There were two times of year that it was easy for a fox to burn down a village, if it wanted to: first, midsummer, when all the bonfires were lit, though that was trickier because the men were out and about all night. The other time was the weeks leading up to Yule, or Christmas as the men called it now, with their candles in windows and on trees, the lanterns hanging from eaves. It was one such lantern that Martin and Melinda fox stood staring up now, round as the moon, with St Nicholas and his reindeer painted around it in black as if they had just been caught in silhouette on their Christmas Eve journey. The lantern swayed gently back and forth in an icy breeze, and the foxes’ golden, slitty eyes flickered below it like four candles. Each fox clenched in their jaws a long, slender branch smeared at one end with copious amounts of pine pitch.
“You knock it down,” Martin mumbled to his mate around the stick, “and then you go east and I go west. Light all the hay mows, the middens, everything.”
“Watch your tail,” Melinda mumbled back.
“Just wait a minute,” came a voice from above. It sounded like it was coming from the lantern, and the foxes blinked at each other. They weren’t sure about St Nicholas: though they had never seen him in particular as far as they knew, they had seen spirits of other people wandering along the creeks at night, or in the ruins of villages, and those spirits sometimes spoke to them, learning at last in death the language of all living things on Earth.
“Oh, Armand, you scared the lights out of me!” Martin heard Melinda breathe after a short run of foxy curses dark as the pitch on their sticks.
The big barn owl was perched on the roofline of the cottage where the Santa lantern was hanging, silhouetted against the clouds overhead. “There’s a child in the village who understands our tongue. We’re going to get her to tell the men to stop the train.”
“Fat chance of that,” Martin spat around his stick. “I know what will stop them.”
“And where will they stop, Martin?” Armand swooped down to the eavesline, making the foxes step back. His wingspan was broad as the two of them nose to tail. “Where will they get the timber, if you burn down their houses and they have to rebuild them? The stone, the clay? If what you want is for them to leave our forest alone, this isn’t the way.”
For a moment the only sound was the breeze brushing through the village, shaking corn dollies on doors and skittering a few oak leaves across the frozen mud. Then, Melinda spat out her stick and turned and walked back toward the fields. After a moment, Martin dropped his stick as well. “It’ll never work,” he growled back over his shoulder. “It never does with them.” And then he vanished behind the cow shed.
The Rookery 