Aurora Fox's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Aurora Fox had asked the same question for eleven autumns, and tonight she meant to get an answer. She pushed open the green door of the small veterinary clinic on the edge of town, the paw-print sign creaking above her. She was a red fox with sharp eyes and a bookkeeper's memory, born the night the northern lights came down low over Storyland. Her mother had told her the lights touched a meadow that night. Her mother had never said where. Aurora wanted to stand in that meadow before another autumn passed. Valerie the Veterinarian was at the counter in blue scrubs, sorting a stack of patient files. She did not look up. "We're closed, Aurora." "You were awake that night," Aurora said. "You drove two hours for Rudy. You came back the long way." Valerie set the files down. "I did." "Everyone in town says you were the last person out on the roads before the sky lit up. I need to know where you saw the lights come down." Valerie's mouth tightened. She pulled a chair out and sat. "I saw a green wall over the hills. I was watching the road. I wasn't mapping the sky." "You remember the hills." "I remember a stretch of highway and a fox on the shoulder." Valerie's voice went clipped. "That's what I remember." Aurora's tail dropped. She had counted on this. She had walked past the flower boxes three times before knocking. "Please. Anything. A direction. A mile marker." Valerie looked at her a long moment. Then she stood, crossed to a low cabinet, and pulled out a battered folder. She thumbed through it and slid one page across the counter. It was a hand-drawn map, creased soft, marked in green pencil. "Sam drew this for me," Valerie said. "His rescues. He was out that night too, hauling a deer clear of a culvert. He marked where the sky was brightest. I kept it because the lines were pretty." Aurora leaned over the map. A green smear sat above a curve of creek. No town names. No roads she knew. A single word beside the smear, in blocky letters: HERE. "That's not a meadow," Valerie said. "That's a swamp." Aurora looked up. "Mire patches through the whole basin," Valerie said. "They swallow grown men. Sam knows every hard step across it. I don't. And I'm not lending you the map without him." Aurora folded her paws on the counter to keep them still. "Then I need to find Sam." "He's not in town this week." Valerie tapped the green smear. "He's out there. Somewhere in that." Aurora took the map. The paper was warm from the cabinet. She had a direction now. She also had a swamp between her and it, and the only guide who could cross it was already inside it. She stepped back out under the paw-print sign and turned toward the low country.