the map for a long moment, then replaced the atlas on the shelf.

  Three hundred miles. It looked 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 backpack.

  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 favorite 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 backpack 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 backpack. 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 backpack 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 backpack. 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 respon-sible 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 with
out 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 odors 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 shriveled, moldy 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 odor 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 had left him.

  The vibrations grew to a roar. Pax rose on his haunches to be seen. But the source was not his boy’s car. It was not a car at all. As it loomed up, it seemed to the fox to be as large as the house his humans lived in.

  The truck was green. Not the growing green of the trees all around, but a dull olive, a color death might wear when it claimed these trees. The same dull olive of the toy soldier the fox had cached in the milkweed stalks. It stank of diesel and the same charred metal scent that had clung to his boy’s father’s new clothing. In a cloud of dust and sprayed stones, the truck charged past, followed by another and another and another.

  Pax bounded away from the road. The vulture soared up and away with a single beat of its wings.

  Not hunting for his grandfather’s flashlight—that was the first mistake of the trip. The moon had lit Peter’s way for maybe two hours before it had drowned beneath thick clouds. He’d stumbled along in the dark for another hour before giving up. He’d slit open the sides of a garbage bag to make a long mat and cut the other to wear as a poncho against the cold mist, and slept beside a culvert, his mitt for a pillow. Actually, “slept” was a wild overstatement, and when the first low sun rays stabbed his eyelids, he’d awakened cold and wet from whatever dozing he’d managed.

  His first thoughts were of Pax—where was he this morning? Was he wet and cold, too? Was he afraid? “I’m coming,” he said out loud as he rolled the garbage bags back into his pack. “Hold on.”

  He ate a stick of cheese and a couple of crackers, slugged a long drink of water, then laced his boots and climbed up to the road.

  He was stiff and sore, but at least his anxiety had relaxed its grip. He probably hadn’t traveled much more than seven or eight miles, but there was still a whole day before his grandfather would get home from work and even suspect he was gone.

  According to the atlas map, he probably had another twenty miles to go before hitting the highway. After that, he could turn west for the shortcut anywhere that looked promising. He’d sleep deep in woods tonight, out of civilization, the riskiest part of the trip behind him.

  He wished he’d paid more attention as he’d driven with his father the day before—mistake number two—but he only recalled there’d been a single sleepy town right after they’d exited the highway, and then stretches of woodlands broken only by occasional farms.

  Peter walked for five full hours. Blisters formed on his heels, and his shoulders ached from the pack. But every step brought him closer to Pax and the home he should never have left, and he felt hopeful. Until a little after noon, when he hit a cluster of buildings that passed for a town square.

  Immediately, it seemed every person he passed was eyeing him suspiciously, wondering why he wasn’t in the school he’d noticed a little while back. When a woman dragging a toddler stopped to stare outright, Peter pretended to study the window display in the hardware store beside him.

  In the glass, he saw his reflection, and the remnants of his hopeful mood melted. His hair was tangled with leaves, his sweatshirt streaked in mud, and his nose reddened with what promised to be a full-faced sunburn by the end of the day. The kid in the window looked like a runaway—one who hadn’t prepared very well.

  He sensed the woman moving on, but before he could leave, a shadow loomed over his shoulder.

  “Need something, young man?”

  Peter looked up. A man in a blue jacket emblazoned with the store logo stood in the doorway, smoking. His arms were crossed over a sagging belly, and his hair was a thinning gray, but something about the way he was peering down his nose reminded Peter of a hawk he’d once seen searching for prey from the top of a cedar. He pointed to the window.

  Peter looked back at the display—seed packets and gardening tools. “Oh, no, I was just . . . uh, do you sell flashlights?”

  The man cocked his head and eyed Peter while he took a drag on his cigarette, and again Peter was reminded of the hawk. Finally he nodded. “Aisle seven. No school today?”

  “Lunch break. Got to hurry back.”

  The man stubbed out his cigarette and followed him inside, hovering nearby while Peter chose the cheapest flashlight on the rack and a pack of double As, and even shadowed him as he checked out.

  Outside, Peter let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. He wedged everything into his pack and headed back for the intersection.

  “Hey, kid.”

  Peter froze.

  The man had followed him outside. He yanked a thumb over his shoulder. “School’s that way.”

  Peter waved and smiled, trying to act dopey, and changed direction. At the corner, he risked a glance over his shoulder. The man was still watching him.

  Peter took off, sudden trickles of sweat chilling the back of his neck. He didn’t stop running until he reached the school entrance, then cut for the parking lot.

  All he wanted to do was hide for a couple of minutes—maybe crouch between a couple of pickups—and figure out an escape route. But beyond the parking lot and the utility buildings, he saw something a whole lot more appealing.

  A baseball diamond carved into the lime-green spring grass. And tucked along the th
ird-base line, facing away from the school, an empty dugout.

  Peter stood at the top of the rise looking down at the sight. He argued with himself for only a minute. He’d like to be moving, for sure, making time. But what if that guy had called the police? Hitting the road would be risky. Any time he rested he could easily make up at night, since he had a flashlight now. And he was suddenly tired—bone-dead tired.

  Mostly, though, it was the way the field looked so welcoming, as if it were inviting him in. Peter always felt good on a baseball field. And maybe that was a sign—he didn’t think he believed in signs, but after the coyotes last night, he wasn’t sure he didn’t. Peter adjusted his backpack and loped down the hill.

  In the dugout, the familiar mingled scents of leather, sweat, and stale bubble gum wrapped around him like a hug. Peter hurried into his other set of clothes and rubbed a handful of clay-red dirt through his hair—when he left here, he sure wasn’t going to look like any description the police might have. He filled his thermos from a water fountain, drank it all down, and filled it again. As he wriggled under the bench, he smiled, realizing that Pax would have chosen this same spot—protected, but with a good vantage point—if he wanted a rest.

  An hour, that was all, and then he’d cut behind the school and pick up the road again. Enough time that if the police had been called, they would lose interest. He arranged his baseball glove and lowered his head. “Just an hour,” he murmured. “I won’t even close my eyes.”

  This is my territory.

  Pax was so startled that he nearly toppled from the oak trunk he’d been drowsing on: all day he’d been keeping watch and seen nothing larger than a grasshopper, and now here was a bright-furred vixen. He had never seen another fox before, but he knew: younger and smaller and a female, but fox. Instinct told him also that the way she held her ears and tail erect meant she expected his submission.