The Bones Below | ONC 2023 | ✔️

FOUR

Months Later

Kip scooped the last pawful of soil from her latest excavation, accidentally splatting Fell in his face with flying dirt. The vixen dove inside the new den with an excited yip while her mate pawed dirt off his snout.

"This is it!" Kip said. Her tail wagged at full speed as she rolled around in what would be their new home. "This is the one!"

The silver fox poked his head inside the hole after her. "Are you sure, Kip?" he asked. "You said that about the last few dens, too." He pointed a paw outside at all the other shallow scrapes scattered amongst the wildflowers; all Kip's previous endeavors that she had abandoned for reasons only known to her.

The vixen slithered outside to join her mate. She rubbed the length of her body against him and rested her fiery plume of a tail under his chin affectionately. The red fox's coat was now lusciously thick, and it glowed like embers in the sunlight. No longer did her bones stick out. "This one feels like home," she told him with a smile. And she meant it.

The two foxes nuzzled together in the overgrown park they had staked out. Spring birds sang their mating calls. Crocuses were in full bloom; little purple and yellow specks of color that swayed in the breeze in the unkempt grass, and fat little bees were busy pollinating each one.

A monarch butterfly flitted from the wildflower it had been sipping from and alighted on the vixen's nose where it flapped its black-veined wings contently. Kip gently coaxed it onto a paw and placed it on Fell's head with a smile. She had long stopped hiding her blind eye from him, and he'd never once seemed bothered by it. Even with all her missing parts, this other fox made her feel whole.

They both watched the butterfly depart up into the trees where birds built their nests in anticipation of small creatures to come. Kip and Fell hoped, too, that their little den would be home to a family of their own. And Kip thought to herself, while she watched the white, puffy clouds lazily roll across the horizon, that she had never before seen a bluer sky.

Then, one by one, all the birds fell silent without even issuing an alarm call. The fur along Kip's spine rose at the sudden silence, and a chill ran down her spine despite the sun's warmth. A shadow from above blacked out the sun as something huge soared past. In an instant, Fell shoved Kip inside their den and stood guard at the entrance, snarling and bristling. Keening with worry, the red fox peered over his shoulder. Her heart stopped at what she saw.

A massive feathered beast dropped from the sky and landed in the tall grass yards away. A harpy eagle, larger than any bird the fox had ever seen before and bristling with feathers the color of smoke, stabbed at some poor animal hidden in the grass with her razor sharp beak. Every beat of her wings kicked up a cloud of dust. The terrified screams of her prey fell silent as the dust settled.

Kip growled at the intruder in their territory.

And, as if she could hear her, the eagle raised her crested head—turning it to glare at the fox pair with a piercing eye. A nictitating membrane slid over her constricted pupils. The fresh red blood of her kill stained her beak. Then, with a few powerful beats of her wings that leveled the grass, the eagle returned to the sky with a rabbit in her menacing talons. The foxes tracked her flight, watching as she roosted in a clock tower that overlooked their little park.

🦋🦋🦋

The birds never once sang again after the eagle's arrival.

Fell's city had gone deathly quiet. Creatures of all sizes—even the leopard—hid away in their holes or else they'd be the next ones snatched away by the eagle. With every day that passed, more and more bones littered the ground at the base of the eagle's tower.