The fox spoke until the moon had become a dim white plate at the bottom of the sky. The morning light had already stretched its light blue fingers towards the horizon when he finally sat down on his red haunches and turned to drink from the bowl offered by a lesser fox.
Harmut sat silent, feeling as if she were in a dream. The story that had woven itself through her brain that night was as meaningful and intricate as a dream. She didn’t dare move or speak, for fear that the scene might disappear of a moment. She rocked lightly back and forth, pondering all that the fox had told her in the last hours.
His words, the deep, clear meanings of the tale,
had brought her unkempt mind up to the vale’s
taut edge, and though she knew it deep inside
that all the fox had spoke was bonafide,
she struggled to retain her dreamlike grip.
She grasped at the full meaning of her trip.
“Fox veritas,” the fox assured her thus,
and she believed his story, more or less.
But can a girl live dumbly on the earth
so long, and never questioning its birth?
And blindly take as fact its history?
He told of floods and foxholes, and of fleeing
aimless to the future, back and forth,
and in between, and everything of worth
resolving and retaining, keepers be
the foxes of the jewels of history.
“von Mona Lisa,” said the fox to her,
“von Air Supply von Beethoven von more”,
And slow the breath took form inside her lung,
and fox linguista sat upon her tongue,
and when she finally slept, she could not say.
She woke alone and felt the freezing day.
She sat upright, shivering. Her thoughts were fragile as dreams, but she regarded the soft impression on the sand, and knew that what she had experienced was true. That the foxes were rescuers of the treasures of history, traveling through foxholes in time. but where were these treasures they had rescued from the flood and before? The Mona Lisa, which no one had seen in centuries? The musical recordings of Air Supply, or the band itself, which had disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace two centuries ago? Why did the foxes rescue these treasures, and where did they hide them? And would they, she wondered sadly, trying without success to warm herself by covering her limbs in the cold sand, rescue her?
