Willow Vinewood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

By morning the fox kit's leg was clean under the bandage, but the shallow dish of water sat untouched and the strips of rabbit Willow had cut the night before were dry at the edges. The kit lay curled on the metal bed, eyes open, ribs pressing through fur. Willow set her palm against its side. The heartbeat was there. The hunger was not. She had healed the wound. That was the easy part. Now she had to keep something alive that had decided it was done. She tried food first. She dragged an old feed trough out under the eaves and filled it with everything she could think of. Chopped mice from her cold box. Berries the foxes stripped from her hedges in autumn. Soft grubs she pulled from a rotted log. She even crushed the glowing shelf fungi from her beams into a paste, thinking the light might draw the kit the way it drew moths. She carried the kit out and set it beside the trough. It turned its face to the wall of the cabin and would not look. By the second night she stopped going inside. She dragged canvas and two bent poles into the yard and made a lean-to against the cabin wall so she could sleep beside the kit and still watch the trees. The ground under the shelter went bare where she paced. She warmed broth on a small fire and pressed a soaked cloth to the kit's mouth every hour. The kit swallowed nothing. Its breathing slowed. On the third morning she counted its ribs and knew she had a day, maybe two. She went inside for the box her grandmother had left sealed. It was wrapped in vine that had kept growing after the woman died. Willow cut the vine and opened the lid. Inside were crystal droppers, small bottles, and bandages woven from a fiber that hummed faintly against her fingers. Her grandmother had told her once that the kit inside was only to be opened when a life was already leaving. Willow filled a dropper with the pale liquid from the largest bottle and carried it out to the shelter. She held the kit in her lap and worked the dropper between its teeth. One bead. Then another. The kit's throat moved. Its eyes closed. For a long minute Willow thought she had killed it. Then the kit turned its head and licked the third bead off her finger on its own. She sat still. She did not cry. She fed it a fourth bead, and a fifth, and the small body began to warm against her stomach. At dusk the kit ate a strip of rabbit from her hand. Behind her, at the edge of the clearing, something moved in the low branches. Willow did not turn. She heard wings settle, and then wait.