FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The Fox

Jacob's "place" was actually a decrepit motor home located in the back yard of an unoccupied residence. They had not actually entered the premises from the road on which its address would have been, but they had actually entered through a hiking trail in a local park. Behind an old tree-stump, there had been a narrow footpath that wove itself a short distance and emerged into a well-tended and strangely circular lawn in the overgrown back yard of what looked like an abandoned mansion, and there sat the little motor home. Mitch was afraid to ask Jacob how he got his power.

"Mind you, I haven't done this in a number of years," Jacob said, "so it will take me a while to set up shop." He grunted as he began pulling tarp-wrapped bundles and some metal posts out from under his home. He opened one of them, and he issued a dissatisfied grunt as he shoved it back underneath without even bothering to redo the bungee cords around it. He pulled out another one, and he tested its weight by lifting it three inches. Still uncertain as to what was inside, he dropped it a few times from a height of about two inches off the ground to see how its contents sounded when he did so, and he growled in satisfaction as he pulled it the rest of the way out.

"So," Mitch said delicately, "you, ah...do live here, right?"

The fox propped himself against his bundle and looked over at Mitch. "Oh, you mean that old thing back there." He laughed. "I got into an argument with the local authorities about having some renovation done on the old house. They felt it would look less historical, and I tried to tell them that his plans would make it look like it actually did two hundred years ago." He began to unroll a large, clear plastic mat, which he began arranging in against the "back" of the old motor home. "And I said to them, I'd just as soon abandon the place and live in a motor home."

Mitch thought about this for a moment, and he tried to decide whether it made any sense or not. He rolled it from one side of his head to the other, and then he looked helplessly down at Zeke, who was at the moment avidly watching some hummingbirds hover around a feeder that hung outside the window. Finally, he fixed his eyes back on Jacob. "I'm not sure I understand," he said.

The reynard began setting up a simple half-tent over the mat. The gear was surprisingly well-kept considering the fox's peculiar method of storage. It was made out of some tan-colored textile that didn't appear to wrinkle, and the window panes seemed to zip in rather than being folded up with the rest of the structure. "Well, without someone living in it, the place will rot to the ground. When it does, the city will lose interest in it, and I'll do the renovations as originally planned." He shrugged as if he didn't expect one to really understand it. Then he looked at Mitch and Zeke as if suddenly remembering his manners. "Hey, why don't you and your brother come sit inside while I set up?" he suggested.

That was copecetic enough with Mitch, and he followed the strange reynard around to side-door into the fox's place. The door the fox was having him enter by was on the passenger side of the vehicle, and Mitch found the lighting within the structure to be impressively good once Jacob turned it on by a switch hanging from the ceiling. There were plants hanging in all corners of it, and the furnishings were small but well-upholstered. In the back, there was a full-sized bed with a smaller bunk hanging over it. A tiny black kitten snoozed in a corner on the top bunk, and a rather large, panda-coated ferret lay on the bottom, regarding the newcomers thoughtfully.

Jacob began making his introductions. "Okay, Sarah, these are two friends I've brought home," he said, gesturing at Mitch and Zeke individually, "young Mitchell, or 'Mitch,' and young Ezekiel." He lay his paw on Mitch's back and introduced the other two creatures as 'Sarah' and 'Dmitri.' "Now, you guys settle in while I get set up for you," he said.

Mitch tried to raise his paw to question him further, but the reynard disappeared swiftly out the door. As Jacob left, the jill dropped her pretense of aloof observation, and she came over to sniff them out. As her searching nose approached him, Zeke leaned over to the side, gritting his teeth and raising his head up to keep away from it. As the nose insistently approached toward him, he clumsily got to all four feet, with a skittering and a scraping, and the two began circling each other tensely. Eventually, Zeke sat down stiffly on his haunches with his tail pulled close to him, looking at her over his shoulder, and she gave his neck one sniff before making her greeting to Mitch.

The older of the two brothers was far more receptive. He stood delicately still as the creature sniffed around his bare feet, and eventually he sat down on the floor and let her press her head insistently into his lap. Wanting to try that "listening" trick again, he tried pressing his fingers gently against the portion of her back most dense in small muscles, and he cocked his head to the side and allowed his eyes to close to slits. He fell into the state a lot quicker with Sarah than he had with his brother, oddly. Her reactions told his sensitive digits where to go next, and they obeyed without Mitch having to give them any instructions. They needed no more direction than his ears did, really. Rather than the vague, muddle non-music he got from his brother, though, he got a distinct feeling of springy grass pressing against his belly and soft earth sliding between his digits. The real shock, though, was when the sensations started to form relationships with each other and follow a kind of pattern.

