Scout Emerson pressed her forehead to the kitchen window and watched the brook run past the yard she was not allowed to leave. She was ten, and her mother had drawn the fence line at the willow stump for as long as Scout could remember. Past the stump, the woods darkened fast. That was where her friends said the blue fox lived. They had seen it at the shallow bend last week, a small thing with fur the color of deep water, and they swore it changed shape when you weren't looking straight at it. Scout had asked her mother three times if she could go. Her mother had said no three times. Scout kept a jar of dried berries in her coat pocket anyway. This morning her mother drove into town for feed and left Scout with a list of chores and a warning about the stove. Scout finished the chores in an hour. Then she stood at the back door with the jar in her fist and counted to ten. She walked past the willow stump. The brook was louder here, and the moss gave under her boots. At the shallow bend she crouched behind a fallen log and waited. Nothing came for a long time. She was about to turn back when something drank from the water on the far bank. It had blue fur and a white chest and eyes too large for its face. It looked up and met her stare without flinching. Scout held out a berry on her flat palm. The fox watched her for a full minute. Then it stepped into the brook, crossed to her side, and took the berry from her hand. Its nose was cold. Its fur, when it brushed her wrist, felt like nothing she had ever touched. She reached for it slowly. The fox slipped back a step, turned, and vanished into the ferns. Scout stayed crouched by the log until her knees ached. She was late getting home, and her boots were soaked past the ankle, and she knew already that she would come back tomorrow.

Scout woke before the sun and laid her plan out on the quilt. She set the berry jar beside a strip of dried meat she had saved from supper, a tin cup for brook water, and one of her mother's wool socks stuffed with cedar shavings so the smell would carry. Her mother had left again after breakfast, this time to help a neighbor with a calf. Scout had until noon. She wanted more than a berry from a flat palm today. She wanted the fox to come close and stay close. She packed everything into her coat pockets and walked past the willow stump without counting. At the shallow bend she did not hide behind the log. She sat on it. She began to undress, folding her clothes and stacking them on the log next to her. She sat on the log in her underclothes, feverish and excited to tame the fox. She fidgeted with a strip of cloth, and when she opened her eyes again she saw the fox watching from across the brook. She gave a devious grin.

The fox watched her from the far bank, ears forward, one paw lifted above the water. Scout laid out her offerings on the log: the strip of dried meat, the tin cup of brook water, the cedar sock. She held the meat out first. The fox looked at it and did not move. She set the cup on a flat stone at the water's edge. The fox looked at the cup and did not move. Scout felt the morning slip. She had brought a child's picnic to something that was not a dog and not a wild thing either. Its blue fur caught the light like it belonged to a different season. She understood then that food and scent were not the trade. The fox had come for something else, and she had not brought it. She stood up in her underclothes and stepped into the brook. The cold bit her ankles. She left the meat and the cup and the sock on the log behind her. In her hand she held the strip of cloth she had been fidgeting with, a torn piece of the hem of her nightgown, warm from her fist. She waded to the middle and knelt so the water reached her ribs. She held the cloth out on her open palm. The fox crossed. It stepped onto the water and then along it, paws barely dimpling the surface, and Scout stopped breathing. It took the cloth in its teeth. It did not slip back. It climbed onto her wet forearm, light as a folded shirt, and pressed its small skull against her collarbone. She stood slowly with the fox on her shoulder and walked out of the brook. Her offerings sat untouched on the log. She left them there and started home in her underclothes, the fox riding quiet against her neck, and she knew already she would have to hide it before her mother came back at noon.