The furriers who kept our arctic brothers and sisters in tiny pens and then skinned them alive for their fur … these furriers we herded off a cliff into an abandoned quarry. A fox can be a sheepdog. A fox can be whatever he wants to be, contrary to legend. Careening crazed around the edges as the furriers pleaded and stumbled even as they ran. Teetered there on the cliff’s edge. As long as they could. Toppled and fell in ragged lines of flailing human, falling out of the sky to Earth. The screams ripped from them, battering the rock, reaching not our ears. The last one of them wheeling arms, red-faced, shouting for mercy. If only he had not been clad head to toe in fox, perhaps we could have forgiven a single, a solitary soul. Perhaps, then, seeing the error of his ways, he would have released his prisoners. But we had already done that. And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

Broken-limbed at the bottom, split and riven, so the red could leak into the exhausted gravel and turn weeds sodden. Brains dashed out as fast as they’d dashed to the edge. Not puppets expressed there. No, not puppets. No one could ever use their skins for anything in that condition. But who but a barbarian would wear the skin of his enemy?

I suppose I was, for a time, deranged. The rest are a blur and a burr and a rankle, even now. A tug-tug of direction or misdirection. I cannot rest thinking about them. How the effort was a waste. How not a one could see me. How I could smell and hear them all too clearly. That I knew more about them from their scent than they knew about themselves. That this one was dying of cancer. That that one suffered from a brain tumor. That the rasp of breath wasted on pleading was close to the rasp of death anyway. What did they know about me? Only that I was a demon come to murder them all.

And what was ease but boredom? The tromping clod so quick to track the way they stank like any dead thing as their victims’ path took them quick and sure leaping over their bodies into the wilderness beyond. Because our arctic kin distrusted us as much as they distrusted humans; they had seen what we could do.

The way they stank so hard and long it was as if they trailed spirals of fire through the night. The way not one of those liberated would join us, could understand our mission.

A fox is just a prisoner who hasn’t escaped yet.

A fox seen in the daytime must have something wrong with it.

A fox is a question that must be answered.