A TAIL OF NINE

CHAPTER SIX: The Widow Boys

After Kon prays over the dead fox, she becomes a fox herself and we stick to the woods. It's a good ten degrees colder here than at the beach. But I'm still sweating under all my layers. Every time I start to unwrap my scarf, she looks back over her shoulder and flicks her ears at me. I mumble and coil the scarf around my neck. In a way, I guess it's kinda like my own fox tail.

Things go great (besides me sweating off about twenty pounds) ... until the next day.

Around the middle of the day, a crow watches us from a high branch in a birch tree. If I had something to throw, I'd wipe that smug look off its face.

We keep going, leaving the crow behind us.

Day turns into night and we keep going. We do manage to catch snatches of sleep here and there. But we keep pushing through the woods. No more crows. If they were around, they'd be letting us know. Crows never know when to shut up.

The sun pokes its head through some fog that's clinging to everything like cotton that's been stretched out too much. We keep really low, weaving in and out of the underbrush. I see the black shadow in the sky.

Could be a buzzard.

And then we hear CAW! CAW! CAW!

Dang it!

Don't think. Just follow Kon. She is a streak of orange that darts through the brush. I squirm between two oak trees. I try to pretend it's when I was younger and we spent a lot of time in the woods. The woods and the ocean ... They're the two best things on Earth, well, besides foxes. I start to hop over a branch and then remember what Kon used to tell me (she used to have to tell me a lot)--Don't jump unless you know exactly where you will land.

Kon plods back to me as she rubs her face against my leg, urging me forward.

<<Keep going, Koto.>>

Hopping away from me, she starts picking her way through the deeper woods. After worming through a few thickets and with me slithering along behind her, Kon finds a sheltered spot under a fir tree. When she's not looking, I loosen the scarf and unzip my coat. Sinking back, I lean against the solid trunk and stare out through the blue-green branches.

After turning around in a circle, like she does in the rental places, she settles down next to me in the dirt made soft by fallen needles.

"Fir," I say. It's a game we used to play when I was a kid.

<<Pine.>>

I see the tree she's talking about. It's only a few feet away.

"Oak." That's the one that really catches my eye. It's further away than the pine, but its trunk is thick and seems fairly smooth. Instead of growing tall like the other trees around it, this one is only three feet tall before sprouting branches.

The thing to know about trees (not sure if you care or not) is that they react to things. I mean REALLY react to things. They can't yell or run away from something. But certain kinds of things leave scars. Something must have happened in this forest at some point. I don't know what. I probably never will. But my mind wanders. Was someone killed here? Things like that can cause weird stuff with trees. A lot of times it'll cause knots to pop out in the bark, kinda like sores. What a human holds down inside, trees show it in how they grow and how they're shaped. When magic's been around it, a tree's branches'll get weird twists in them. I've seen some that look almost braided.

I wonder what the trees in Dooms look like? The war had to leave some kind of mark on them and everything there.

"Magic shapes things," I say out loud.