http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/fox-gran-paradiso-italy/

This wasn’t at all how he’d pictured spending his Saturday afternoon. This time last week, he’d set up a date. A beautiful girl, smart and spry and she was a part of the opposing party in the forest council, but that wasn’t that big of a deal because she was a beautiful, smart, spry redhead. They were all redheads of course, but that wasn’t an important note at this moment. Because at this moment he was not on the date he had set up last week.

Instead, he was crouched in the grass in the western region of the forest. He was two days away from the council, crouched in the grass, watching smoke rise from a chimney in a little cabin. The cabin itself was idyllic, picturesque in its little valley nestled among the autumn trees. But he wasn’t crouched in the grass in the hills above the cabin to dissect its architecture. He was on surveillance.

The cabin was immaterial to his investigation. It was the contents of the cabin that had brought him all the way out here. The human that lived inside had shown up a month ago. In the weeks since, he’d taken samples from half the regions of the forest. Fresh and dried leaves from nine species of trees, bark from the trunks of those same trees, flowers where he could find them this late in the season, the leavings of every creature he came across, including brown bears, grey wolves, white-tailed deer, two kinds of chipmunks, two kinds of squirrels, six types of snakes and more birds than the fox cared to think about.

All of this was unsettling because the creatures didn’t know what it was about. Their understanding of human actions was limited to the hunters that came for the deer in the months before the snow came. And those humans never took anything with them but the dead. While that was unsettling, the forest creatures understood that. Creatures got hunted, they got killed, they got eaten. That was part of forest life.

Taking feces and fallen leaves was not in the normal course of anyone’s activity, animal or human. It was unprecedented, and most of the forest folk were creatures of habit. Anything that was out of the ordinary was perceived as a threat by reflex.

Foxes were, by nature, more curious than most of the denizens of the forest. The fox thought it only practical to find out why this human was here and picking up everything he saw. At the council meeting last week, he had said as much. The reaction had been predictably alarmist.

“He’s hunting us. Humans only come here to hunt.”

“If he’s hunting, why did he build a house?” the fox had said, his voice calm and even. “He cleans himself, and he doesn’t carry the… you know, the thing they use to hunt.”

“Gun,” said a feral cat. She was their resident human expert. She’d lived with humans for three years before escaping. She was also the forest’s lead spy. When necessary, she would meander around the town beyond the forest’s edge where the humans lived. She overheard and reported back anything pertinent.

“Right, gun. Also, he’s been there a month, and he hasn’t killed anyone.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t,” the deer delegate said. He was an old buck, hair turning grey around his snout. His antlers were enormous monuments, and when he spoke everyone listened. Deer always had the most to lose from humans. “Only that he has not yet.”

“That’s a fair point, but we cannot condemn him for something he’s not yet done.”

“Who’s condemning him?” the badger delegate asked.

“The last meeting ended at a forced recess during a debate over whether we should destroy the cabin,” the fox said with barely concealed indignation.

“We are aware of how the-”

The fox added, “With him in it, I’m saying.”

The wolf delegate growled his dissent. “If he’s here to kill our members, we should be prepared to defend ourselves.”

“Hunters come to kill, and we never defend against them.”

“Well they don’t build houses, do they?” the badger said. “And that’s different. They hunt, take their kill and leave. No different than the wolf pack or cougar, any of the predators. It’s natural.”

“There’s nothing natural about what this human does,” the wolf said. “Collecting things from us, from the forest, bringing them to his house. What could he be doing with them in there?”

The cat pushed her paws forward, leaned her shoulders down and stretched. She circled around her spot in the council clearing and sat down. She mewled quietly to call for attention. It was a quiet sound, but they all fell silent. When humans were involved, and the cat wanted to speak, everyone listened.

“There is a certain type of human that even their own kind distrust.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean some of the humans do things that scare the other humans. They use things, from their world and ours, to do something they call spells. The others whisper of them in quiet tones. They call them magicians, and they are feared.” She spoke with her usual disconnected authority, but everyone believed her. Feral cats never had reason to lie.

“How do the other humans know when one of their own is one of these magicians?” the fox asked.

The cat lifted an eyebrow. “By what they have in their homes.”

“And what’s that?”

“Things they collect. Leaves, bark, leavings… dirt from human burial lands, blood, body parts-”

A great uproar burst around the council clearing. The fox shook his head, and shot the cat a sharp look of remonstration. In her way, the cat shrugged. Delivering information was her role, and she felt she’d fulfilled it.

“Just wait. Everyone, hey… PLEASE!” the fox called out, finally quelling the commotion.

“We cannot wait. This human means to bleed us, to cut off our body parts to use for these sells,” the wolf cried in anger.

“Spells,” the cat corrected before yawning widely.

“We have no idea if that’s true, and we can’t just kill him.” The fox stood and walked to the clearing center. He had to offer an alternate plan, and fast, or things were going to escalate well beyond reason.

“Can’t we? To save ourselves?” The rabbit hadn’t spoken before, but she was firmly on the alarmist side. Rabbits were often targets of human hunters who were unlucky with the deer.

“Ok, let’s not jump to conclusions. The rules of the forest are very clear. No death that is not in the natural order can be sanctioned.”

“This is an extreme circumstance!” the wolf claimed.

“Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. We need more information.” The fox wasn’t interested in this next part, but he felt he had no choice. “If we kill this guy and we’re wrong, it’ll mean war with humans.”

“The cat just said the humans have no love for the magician.”

“I’m saying we don’t know enough, and someone’s got to go out there to find out whether he’s a magician or not. Because if he’s not, and we kill him, we doom ourselves.”

An uncomfortable silence fell across the clearing. The fox knew he had some friends, especially among the birds and weasels who were never targets of the hunter humans. But they held their tongues, and the alarmist sect bristled at having procedure used to block their fear-driven bloodlust.

“Fine,” the badger said, eventually. “Someone will need to go out there.”

Another long silence, eyes moving left to right. But like a moth to flame, they all eventually flitted in a single direction. Toward the fox.

“Great,” he said under his breath.

And so he crouched in the grass putting his leavings and his blood and his body parts on the line to protect the forest’s tenants of civilization. The cat had given him a rundown of what humans thought were typical signs that one of their own was one of these magicians. She could not identify what a spell might look like, and the fox had settled for the broad category of observing anything suspicious.

More suspicious than a cabin built miles from the town. More suspicious than a human traipsing through the forest picking up the bowel movements of other creatures. He knew nothing about what humans did or what might look out of the ordinary. But he had been the voice of reasonable dissent at the council, and he could no more back out now than he could do one of these human spells.

So he sat on the hill and crouched low and he watched. He didn’t know what might happen, or when, or what he would do when it did. But he felt the weight of his life, of the entire course of life in the forest, on his shoulders. So he watched, eyes open, and he waited to see whether this was just another day in the forest or the beginning of something the forest folk would not soon forget.

And still the smoke puffed out of the chimney, steady and unbroken and mysterious.