Two

"Please don't eat me!" cried a blue-feathered mother quail. She was making an awful fuss by flapping around helplessly, making it obvious to the world that she had a lame wing.

The fox stopped short. He'd been paying more attention to where he was going than to where he was, but the mother quail was a few paces aside his path through a field of dry grass, and he would have completely missed her if she hadn't called attention to herself.

Snacking on quail is rarely far from a fox's mind—but it wasn't in his immediate plans. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you," he told the mother quail politely as he shook nettles from his paws. "I have no intention of eating you."

"But just in case you get the idea, don't!" protested the bird. She was dragging her wing on the ground and seeming to have a difficult time with it. "You could be on me in two pounces, and I wouldn't be able to get away!" She hopped a short distance away, then looked back at him and waited.

The fox was puzzled by the bird's behavior. "Do you want me to chase you?" he offered slowly, trying to make sense of her.

"Heavens no," she replied, and flopped a few more steps further. "But if you did, I'm going this way." And she dragged herself slowly away through the grass.

So the fox pursued her obligingly for a little while, loping along at a pace no quicker than hers. He was more curious than hungry, and twice as determined not to eat something that seemed so eager to offer him the invitation.

After a slow minute or two they reached some trees. Suddenly, the mother quail spread her wings and leapt into the air. "I'm feeling much better now," she chirped to him as she beat the air and rose up to perch on a high branch.

"That's good to hear," the fox said, "take care." He decided it was best not to dwell on it, and went on his way.

The mother quail watched him suspiciously until he was safely out of sight, and then some. Then she returned to her brood of chicks in a well-hidden nest on the ground, not far ahead of where the fox had been before she spotted him. She gathered them all up close and scolded them because she'd been so worried, and then she made up a fairy tale for them about a mean old fox and the beautiful quail princess who outsmarted him.

. o O o .

The fox roamed all night in the direction of the fallen star, crossing forests and hills and streams in the effortless manner that tamed animals remember only in dreaming.

Gradually the horizon before him grew brighter with deep blues then golds and oranges, and the sun peeked out onto a new day. The fox briefly feared that the shooting star might have fallen into the sun, and it might be a great deal of trouble to fetch out; but he was a fox, and he had faith in his cleverness to find a way to retrieve it once he got there.

But a long night's worth of faith and resolve began to give way to weariness, and the ground before him had become rough with dense underbrush and enough maples and birches to hint at a forest's edge. The fox began to seek out someplace comfortable to nap the morning away. He found a patch of thick bushes which didn't have any prickly thorns in them; he wiggled carefully beneath, curled up tightly with his chin on his tail, and drowsed.

. o O o .

Once upon a time, there was a man named Mr. Odonson who never lived.

His life, such as it never happened, took place in a small and old town with tired-looking buildings between crooked cobblestone streets. He never enjoyed thirty years of selling musical instruments in a shop with his family name on the sign outside the front door, just as it had been there when his father had owned it, and his grandfather before that. Both of those Mr. Odonsons had been musicians of some small renown. The current Mr. Odonson wasn't.

The shop was cluttered with guitars, flutes, drums, and horns; but in all the years of his life, Mr. Odonson had never learned to play any of them. He simply saw no point in it. Mr. Odonson had a heart that beat without resolve, and eyes that saw much but noticed little, and hands that never touched any of the fine instruments in his shop other than to dust around them. His countenance was as gaunt and thin as his faith in the world around him, worn down by all the waiting for someone to come rescue him from his empty life. That someone had never come. The only certainty in Mr. Odonson's life was that he had never wanted to inherit this music shop; beyond that, he had no idea what he did want, other than a vague desire to avoid wasting time with anything that might not make him any happier than he wasn't being now. While he might not have joy, at least he also had no sorrow, and he preferred not to risk the latter in pursuit of the former. And therefore the only sure thing he had found was this: in half a century on this earth—nearly twenty thousand sunrises and sunsets each—Mr. Odonson had never savored a single day.

This is why he didn't seem any less happy than usual when his shop burned to the ground.

