To Stand between the Wild and the HumanTeresa Noelle Roberts
I stood on the narrow beach and watched as the fishing boat motored away from Torishima, shrinking and finally turning into a speck on a blue-tossed horizon.
The boat had answered my distress call, and was now ferrying Akiko, my Project Albatross partner, off to the nearest hospital, some eighteen hours away.
Thank goodness, she’d only broken her leg when she fell. It looked like a nasty break, but it could have been far worse. She could have broken her back or neck tumbling down that steep rocky slope, or she could just as easily have fallen off one of the many sheer cliffs that protect the albatross-breeding grounds.
I was alone on the island now, just me and most of the world’s population of short-tailed albatross.
And I was guiltily relieved Akiko was gone.
Akiko just wasn’t cut out for this kind of rough fieldwork. She was smart and she knew her birds. But she was a klutz, and she spent more time watching the sky than the ground under her feet. On a deserted island that features dangerous cliffs, crashing surf, slopes slick with a mix of volcanic ash and bird guano, and an actual live volcano, that’s a bad combination. Her stay on Torishima had been a series of small disasters: blundering into a lit Coleman lantern, stumbling and gashing both palms open on sharp volcanic rock, smashing one of the cameras so it looked like a hatched egg, having a few close calls with both her own climbing ropes and mine as we made the steep ascent to the nesting grounds. She was safer at Toho University with her leg in a cast, analysing data, than she was here. Pity she would miss the mating flights, but at least she wouldn’t fall off a cliff backwards in her excitement and kill herself.
Right now, standing alone on the beach and staring at the tiny speck of the boat, I felt a bit desolate, but I suspected that I really wouldn’t miss her that much. She was a pleasant enough person but, after six weeks alone together, we’d been getting on each other’s nerves. Some of that was a problem I’d had with other Japanese acquaintances. As a third-generation Japanese–American, I was a walking mixed signal; I looked Japanese enough and spoke the language well enough that sometimes they’d be taken aback when I didn’t get a pop-culture reference or react to something in the way most Japanese people would.
A lot of it, though, came down to differences between Akiko and me. She regarded me as borderline uncivilised, and I could see why; with two naturalist parents, I’d been going on field expeditions since I was an infant, and Torishima was more comfortable for me than Tokyo. For my part, I didn’t understand how an ornithologist could be as unconcerned as she was about global conservation issues. As long as it didn’t have a direct impact on the albatross, she saw it as someone else’s problem. I tried to walk as gently on the earth as I could. She admitted that she simply couldn’t be bothered.
For me, the sky, the ocean and the magnificent short-tailed albatross would be better company.
On the other hand, if Project Albatross sent out a gorgeous single man in her place . . .
He’d be married. Or gay. Or, worse yet, he wouldn’t be, we’d have one night of insanely hot sex, then fight and spend the rest of our stay tiptoeing around each other.
That didn’t keep me from having a few lovely thoughts about passionate kisses, well-muscled male bodies and hard cocks. About sex in the field of golden-yellow chrysanthemums in the centre of the island, sex under the stars on the ‘veranda’ (which had been a cannon platform in our research station’s original incarnation as a military observation post), sex while we watched the albatross in their beautiful playful courtship rituals.
I swore I could feel a cock inside me, feel hands on my breasts, rolling out my nipples, elongating them, firm pressure but not painfully so . . .
Being alone on the island, I told myself firmly, was getting to me already. That or it was the complete lack of nookie in my life since leaving the States. I’d told myself for over a year that it wasn’t important and, compared to my work, it wasn’t. I’d been preparing myself to work with Project Albatross since I’d heard of it back in high school and, in the big picture, the fact that finally getting the chance to do so had pretty much derailed my sex life for the time being didn’t matter all that much.
But there were times, and this was one of them, where it became damn hard to focus on the big picture over the sheer horniness.
I felt the sexy phantom sensations throughout the steep walk back up to the research station. I was in good shape with all the walking I’d been doing, but trembling legs, a racing pulse and a pussy that was getting wetter with each step made the climb feel more strenuous than it normally was.
By the time I got home, the light was failing. Taking care of Akiko while waiting for the boat to arrive, I’d not got in any fieldwork, but I had notes from the day before to collate and pictures to get off the digital camera and back up. (When you’re running your computer off a generator, you back up obsessively.) Dinner to prepare, even.
But, before I did any of that, I needed to release some of the sexual tension flooding my body. There was no way I could focus in my current state, with my nipples so hard I was nonsensically convinced they’d rip my sweater and Gore-Tex pullover and my pussy so twitchy I couldn’t think straight and so wet that, if I didn’t do something soon, it would soak through to my jeans. Given how inconvenient it was to do laundry out here, that alone was a motivation to peel out of them.
So I did.
Right on the veranda.
Why not? It wasn’t like there was anyone to see me, and the view from the veranda was far more appealing than the streaky cement interior of the research station. Fog hung low over the water, but directly overhead the sky was streaked with the last of the sunset and jewelled with a rising full moon. The only sounds were the surf and the cries of birds, my beloved albatross among them. Romantic, even with no one to share it with.
It was cool verging on chilly, but the dusk air caressed my overheated skin. I plopped down on the little table some previous insane researcher had built out of driftwood, lay back and spread my legs.
The cool air on my crotch felt like a lover’s touch. I was that sensitive. That wet. That needy, in a way I didn’t remember feeling needy when I actually had a lover and was longing for him.
But it was far from enough.
I bit my lip as soon as I began circling my clit, bit back the cries that were threatening to burble out of me.
Then I remembered that I was completely alone, and let myself whimper encouragement to myself, cries as crazy as those of the albatross. They hadn’t started mating yet, but they were getting restless and, with that, noisier.
I pictured a man licking me. Not anyone I knew, but not the usual vague, faceless fantasy fill-in either. I pictured a vividly distinct individual: a handsome longhaired Japanese man with a narrowly triangular face, large but rather close-set almond eyes, a slender hard body I could only guess at under his elegant traditional clothes. His cock, though, I could see, or rather feel, pressing against me as he licked, nipped, took me to the edge of orgasm time and again without letting me slip over. I followed suit with the fantasy, teasing myself into a frenzy, but not letting myself come, letting my need build higher and higher.
I imagined my lover kissing and nipping his way up my body and – in the way of fantasy – slipping his cock into me without any of that awkward fumbling that happens in real life.
As I came, I would have sworn that I was coming around a cock, one that filled me like no other ever had – not because it was so huge, but because it was simply the perfect fit.
When I gave a damn about my surroundings again, it was cold and the blanket of stars you see only in such an incredibly isolated place was coming out.
And a fox was staring at me from the corner of the veranda, cheekiness incarnate in the cock of its head, in the way it held its magnificent tail.
It looked so intent, so interested in what I’d been doing, that I jumped up and tried to cover myself as I would have done for an unexpected human guest. My quick movement startled the beast, which darted off into the darkness.
I followed it for about two steps before I lost it in the shadows.
And I realised I shouldn’t have seen what I’d just seen. Foxes were common in rural parts of Japan proper, but not on Torishima. According to everything I knew about the ecology of the island, I should be the only mammal on it.
And yet I was sure I’d seen a fox.
A fox among the world’s last breeding population of short-tailed albatross, which had never seen a mammalian predator and had no idea something might try to eat their eggs or chicks.
I couldn’t imagine how it got here.
Maybe it was a trick of the fading light, the shadow of a cloud or something, but, if it were here, I was going to track it down and dispose of it.
How, I would think about later. I had no weapons. I was trained to protect wildlife, not to kill it. And I’d always been fond of foxes, with their cocky attitude and beautiful tails. But I couldn’t let one maraud through the birds of Torishima.
I stayed up late that night, trying to devise a plan that could kill one mysterious fox and not harm any of the island’s other wildlife.
With each minute I spent pondering the creature’s death, I felt sicker at heart. Yet I knew it would be far worse to let it roam free, assuming it was actually there and not some bizarre product of hormones and twilight. (But, I reasoned, if I’d imagined anything in the shadows at that moment, it would have been my hot fantasy man, not an animal that had no reason to be there.)
When I finally fell asleep, I tossed and turned in uneasy dreams. A fox, broken and bleeding under my hands, turned into the gorgeous Japanese man of my fantasies, who turned huge sad eyes on me and tried to speak.
I snapped myself from the dream several times, fearing to hear what he’d say, how he’d condemn me. The final time, though, I didn’t wake up – and I heard him apologise to me. I didn’t understand why he was apologising when I had killed him, but he didn’t have time to explain before death took him.
Once I knew to look for signs of a fox, they were laughably easy to find. Scat that never came from a bird. Narrow pathways winding through the sparse undergrowth.