Mitch was awakened from his reverie by his brother, who had suddenly stuck his claws gently into his paw to stop it from moving so over Sarah's body. With that, Sarah got up from Mitch's lap and stalked back over to the bed, where she leapt first to the bottom bunk from which she had come and then to the upper bunk, and there she joined with the kitten, who had been silently watching from his perch. Mitch stroked his paw over Zeke's head, feeling a little shaken.

Before he could examine the issue further, though, Jacob popped in through the driver side door. "Jeez, I'm sorry," he huffed as he stumbled into the kitchenette. "Coffee. I forgot to make you up some coffee."

"That's okay, sir," Mitch said. "You don't have to."

Jabob smiled at that. "Nonsense. I did have an upbringing, and I was taught that you make up coffee for visitors." He pulled a canister of grounds out of his refrigerator and got out a measuring spoon. "Do you like yours strong or mild, my young tom?"

Bemused, Mitch tried to think of whether he had ever even had any coffee. "I'm not sure. I guess make it the way you like it, I suppose."

"Super-black and boiled!" Jacob exclaimed. "My kind of tom!" He began measuring the stuff out, counting as he added one scoop after the other of the substance into a tin pot. "The thing is," he said, "I can't taste sweet, so I like to boil an egg to mine instead of adding sugar later on." As he switched on the gas burner, he bent down and grabbed an egg out of the fridge and began bashing it up in a small bowl. "And then you add some icewater to it." He got it from the tap on the fridge, having satisfactorily bashed the egg. "And then," he concluded as he added it to the pot, "You put it in and let it boil for a while." He turned around and grinned. "After that, you just add some more cold water to sink the grounds, just like you always do."

Mitch put a finger to his chin, trying to take all of this in. After a moment's thought, he shook his head helplessly. "I can't say I've ever head of that," he said.

The reynard gave a curt, confident half-nod. "It's good," he said firmly. He raised his paws in distress, though, as he noticed the position Mitch and Zeke were in. "Hey, both of you guys get off of the floor! It's okay to use the couch!" He gestured for them to get up. "The fur goes when I get the thing reupholstered again, and it's easier than sweeping."

After situating his guests, the fox ran over to his sleeping area, and he pulled out a drawer from underneath the bed that rattled metallically as he heaved it up. He took it to the sink, and he began setting out various tools, including assorted clippers, guards, scissors, pins and some less identifiable objects. He filled the sink up with some water and added a strange-looking fluid to it, and then he started washing the implements.

"So," Mitch started delicately, "Sarah is one of your relatives who was feral-born, and you're taking care of her?"

"She's my wife," he answered.

"Wife???" To Mitch, that was all but unheard of...how...?

Jacob nodded. "We don't mate, though, if that's what you're wondering."

Flummoxed, the young tom sputtered, "so how is she your wife, then?"

"Because we have feelings toward each other," the reynard said sensibly. "I think anything else is an illusion."

Mitch puzzled over that for a while, and his host slowly dried his equipment and laid it neatly, on some paper towels, in a plastic container. He stopped midway in this to turn the burner off, and he poured a glass of cold water onto the concoction, causing the mess of grounds, half-poached egg and bits of shell to sink down to the bottom. He carefully poured some of the fluid into a stout mug with a brick pattern on it, and he handed it gently over to Mitch, who sniffed at it curiously. He wasn't quite prepared to take his first uncertain sip of the stuff, though, so he set it down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

Jacob finished cleaning up his tools, and then he pulled a power strip and an extension cord out of a small closet next to his sleeping area. As he did so, he gestured behind him at the opposite door, saying, "by the way, this is my bathroom if you need it." With that, he unfastened the clip that held Zeke's leash to his collar, and the strange reynard led Mitch's brother out by a gentle paw on the back of his neck.

Mitch was perplexed by his situation. Michelle had been coming over ostensibly to see his brother, Zeke, and all Mitch had wanted to do was to spend some of his scant funds on getting him trimmed professionally. He stared helplessly at the odd concoction in front of him, craning his neck over his shoulder occasionally, trying to spy Zeke and Jacob.

It was a very humid day, so Mitch pulled his feet out of his paw-mitts to give them some air, curling himself up languidly against the arm rest of the sofa. As the heat given off by the burner registered with a sensor, the air conditioning unit cut itself on, and Mitch had the pleasure of cool, dry air blowing against his damp, overheated digits.

As he settled himself, the black kitten sitting on the top bunk walked out to the edge of the bed. Mitch looked over curiously, wondering how the kitten was going to get down from such a height being so small. He should not have worried, though; for the young cat smoothly went down from one bunk to the other, head-first and without dallying, and padded his way over to Mitch.

