Keep Walking
You are tense as you continue through the forest. There are birds twittering around you. You can smell rabbits. Something is very wrong here. You can smell other foxes, you ignore them. You haven’t marked any territory and you have no reason to fight them. You can hear their high-pitched barks from a distance, but they let you pass.
You keep going. You feel uneasy as you step through the ferns. The trees around you are young, barely leafing. Their limbs are spindle-like. They look like bird’s claws, bare as they are. There are small leaves sprouting on their ends. It is too late in the year for this. The leaves should be falling, not growing, you know that much.