Salt Foxes

Overview

Salt foxes are the small pale foxes of the true desert. They live out on the salt pans, the old sea floor, and the stony flats of the Glassbelt Interior, where almost nothing else that size can, and they come to the edges of crossing camps at night for scraps. Kindred lore says: follow a salt fox at dawn and it will drink before you do.

Appearance

A salt fox is smaller than a cat, slight and quick, with enormous pointed ears nearly as long as its head and a narrow face with large, dark eyes. Its fur is thick and soft, cream to pale sand, nearly white on the belly, with a black-tipped tail and furred soles that pad silently over hot sand and salt. It trots in short bursts and freezes, ears turning, before it pounces. It yaps and chitters, and at night a pair calls to each other with a high, wavering whine.

Habitat and Range

They live across the Glassbelt wherever there is ground to dig and something to eat: the salt pans, the dry shorelines and steps of the old inland sea, ruin fields, and the stony desert. They come onto the floors of the Rimward Basins near the Lastwater Wells. Each pair keeps a den of many tunnels in a bank or among ruin stones and stays in it through the heat of the day.

Behaviour and Temperament

Salt foxes hunt at night and at dawn, listening with their great ears for dew beetles, lizards, rodents, and small birds, and eating seeds and the fruit of desert scrub. They are curious and not very shy, and a camp that sits quietly will see them at the edge of the firelight. They seldom drink, getting their water from what they eat and from the dew they lick off stone and beetles' backs in the cold hour before sunrise.

Life Cycle

A pair mates for life and raises two to five cubs in the den in spring, before the hot months. The cubs leave by autumn. Salt foxes live about ten years.

Uses and Dangers

Salt foxes are harmless and of little use: their fur is too small to be worth much, and they are too clever to trap easily. Crossers value them as signs. A fox's tracks lead from its den to where the dew forms and the beetles gather, and where the beetles gather, dew will form again tomorrow.

Lore and Belief

The Kindred saying is half true. A salt fox at dawn does drink before you do, but what it drinks is dew off stone, and a crosser who follows one in hope of a well usually finds the fox's breakfast instead. The old crossers know it and tell the saying anyway, as a lesson in reading the desert. Salvagers say a salt fox will not den near poisoned ground, and the Kindreds mark a fox's den as safe to camp beside.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals