Chapter 24

The fox padded on velvet paws. Her amber eyes gleamed in the strange light—not normal dark, but the magic half light reflected from new-fallen snow. Snow speckled the red-brown hair on her back. She placed each foot carefully into the cold snow, leaving a line of neat prints across the snowy garden. Every so often she stopped, her black nose twitching, listening out for danger. In her mouth she carried the limp body of a dead mouse, still warm.

The tiny cubs were waiting for her, deep in the den beneath the tangled thorny stems of the blackberry bushes. She had been gone a long time. Hunting was hard in the snow. Most mammals were hiding or hibernating, curled up deep down in their own burrows, and the mother fox was exhausted—and extra wary; she had spent most of the day listening to strange sounds, loud voices, machines, whirring, and sawing, a horrible whining, screaming sound. Every hair on her body had stood alert. Was the danger coming closer? She would have to make a new den, in a more hidden, secret place away from noise and people. She had already sniffed around an old, disused badgers’ sett in the horses’ field. That might do; it was dry and quiet, away from people and machines. She would have to move the cubs one by one, carrying them by the scruff of their neck, through the cold night. But first she had to feed them.