I didn’t find broken eggs, though, or the remains of dead juveniles. My count of young albatross was the same as it had been.
The fox might have been going after any of the smaller less threatening-looking seabirds that nested here. Must have been, in fact – it had to eat something. There were no albatross eggs or chicks yet, and the juveniles from last year’s mating must be too big to look edible. (No surprise there; the adults have a seven-foot wing span and the juveniles are still impressively large.)
But, still, the day would come when it figured out that, for all their size and magnificence, albatross weren’t all that bright and wouldn’t know to fight off a fox until it was too late. Newly laid eggs would be extremely vulnerable.
So, to prevent that day, I laid snares on the fox’s trails, as far from any bird-nesting sites as I could. They were makeshift, the product of dim memory of having someone show me once how hunters in earlier times would catch rabbit.
I hoped they’d do the job.
And I hoped they wouldn’t.
That evening as the sun set, I gave in again to lust, dreaming of the man I’d dubbed ‘my samurai-poet’ as I made myself come and come. I’d hoped to wear myself out enough to fend off dreams of dying foxes.
It didn’t work.
I woke in the middle of the night in an actual cold sweat, shaking with the conviction of death. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was a voice on the wind, a beautiful voice begging, not for help, but for absolution.
And, once I was awake, I still heard it.
It compelled me out of bed, into my clothes and out into the night, flashlight in hand, looking for God only knew what.
The rational part of me, which was by far the larger part, figured I was still dreaming.
The part of me that had been raised on my grandmother’s Japanese folk tales (she was born in America, but she’d learnt them from her mother) thought of ghosts – the entire human population of the island, bird-hunters and their families, had been killed in a volcanic explosion in 1902. Thought of demonic oni. Thought of all sorts of hideous phantoms that should, by all logic, have kept me cowering in my futon with the covers over my head until morning dispelled them like the nightmares they were.
Instead, I was following that voice as if it were the voice of my lover, and damned if I could make myself stop or turn back.
I didn’t have to go far from the station to find what I was looking for. I almost tripped over it despite the flashlight.
I trained the light down to find the fox I’d sought. It wasn’t caught in a snare, and under the flashlight’s beam I couldn’t see any signs of injury, but it was struggling to breathe.
I crouched down next to it, careful to keep back. Despite the threat the fox represented to my birds, I pitied it, wished there was something I could do to help. But I didn’t dare. Sick or injured animals might strike out and, while rabies was rare in Japan, that wasn’t something I was willing to risk.
And then the fox laboured, turned its head towards me . . . and spoke. ‘I have wronged you, beautiful lady, and my regret for this is killing me. Please accept my apologies and let me right the wrong I did you.’
At that moment, the talking fox didn’t surprise me nearly as much as it should have.
His voice – and the voice was definitely male, and seemingly too large for that small body – was weak but melodious, almost seductive despite his obvious pain.
‘You’re . . . a kitsune,’ I stammered. Part of me told me I should be more alarmed than I was, but I was still expecting to wake up any moment and find myself in my futon.
The fox nodded.
Foxes don’t nod. But kitsune might.
Kitsune – spirit-foxes, shapeshifters, nature guardians, notorious tricksters and seducers. In most traditional tales, they were females, causing trouble for human men because their human forms were irresistibly lovely, but their ways were too alien for a relationship to last. But, as my grandmother had always said with a wink and a nod, there must have been males, or how would you get little kitsune? Human women were either too smart to be taken in, she reasoned, or too proud to admit they’d fallen for someone who turned out not to be human.
And kitsune, the good ones, at least, could die of regret.
I’d felt bad enough about causing the death of an ordinary fox. I couldn’t risk killing a creature of legend, even if it couldn’t possibly be real and talking with me.
‘I accept your apology, kitsune-san,’ I said in my most formal Japanese. ‘But how could you have wronged me?’ I felt myself colouring in the dark. ‘I didn’t mind you watching me last night.’
The fox’s voice seemed a little stronger. ‘No, not that. That was saying goodbye. I have watched you and your friend since you came here, seen the care you take of my birds and my island. But your friend was so clumsy that sometimes she came close to stumbling into nests. I decided she needed to learn to be more careful and materialised almost under her feet, just to startle her. I didn’t mean to do her harm, but she tripped and took a nasty fall. It’s my fault she got injured, and I deprived you of your friend, and when I saw you last night I realised how very alone you would be now without her.’
His cadences were formal, some of his words old-fashioned. It took me a while to realise that the word I was mentally translating as friend or companion was probably more like lover.
