One

Once upon a time there was a fox, and he was trying to catch stars.

It had been hours since the midsummer sun had set, and the velvet darkness above was scattered with countless twinkling points of light. All night long the fox had roamed far and leapt high: over and over he crouched and aimed his nose carefully upwards, sprang lightly into the air and tried to catch a star in his teeth; but each time, he fell just a little short, and snapped his muzzle closed around empty air. Each time he landed starless on the ground.

Tonight, like all nights, all he had to show for his efforts was dusty fur.

But this night was a perfect night, and the fox had a good feeling about it. The moon shone brightly through cloudless heavens above him. The meadow grass was a soft, cool blanket beneath his paws. Somewhere far away, frogs were singing, calling to the breezes that bring the morning dew.

He wandered onwards through woods and hills and fields he'd never visited before, searching for a place where the ground might be a touch higher and the sky a smidge lower. Every now and again he happened across a large rock or tree stump, and he leapt off each one to bring himself that much closer to the sky. On a few attempts he was certain that he had just missed a star by a whisker, no more!

Such near-misses only made him more excited, more certain that either he was getting better at leaping or else the sky was tiring of holding the stars out of his reach. The fox suspected that the sky didn't like him much because he enjoyed snacking on pigeons, and this was its way of getting back at him. He was good at figuring these sorts of things out. Like, why didn't the stars come out on rainy nights? Did they mind getting wet? Or perhaps they were as frightened of thunder as he'd been when he was young? The stars are probably very young indeed, the fox decided, and felt proud for having guessed something about them.

The night continued peacefully except for occasional leaps and tumbles. Sometimes the fox thought he saw stars drifting among the grasses or hiding behind trees, but each time it had turned out to be a firefly instead.

It was a fairy tale that was responsible for how the fox spent his nights. He was already a few seasons old, but he hadn't forgotten the nursery rhymes and stories his mother had told him as a young kit snuggled deep in his den, wondering about the great world outside long before he had gathered the courage to poke more than his nose into it. All mothers tell their children bedtime stories to send them off to sleep, and these were a fox's stories: of a smart old fox who could speak with the fishes and flattered one into becoming supper, of a sly vixen who cleverly stole a bunch of sweet grapes from a farmer every morning by making a new hole through the fence each time, of a hungry fox who was on his way to a supper invitation with a lion until he noticed that the tracks of many more animals went into its lair than came out.

But better than all these, the story which the very small kit never tired of hearing, was the tale of the greatest and cleverest fox of all—the fox who knew how to dance among the clouds, and whose cunning stole the very stars from the sky. For the young fox had never met a lion, and fish seemed to have little to tell him, and he had never tasted grapes; but the stars were there over him each night, glittering jewels held just beyond his reach.

Though he loved this tale with all his heart, there was something about it which occasionally bothered the young fox. "But momma," he would say when he was still very little, "there are still stars in the sky!"

"There used to be more," she would tell him, and nip at his ears playfully until he settled down for sleep.

Tonight, in a forest clearing, the fox happened to find a fallen log of fairly good size. He'd taught himself to generally ignore trees, because he believed that he could jump higher than the treetops only if he wasn't looking at them. But this one was recently downed and looked harmless as trees go, and standing on it brought him a bit higher above the gentle grasses. So he climbed atop it and surveyed his surroundings wisely; carefully he crouched, and with a great effort he leapt from the wood, snapped his teeth in the air, and tumbled again onto the ground.

This time he lay where he landed on a patch of clover, recovering his breath and looking defiantly upwards. "I'm going to catch a star," he told the sky. "I'm as clever as any fox ever was. I'm going to catch a star of my own, and I'm going to keep trying until I do." Then he remembered the tales his mother had told him about flattery. "You could help," he suggested to the sky, wanting to think of some way to compliment it. "You're very dark."

At precisely that moment, a shooting star high above streaked past the treetops, leaving a glittering trail in its wake for the merest fraction of an instant.

"Thank you!" the fox called upwards, with as much surprise as genuine gratitude. He hopped to his paws again, and with a flick of his tail he scampered into the woods in the direction that the star was going.

Two