Now, Mitch was a skeptical sort of tom, and he felt that his experiences with his brother and Jacob's "wife" were sufficiently extraordinary that they may well have been entirely his subjective experience, which needn't correspond exactly with reality. Wishful thinking, he felt, could go a long way. Therefore, he decided he would try that "listening" trick again with this perfectly normal cat. He was sure that, if he were to "listen" closely, he would start "hearing" similar things going on in its tiny mind.

He stroked his fingers gently down the kitten's spine, noting that its fur was not all-black at all but really a dark salt-and-pepper. There were little white hairs distributed randomly throughout its coat. As Mitch worked his way into a rhythm, closing his eyes and dismissing the world around him, the kitten picked up a loud purr. This time, the pattern was easier to observe, simply because it was simpler. When he stroked his paw from the kitten's hind-quarters to his neck, he would turn a certain way. When he rubbed his knuckles down its spine, its back would arch in a certain manner. The petting was a simple, clear way for him to have a sort of dialogue between himself and the kitten.

However, Mitch realized that, no matter how much he let his mind go, he was not going to get the same oddly thoughtful reactions out of this creature that he could obtain from either Zeke or Sarah. They were far too predictable to really communicate anything. It was like playing a game of checkers when one already knows how to predetermine the outcome of the game: it might be pleasurable to do mindlessly, but it would never be as stimulating as it was when one was still working out all of the different strategies. By comparison, Zeke and Sarah were like games of chess, and there was something...more.

In time, the movement of his paw slowed down and eventually fell dormant, so the kitten curled up on Mitch's prominent hip and promptly went to sleep. Accomodatingly, the young tom adjusted himself on the couch to be more level, enjoying the feeling of the little kitten purring loudly against his hip. Very little could be more pleasurable, he thought.

The peculiar beverage poured for him by the reynard sat on the table in front of him, steaming quietly. It was a peculiar brew, and one could look into it and see the steam forming in it before it was actually expelled from the fluid. Everytime a puff of steam would rise up, it would agitate the liquid contents of the mug, causing the various sediments in it to swirl around as if the drink had a mind of its own. Coupled with the aroma, the effect was hypnotic, and the young tom found himself leaning forward to let it drift into his nostrils.

Mitch found himself picking the brew up delicately and holding it under his nose, trying to swirl it around to see if he could get more of those aromas to come out. After a few moments, he gave himself over to curiosity and allowed a very small amount of the fluid to pass over his lips, and then he gently set it back down on the table.

However, he was to be interrupted from savoring what it actually tasted like by the reynard popping back in, ushering Zeke in along with him. "Alright," Jacob said, "Like I said, I haven't done this in a while, and I'm glad just to have a chance to keep my skills polished. Now, a lot of the reason that people tend to get fur cuts on ferals and animals wrong is that they have trouble seeing a four-legged creature and finding the same shapes and forms as we see in people."

From there, the reynard launched into a lengthy discussion on the issue, and Mitch lost track of time as Jacob's ramblings wandered into talk about other trades he had had experience in, and a great deal of it contained criticism about the problems inherent in limited thinking. As the day wore on and their coffee cups slowly emptied, Mitch got up the nerve to ask the fox a question that had been bugging him.

"Jacob...Jake. Look, I've been meaning to ask you something kind of sensitive, but I'm still not sure what you meant about something. I mean, about Zeke being 'more of a place than a person.'"

The fox frowned thoughtfully. "Ah. That is a good question. However, I don't think that me sitting here telling you would help you understand it." He tapped his digits together and stared upward, as if trying to get something to come to him. After a moment, he let out a soft, slow whistle, and he said, "You know, I think Zeke could tell you what I'm trying to say. Just pay close attention to what you see and hear, and you'll find him in there somewhere." He smiled. "In fact, I'm sure you will."

Mitch checked the time on his cell phone. "Oh, my god. My parents are going to be home soon." He picked up his paw-mitts and stuffed them in his pocket without bothering to don them, and he groped for Zeke's leash. "Look, I'm sorry, but I gotta go."

Jacob stood up. "Do you need bus fare?" he asked.

The young tom shook his head. "No, home is just a half-hour jaunt from here if I cut straight across. It'll get me there quicker than the buses, and Zeke and I can run pretty fast."

"Okay," said Jacob. "Well, you know where to find me. Remember, my name is Jacob Bernard Fox. If you look on the historic website for the town, you can find a few pictures of how that old place used to look before the years got to it. Maybe when I finally get it put back together, you can come over and stay a while someday."

And, with that, they exchanged pawshakes, and Mitch departed for home.