Despite his solemn tone, I smiled. Then I bowed. ‘Master Kitsune,’ I said, trying to remember my best formal manners, Japanese-style, ‘I accept your apology. I regret that Akiko got hurt, but I also think that you may have saved her life by forcing her to leave here. A clumsy person shouldn’t be scaling cliffs and I was scared for her every day. And, if it helps, Akiko was my work partner, but not my lover or even a close friend. I’ll miss having someone to talk to, but eventually someone else will come to watch the albatross with me.’
I swore that even under the flashlight’s beam I could see the kitsune’s breathing become easier, see his form relax.
‘But I must make amends,’ the kitsune insisted. ‘I only meant to scare her a bit, not to harm her or to leave you without companionship. May I offer you . . . conversation?’
My flashlight popped out, and then popped back on, equally mysteriously.
And, when it did, a beautiful man in old-fashioned layered robes stood where the fox had lain. A fox tail peeked out from under his robe. The man I thought I’d invented in my sexual fantasy, only far sexier in the flesh. Far sexier than any human had a right to be.
‘I hope my appearance pleases you,’ he said. ‘I cannot seem to create clothing like that worn today. Ah well.’ He shrugged with incredible grace. ‘Even if I could, they would not accommodate my tail.’
Then he touched my arm, and I felt heat sear through my awkwardly thrown-on layers.
He drew closer. His eyes weren’t brown but a pure gold like a fox’s eyes, and he was entirely male yet utterly beautiful and elegant in a way that men usually weren’t, at least not 21st-century straight men. More masculine and grown-up than the androgynous bishonen boys of anime, but with that silken appeal.
‘Conversation?’ I said, realising my voice was coy, flirtatious, dripping honey almost as much as my pussy suddenly was. ‘I forget . . . is that another word with more than one meaning?’
When he kissed me, I did something I’d only read about in particularly bad books: I swooned. Fire and earth and growth and pure animal lust overwhelmed me and for a second I literally couldn’t see or breathe.
He caught me as I started to buckle. ‘Forgive me yet again,’ he said. ‘It has been far too long. I must remember how to . . . moderate myself. Let me take you to my home.’
It was and was not a cave. That is, I knew where we were, and I knew that what I was entering was a small cave, a crevice in the lava. But, when we entered, it opened into a lovely home in the antique Japanese style, complete with rice-paper walls that couldn’t possibly be there. It was warm, well lit and as elegant as my handsome kitsune friend.
And it should have bothered me immensely that none of this was possible, that I was apparently about to make love with a mythical being in a house that couldn’t exist.
I was having a harder time by the second, clinging to the conviction that I was dreaming. It was too vivid, too detailed, too unlike any dream I’d ever had. Either I was going insane or the kitsune was throwing off pheromones my long-deprived body couldn’t resist – and, since I was way too busy to become crazy, I was voting for the latter.
He offered me food and, when I accepted, a lovely meal appeared: rice balls, inari and other sushi, beautifully presented on lacquerware, and a steaming bowl of udon soup. ‘You will still be hungry in the morning,’ he explained, his face merry. ‘But it will taste good. We so crave human food that we’ve learnt to create its likeness from air and will, although we have little need for nourishment.’
‘No problem there. What woman wouldn’t love a great dinner with no calories?’
He laughed, although his face showed he was puzzled. Then again, he probably hadn’t interacted much with humans since the volcano erupted, and, in 1902, people in such a remote place would be more worried about keeping weight on than taking it off.
We ate and chatted, and the food (though it might have been an illusion) was delicious, and his conversation quirky and poetic and charming, although some of it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because his vocabulary was archaic. And all the while, as we spoke, I felt my lust building.
Dream, hallucination or creature of the spirit world – whatever he might be, I had to have him.
I kept shifting my seat, feeling the weight of my desire in my pussy, in my hard eager nipples. The conversation was light, layered in innuendo and double meaning, but I couldn’t figure out the right way to say what I wanted.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. We reached at the same time for a rice ball. When our skin touched, my breath hissed in and I could feel my eyes widening. I strained forwards.
He brushed the remains of dinner aside with one grand gesture (they turned to twigs of heather and bright chrysanthemum flowers as they hit the tatami mat, the lacquered plates to large shells), grabbed my shoulders and pulled me bodily towards him. He was strong for all his sleek elegance, strong and graceful like the predator he was.