That happened at sundown on the night before last. It was lightning after a dry season that sparked it, perhaps sent by a god wrathful over a life wasted; but it burned the shop to the ground, along with the room in back where Mr. Odonson kept his bed and his kitchen. He had been inside when it happened. With quiet acceptance he had taken a few moments to don his best suit and tuck a few things into a brown leather satchel—a clean folded shirt, a small china cup and a little box of good tea, and a few other items small enough to fit—not because they were valuable to him but because he thought they oughtn't perish in a fire. He said a brief farewell to the shop before the flames took it, and then he slipped out the back door and walked away. A few of his neighbors saw him depart, but none felt they knew him well enough to call him over and see if he was all right.

Dawn came, and Mr. Odonson was still walking. This was the furthest he'd ever been from home. Beyond the edge of the town he'd come upon a vast plain lit by the bright moon, and then grassy hills and a river he followed until it left him. His suit had become dusty and torn and filled with brambles; his shoes were very uncomfortable but he didn't dare take them off, since he hadn't ever before walked somewhere where there wasn't a street. When evening fell after the first day he laid on the ground and tried to sleep. He finally drifted off around midnight and slept dreamlessly, but he woke again with the first touch of sunrise and walked some more. He neither knew nor cared what direction he took. The walking had become the point of Mr. Odonson's life, and there was no sadness in it, since the fire took nothing from him that he cared enough to be sad for.

The sun was high again in the sky when Mr. Odonson stopped for the second time, as weary in bones as in spirit. He had long since left anything resembling a path, and now he found himself within a dense green forest, whose canopy hid the mid-day sun and cast everything beneath in damp coolness. He chose a tree stump that was covered with moss and he sat down on it, opened his satchel and withdrew the teacup and one teabag. There was no water nearby, and he hadn't thought to bring any with him. He dropped the teabag into the teacup and raised the cup halfway to his mouth in the way he used to do when he was waiting for tea to cool. He wasn't quite sure what else to do with it.

So he set the teacup by his knee, and took a few more items out of his satchel. Here was a well-worn cap which protected his head on chilly evenings. Here was a pencil, since it was always wise to carry a pencil, though he hadn't thought to bring a notepad with him. Here was a half a turkey sandwich wrapped in wax paper. He unwrapped one corner of the sandwich and ate a bite, then re-wrapped it neatly and placed it beside the teacup. He didn't feel particularly hungry, and besides, he had no tea to wash it down with.

At the bottom of his satchel, Mr. Odonson found a wooden flute.

He was puzzled to find it there. It was a child's instrument, of the kind that some call a recorder, though Mr. Odonson thought this was not a very practical name for it since it wasn't actually capable of recording anything. He picked it up and turned it around slowly in his fingers as he remembered it: a baby had grabbed it from a shelf and teethed on it last month, and he'd ushered it quickly into this satchel to keep it out of the way until he had a chance to wash it off. He had forgotten to. The flute was old and worn, a secondhand item even before it had come to him through trade or purchase or however he had acquired it; there were nicks and scuffs along its length, as if children of generations past had imagined it as a sword or a baton and treated it as such.

A breeze slipped between the trees and gently around Mr. Odonson, stirring him from his thought and teasing his hair as it rustled the leaves above. He rubbed the flute on the tattered sleeve of his suit, and looked around himself as if seeking someone to give him approval; and then his hands lifted the flute, and his lips touched its mouthpiece.

He blew into it. The flute squeaked.

He settled his fingers over the holes, and tried again. This time he got a hint of a note before it broke into another shrill squeak. This wouldn't do, thought Mr. Odonson; the squeaks hurt his ears as much as a baby's cries did, which is why he preferred not to let mothers bring babies into his shop, aside from the teething. So he tried again and a few more times until he could play a respectable note; and he practiced holding his fingers against some holes and away from others until he had found an octave's worth of notes, more or less.

As he haltingly practiced before an absent audience, tunes he'd heard over the years began to drift through his head. He hadn't ever paid particular attention to any of them, and so he was surprised to remember them now; but the blood of his father and grandfather sang softly in his veins and guided his fingers and flowed from the flute as song: halting, and with plenty of pauses to search for right notes, but there it was.

