Doomed

Twenty moons after her birth, she met a human for the first time. Her first human — her first of many — was a woman. She was a wanderer like the fox, seeking only the bare necessities. Unlike the fox, the woman was a fugitive. Whether from the ravages of war or from the excesses of peace, no one will ever know; the fox, for her part, understood not what it meant to be a runaway. A fox, after all, always belonged exactly where she chose to be. The woman, meanwhile, had no place of her own on this earth. Yet she was warm, warmer than the soft breast of the fox’s mother and the radiant rays of the noon sun.