When he kissed me, I swore the island shuddered, like it did occasionally when the volcano grumbled and threatened. I half-expected his breath to be fetid, like a dog’s, but it smelt of sweetgrass and green tea, and he wore an elusive perfume, amber and cherry blossoms, that lay lightly on top of a natural scent that was half sexy man, half warm animal musk.
My clothing – sweatpants, T-shirt, fleece, Gore-Tex jacket – moved aside for him as gracefully as if he were peeling back layers of brightly coloured and patterned kimono to reveal the red silk hakima underneath.
My underwear wasn’t nearly as elegant as that, but he made it melt away.
Damn, I had to sleep with more supernatural beings.
I delved through layers of silk, enjoying the journey, but eager to get to the goal. His skin was as silken as his clothes, but hot, hotter than a human, and his chest was downy with fine red hair – no, fur that extended in a vee to his cock.
He whimpered when I toyed with his nipples, a puzzled, but pleased sound. When I dropped to my knees (wishing as I did that I had a modicum of his animal grace) and kissed my way down to his cock, his reaction was an amused aroused chuckle. ‘So bold! Are all women of this era like you?’
I looked up into his golden eyes. ‘Some are much wilder than I am. I’m kind of out of practice.’
His cock was shaped a bit differently from a human’s, and the way it emerged from the foreskin seemed different as well, not that I’d had a lot of experience with uncut cocks. And, when his tail swished forwards and brushed against me, I briefly had second thoughts.
If he were just my fantasy, my dream, he’d have been human inside his clothes – but he was definitely not. His differences were beautiful, even erotic, but at the same time startling.
Not an animal, but not a man either. A kitsune.
Alien. Wild. Supernatural, or perhaps extra-natural, an incarnation of nature. Not a safe partner for a human, if I were to believe my grandmother’s stories – not because he was evil, but because he was simply other.
Then the tail swept forwards again and very deliberately brushed between my legs, flicking at my clit.
Soft. The very definition of sensuality. But the rest of him was deliciously hard, and the contrast made me crazy.
I’ve never feared adventure. I’d come halfway around the world to pursue my dream, then planted myself on a deserted island.
This was just another adventure, or so my overheated body and mind assured me.
I took him in my mouth. He tasted of male musk, but not much more so than a turned-on man would at the end of a long day outdoors.
But, under that, he tasted of sunlight playing on the water, of the albatross dancing over the island, of the scruffy shrubs and the chrysanthemums, of salt and stars and volcanic ash. I could taste all of Torishima on his cock, and I wanted more, wanted him to spill the essence of the island into my throat.
He buried his fingers in my hair, began moving in opposition to my movements, letting his length fuck my mouth. I let one hand slip between my legs, stirred at my cunt to slick my fingers, began to circle my clit.
‘No!’ he cried. ‘Not like this!’ He tore away from me, leaving my mouth bereft. Then he pushed me back on to the low table.
‘Such lovely human skin,’ he murmured, as he kissed and licked my throat, kissed my collarbone. He suckled my breasts, first one, then the other, taking them further into his mouth than I would have thought possible, and I could tell he was tasting my world on my skin as I had tasted his world on his.
And, when he worked his way between my legs, he lapped at me eagerly, delicately, his hands working in concert, almost pushing me over, then pulling back at the last second and letting it build again.
‘You taste of art I’ve never seen, poems I’ve never heard,’ he said. ‘You taste of cities and, yet, of caring for what is not human.’
That so struck me that, even though my brain should have been non-functional by that point, I asked, ‘You know cities? I thought you were a wild thing.’
‘My kind is between the wild and the human, guarding each from the other. I have been in cities, before I followed the first humans here a century and more ago. They needed more kitsune here,’ he added sadly. ‘One was not enough for the balance to be preserved. But now there are humans like you to help.’
Then, without warning, as if to force his mind away from melancholy thoughts, he pulled back. ‘Turn over,’ he said and, when I didn’t arrange myself in quite the position he’d had in mind, he roughly positioned me on hands and knees on the mat, ass high, head down.
He knelt behind me, teased at my pussy with his cock. When I pushed back towards him, he growled and put one hand on the scruff of my neck, pinning me into place.
I’ve never been submissive in bed and I wasn’t submissive then – I growled back at him, pushed against his cock – but, still, the show of dominance made me shudder, made me open for him even more than I already was.
‘Now!’ I’d meant it as a plea, but it came out as a snarl.
