The thing we didn’t know, child. But felt. The reason we began to look forward to a time we could be truly careless: It was the end, not the middle, the end not the beginning. The time of your kind was ending. We knew it in the busy places that became still, watchful. We knew it in how fewer lights shone at night and how more shadows we sniffed were stray dogs. (Oh, stray dogs were a bumbling marvel, even the best and keenest of them! For we had changed.)

Still, you took things from us. Even then. Became more ferocious as you disappeared, as if you knew it in your hearts.

You burnt part of the forest on the island. We moved to the mainland. We lived in gardens. You cut down the verge. We lived in the shadow of lawns. You filled in the lawns with gravel. We lived on rooftops. You could not take sky; we kept that for ourselves and the tunnels below, too. So that humans were garlanded by us and yet never saw us.

But we saw you.

Maybe, once, from afar, once there was a bridge and a poisoned river. Maybe once in our travels we passed by that which once had been beset by fire. Maybe we knew. Maybe I knew what it might come to mean.

We became careless and yet were not killed. By snare. By bullet. By poison. Because there had been a person always to kill us. Now the people truly became a murmur across the land. A puzzled, bewildered muttering.

I was wary-wise and soft-new, naïve back then. I would have growled and yipped at you, or you would have known nothing of me, even if I stood close, in the shadows, and I would have been better for it. Perhaps.

Then one day I was taken and I became the blue fox.

There was an insect up above. A drone that hovered, made of flesh and metal. I remember I stood on my hind legs to see it better. How it shone in the sun!

The men came much later. A shadow. A metallic smell appearing as if magician-summoned. A sound from an old abandoned building that had always been safe before. The pale men that always come before the end, that signal the invasion. And the locals they enlisted. The banal drawling drowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.