A fox is vermin. Ought to be shot. Quite right. Loose the hounds, my good man. Train them first on the kits, or the hounds will never learn to kill a full-grown fox. Tally. Tallyho.

A fox is not just a fox is not just a fox.

How tiresome it became, too, for other reasons. Oh, how these dead people who lived in houses on lots where they had cut down most of the trees loved trees. How they loved to be out in the trees. The tales they told about the trees and how they loved them. Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over of their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love of the ax. The chain saw that felled most of them just completed a tree’s own inevitable thought.

The proof—that trees never turned chain saws against the ones that wielded them. The chain saws, which were even named, as if they were as alive as a tree, had a personality. Greta. Berta. Charlie. Frank. Sarah. So some we killed with chain saws, to remind them of what it really meant to be a tree. A messy business. Difficult for them and for us.

Absurd of foxes to do all of this. We had no hands. We did not walk upright. We were not made to use human tools. Yet still we did it, and did it well and with vigor.

Do you doubt me? Do you not see the corpses strewn there in my mind’s eye? Can you not distinguish truth from fiction? Or were you never taught the difference?

I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing with you. Except: Foxes don’t laugh, they grin. Do you know what a grin from a fox means?

But I was not content to wage such a ragged war upon the enemy. I raised a great liberation army and stood one dusk looking out upon the glittering plain where the humans had camped. They did not know we were their enemy. They had come to that desolate place to battle another army of humans. That was the way of them—to fight each other even as they waged war on us as well. War against us was a casual affair, as quick as thought but without thought.

I stood above that glittering valley, the dusty plain, and watched the legions arrayed there. An army that didn’t think of itself as an army. Even as they killed us quick and casual, slow and calculated. Poisoned the darkness with an everlasting and cruel light. They did not smell our blood, heard nothing that we shrieked out or moaned.

We set upon you in the night. And you, bewildered that your quarry should be full of so much rage, as if killing us had been a gift you’d given us. Confused that we fought to the death. That we could overcome the animal instinct to flee, to survive, to subsist.