And apparently he liked that, because he drove into me. None of this inching in, teasing, that I’d expected after his delight in foreplay, but a claiming.
And I gave it right back, shaking his hand off my neck, driving back on to his cock, thrusting on to his thrusts.
I’d been rippling at the edge of orgasm so long that when the wave broke it was a tsunami, or maybe more like the volcano blowing the top off my world, sending wave after wave of white-hot lava over me. I clenched around him, working his cock without even trying to.
But he kept going.
Another series of waves threatened to drown me.
But he kept going, slowing down a bit to let me catch my breath, let the tension build again. This time, I sensed, he would let himself come with me.
‘Not so fast,’ I said. ‘This time I want to look at you. I want to watch your face while you come.’
‘But my tail . . . and my face . . . I might not look . . .’
I understood what he couldn’t say. As he lost control, he might also lose control of his shape, lose his gorgeous human mask.
‘Will it be your true face I see?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then please . . .’
I think he expected me to lie under him. In any event, he seemed surprised when I urged him on to his back and straddled him – surprised, but pleased.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I get to watch you. You are so beautiful.’
I wondered at that for a second. I’m not unattractive, but not beautiful by either Japanese or American standards: too sturdy for the one, too small-breasted and short-waisted for the other, with the broad nose and flat cheekbones of someone from Japanese peasant stock.
And then I sank on to his cock and began to move, deciding that, if a glorious supernatural creature thought I was beautiful, I was damn well going to believe him for the moment. Especially when his clever hands began to play with my clit, coaxing me towards another climax.
Heat filled me, blinding me. I had to close my eyes against the surge of pleasure. Closed my eyes and saw Torishima below me, a tiny rugged jewel in the ocean, as an albatross saw it, then saw it as obsidian and shale and plants and nests and feathers and guano, a fox’s-eye view.
But I wasn’t going to be cheated. I reached back, began tickling his balls, felt them shift and clench under my touch. When I felt his muscles tighten and ripple, I forced my eyes open, forced myself away from the vision to watch his face.
Or rather his faces, morphing back and forth.
The handsome man. A woman lovely in the old Japanese style, with fragile features and a cloud of black hair. An ordinary red fox. A black fox with nine tails. An old man with wise merry eyes.
A being not clearly male or female, not clearly fox or human. Fox ears and whiskers and human eyes and lips. Stunning.
That face was the one he settled into as his climax claimed him.
His back arched like someone had fed him strychnine, and the sound he made was high and surreal, as much a fox’s yips as a human’s cries.
And as he poured hot as lava into me, I came again, even more violently than before.
I ended up curled in his chest. He was a human man again, or as much of one as he ever had been – his tail, as well as his arms, were curled possessively around me – and we were floating on a cloud of his long black hair.
‘I am of the night,’ he whispered. ‘In the morning, you’ll be in your own bed, alone, but you’ll see me again.’ He sniffed at my hair like a cat might, an endearingly animal gesture. ‘I won’t stay away. I can’t. You are far too beautiful.’
This time, he used a different word for you, one that roughly translated means ‘all of you honourable people’. This time he definitely meant not me as an individual, but human women, or humans in general.
Well, that worked for me. He was beautiful in his own right, but all wild things were beautiful in their wildness.
And, from what I could tell, we both had the job of maintaining a balance between the wild and the human.
Perhaps we had more of a chance to make things work than the human–kitsune couples in traditional tales, more common ground to build on.
And, if not, I had had an experience even rarer and more marvellous than observing the albatross.
The albatross! I’d almost forgotten them. How much time had passed in this world between worlds? In some old tales, visiting a kitsune could distort your sense of time horribly. A day could be a year; a year could be a day. Was I reckoned to be missing, lost somewhere on Torishima? Worse yet, had I missed the mating flights?
‘Don’t fret,’ he said. ‘When the sun comes up, only one night will have passed, and it will be time for the albatross to dance.’
I had been too sleepy by then, worn by great sex and sheer strangeness, to parse that.
But, when I took my weary, but still blissful body to the cliffs in the morning, still bemusedly brushing fox fur from my clothes, the air was filled with wings tinted rose by sunrise, meeting and courting in a dance older than anything human.
Somewhere in the distance, although he’d said he was night’s creature, I heard a fox’s bark, sounding for all the world like a man’s sated laughter.
I turned to the direction from which it came and whispered on to the wind, ‘Tonight I want you in your true form.’
And the wind caressed me like a hand, like fur.