Foxes

Overview

Foxes are the small hunters that live just outside every village: in the hedge, the wood's edge, the ruined wall. Farmers curse them for their hens, children watch for their cubs in spring, and morphic scouts borrow their shape when they need to go low and unseen.

Appearance

A fox is the size of a small dog, long-bodied and light, with a narrow pointed muzzle, tall triangular ears, and a thick brush of a tail nearly as long as its body. Its coat is rust-red above, white at the throat and the tail's tip, with black lower legs as if it had walked through soot. Its eyes catch lamplight green-gold.

It trots with its head low and its tail straight out behind, and pounces on mice in long grass with a high stiff-legged leap. On winter nights vixens scream, a shrill cry like someone hurt that frightens those who have not heard it before; dog foxes bark in short yaps. A fox's earth, and anywhere it has marked, has a sharp musky reek that lingers for days.

Habitat and Range

Foxes live wherever there is cover near food: hedgerows, woodland edges, brush, the banks of ditches, and ruins. They den in old burrows, under roots, and in the gaps of collapsed works, and the ruin country of the Broken Marches is thick with them. Some live in towns, at the edges, on what people throw away.

Behaviour and Temperament

A fox hunts alone, mostly at dusk and dawn, for mice, voles, rabbits, birds, beetles, and windfall fruit. It caches what it cannot eat. It is curious, cautious, and quick to vanish, and it learns a farm's habits: which coop is badly shut, which dog sleeps. Once inside a henhouse it may kill every bird it can reach and carry off only one.

Life Cycle

Foxes pair in midwinter, and the vixen bears four to six cubs in spring in an earth. The cubs play at the den mouth through early summer and leave in autumn to find ground of their own. Few foxes live beyond three or four years in the wild.

Uses and Dangers

Foxes take poultry and the odd newborn lamb, and are trapped, snared, and hunted with dogs for it. Their winter pelts are made into collars, hoods, and trim. They keep down the mice in the granaries' fields, which farmers rarely credit.

A scout who knows Beast-Skin may become a fox to slip beneath siege debris, keeping her mind but losing much of her hands' skill while she wears it.

Lore and Belief

Foxes are the clever thieves of village tales, the beast that talks its way out of every trap. A fox crossing the road ahead is held to mean a trick is coming. Some Human villages say that a fox which does not run from people is a mage wearing one, and drive it off with stones to be sure.

Outlaws of the march country take the fox as their sign, and more than one outlaw band has called itself after it; the songs about them are as clever and as false as the fox tales.

Where It Appears

• Morphic Magic