I Was a Fox
You'll think this a strange tale at least, and quite likely you'll think me a liar, but for several years in my youth I was a fox.
I was born from a human mother and a human father, just like you. My childhood was quite normal too, if not always entirely happy. My father drank to excess – but did not every father, in those days? And my mother lived her life like a woman condemned – but did not every mother, in those days? They did not care too much if I went roaming the forest, often for whole days. And if I somehow forgot to attend the village school, or if I failed to say the proper prayers at the proper occasions, they did not mind.
So I lived a lot like a wild animal, at that time, and carefree except for the one thing. I was nearly always hungry. My parents were poor, and naturally my father spent most of the wages he earned on his drinking. My clothes were usually ragged, handed down from other children who had already torn them here and there. Food was often scarce, and when we had food then my father had to keep up his strength for work and my mother ate to stave off misery.
That is why I learned to steal.
It started in a small way. An apple filched from a market stall, a hunk of bread from a labourer's lunch left at the field edge, that kind of thing. But with these little successes I grew in confidence as a thief, and with confidence comes ambition.
There was this old woman who lived alone in a little house right out on the edge of the village. She didn't have much, but I thought she had more than most of us. Parsnips and cabbages growing in her garden, a few hens pecking around, the sort of thing that looked like wealth to a boy like me. It was the hens that I had my eye on. I daydreamed about fresh eggs, maybe meat when the bird grew too old for laying.
One night, I waited until it was good and dark, then crept into the old woman's garden intent on my bad deed. The hens were all cooped up nice and cosy, and being young as I was I had it in my head that they would all be fast asleep and would make no sound when I broke in. Well you cannot believe the ruckus that a few hens can make when they're disturbed in the night. They flapped, they squawked, they rustled up their feathers in a frenzy. I swear they could have woken up my dead grandmother, let alone the old lady who came running out from her house, very much alive and wielding her broom as if it was a spear.
“What are you doing, boy?” She could see very well what I was doing, even in the dark, but I did not know what excuse I could give and stood there in front of the hen house just gawping at her.
“Well now”, she said when I hadn't answered her for a minute or more, “I see a fox in front of me”. She prodded me with the end of the broom, and cackled.
I managed to get some courage at that point. “I'm no fox”, I said, and then in a fit of bravado, “I am a man!”
“Oh no, boy”, she said, and she leaned hard on that word boy so that I would hear the disrespect in it, “Oh no, you are surely a fox come to steal my hens”.
That very moment, I felt my nose beginning to stretch, and my chin too, until they grew so long that they merged into a snout. I put up my hands – or at least, I would have done so, but my hands had become paws, and I fell to the ground on four feet. There was a tingling sensation as my tail-bone lengthened and bushed into an actual tail.
I looked around in fright, with the narrowed eyes of a fox. I tried to stand up as a human boy would, but it was no use, my new back legs would not support the weight of my fox body like that, and I dropped back onto all fours. I tried to speak, to call out for help or perhaps mercy, but nothing came from my mouth other than a coughing bark. Somewhere close by, I heard the village dogs barking in response, and knew that I was in terrible danger.
Without another thought, I ran away from that house, the old woman laughing as I fled, and then ran from the village. I could hear the village dogs behind me, barking as they came, but I was faster – driven by fear as I was – and I raced into the forest. I did not pause even to take a breath until I had gone deep among the trees and the bracken, and found a hiding place, an abandoned den among the tangled roots of an ancient oak.
I cowered there for a long time. Perhaps three days and three nights, afraid and alone, before hunger and thirst forced me out of the den at last. What did I do? I don't truly know. My human mind was clouded, and more so as the days passed and became weeks, then months, until I was all fox. I ate rats and worms. I drank rainwater from puddles until I found a swift running stream.
I lived that way through the summer and the autumn, I was like a lost orphan who had to learn without a teacher how to survive. Then the winter came, my first winter in the forest, and I must have come close to death more than once in that bitter season.
One morning, as I roamed the snowbound country in search of food – which was sparse in the dead of winter – I heard an eldritch scream. Now I have to tell you, though perhaps you already knew it, that there are many strange things living in the forests, things that are even beyond the imaginings and nightmares of men and women like you and me. I'd seen much, with the sharp eyes of a fox, that I would not have seen as a human. Yet the scream was like nothing I had heard before, and it did not strike fear into me; rather, I was drawn towards it, to find the source.
Again and again that sound rang out, calling to me. At last, mounting a low ridge, I saw a fine vixen among the trees, as if she was waiting there for me. We mated there in the wilderness. She bore the cubs, and she taught me as much as she taught them, so that I learned to live and thrive as fox. For two years, maybe three. Maybe four. I don't know. What wild creature counts the years?
One autumn day I came scavenging close to the village where I had lived as a human. I had not intended to do so, but I was ranging far in search of food. Maybe there was enough left inside me of the human to feel homesick. Or it might have been fate that drew me back there. Because as I moved stealthily through the long grass, there was a loud SNAP and then searing pain, as a hidden gin-trap tore into my leg. However much I tried to writhe free, it was to no avail, I was held firmly and I knew by instinct that soon the humans would come and they would kill me.
I am sure you've heard that a fox will gnaw off its own leg in order to escape the vicious teeth of those traps. Sure enough, as I struggled to free myself, I began to bite at the deep gash where the cruel teeth had ripped and gripped my flesh.
But not quickly enough. I heard the sound of human footsteps, caught the scent of people and heard a rustling of the long grasses nearby. It was not the hunters who came, but that same old woman whose hens I had tried to steal. Now, though, she looked down at the terrified and wounded fox with kinder eyes.
“I know you”, she said, “the boy who tried to be a thief. It is time that you came home”.
Even as she spoke, my body changed. The snout shrank back into my face, fur shortened until it disappeared under a human skin, the tail shrivelled away. It took only a few minutes and I was human once more. Naked, but human. I tried, stupidly, to cover my dignity as the old woman parted the teeth of the trap with surprising strength, and released me. Then she helped me limp to her cottage where she dressed the wound. Otherwise I would have bled to death out there in the wild.
That old woman nursed me for several weeks while my wound healed, until more and more of my human mind returned and I was weaned back onto human food. You might ask, was I angry with her, for what had happened to me? Did I want revenge? The answer is no. I understood that I had been taught a necessary lesson. Now that I had come back to being a man, I was at least a better man for my years as a fox.
Once healed, and my strength restored, I left the old woman's cottage and went back to my family. My father was drunk, as I remembered him, and he did not remember me. My mother knew my face, but would only curse me.
“Go to hell”, she shouted, “You worthless son who abandoned me, instead of staying home and caring for me as I grow old and my ailments increase”.
I walked away from there, left the village of my birth and childhood to become a wanderer through this wide world. What else could I do? I no longer belonged there. Perhaps I am still a fox inside this human shell.
And that is my story, whether you believe it or not.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).