. o O o .

In his sleep the fox dreamed of stars and the sun. The sun filled the sky with its brightness and it chased the timid stars away, and they hid in trees and behind rocks and called softly to the fox for help, and he found them all and gathered them neatly into a comfortable fox-den where they lit the darkness with their cool glow. But as he did this the wind whistled outside the den and beckoned to him in a sound that was sweeter than any wind he'd ever heard. It tugged at his consciousness until he realized that it wasn't part of his dream at all, and that's what woke him up.

It was music, the faint, thin song of a flute fumbling over notes.

The fox hadn't ever heard music before. It was like the call of a bird—no, it was less urgent, more gentle; it lilted like stream water and tickled at his ears and coaxed him out from where he had napped. He crept towards the sound over soft carpets of moss and clover, and was careful to avoid rustling any fallen leaves or sticks. The forest was silent but for the call of the flute. No birds or frogs joined in the melody, though the fox was too captivated by the flute's song to notice.

He followed his ears until the song was very close, then peered towards it through the safety of a fern with wide leaves.

The fox had never seen a man before, either. He couldn't quite imagine what it was. It sat upright, looking as though it would topple over at any moment but it never actually did; and it was covered in something dusty and rumpled in a way that fur isn't, which the fox could not have recognized as clothing. And the man looked wrong there; he gave the distinct impression of not belonging in a forest. But strangest of all was that the man was holding something up to his mouth as if chewing on it, and that's what made the music.

The fox kept hidden and marveled at his new discovery. Had anyone else ever seen such a creature before? Would it be frightened away if it saw him? The notes it played were lingering and melancholy, and these were unfamiliar feelings to a fox, but they tugged at something in his heart and held him put. There was something lost about the man, and the fox had never learned what lost was.

After a very long while, the man stopped playing the music and set the flute down. Silence settled perceptibly over the forest once more, so heavy that the fox heard his own heartbeat and crouched lower for fear of being discovered.

But the man didn't notice him at all. Instead, it settled to its side on the tree stump, tucked its knees against its belly, closed its eyes, and began to nap.

The fox held perfectly still but for his ears and whiskers. Was this a trick to lure him closer? Where was the music, why did the man stop the music? Did the music drain the man, was it dead? He quickly dismissed that last idea; the man carried many curious and unusual scents, but death was not one of them.

So, after giving the matter due thought, he decided to investigate more closely. He slipped stealthily from his hiding place, and with tentative steps he slipped closer to the sleeping man, until he gingerly pressed a paw against the tree stump itself and leaned in close. The man's breath tickled his whiskers; he smelled the tattered suit and the teabag and the leather satchel, and he wondered at the deep lines in the man's face. All these were interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the flute.

The fox's fascination was getting the better of him. He could continue after his fallen star tonight, and there were more stars in the sky than he could count and plenty to catch later. But in all the world he'd seen, there had never been any more than this one flute. He had to have the music. Surely the man wouldn't mind sharing it?

The flute was lying peacefully beside the man's arm. The fox lowered his nose towards it, his bright gaze not leaving the sleeping man's face. He hoped desperately that the flute wouldn't start making music again and wake the man, but thankfully it remained silent as his teeth closed around it. It tasted of maple wood and fingerprints.

And then the man opened its eyes.

It blinked twice, wrinkled its nose, and twitched its fingers. The fox was startled and hopped to the ground with the flute still in his mouth, and only now did the man seem to understand what it was seeing. "My flute," it said with quiet despair. "My flute."

But the words of mankind are like the chattering of pigeons to a fox's ears. Run, his instincts told him quite clearly, run! So immediately the fox turned tail and ran away, clasping the flute so tightly between his jaws that his teeth added a few more marks to the wood.

Mr. Odonson watched the spot where the flash of russet fur, soot-black paws, and white-tipped tail had disappeared into the underbrush. And suddenly the flute meant more to him than his suit or his teacup or the sign outside his burnt shop never had, and now he'd lost it.

For the first time he could remember, he felt terribly sad.

Three