Foxes, worms, and cats. Three distinctly different creatures: and yet, the people of Earth are determined to conflate them.
They say that wormholes are gateways to other dimensions. They say cats can slip between worlds. Cats do slip sometimes, by accident, but foxes do so with purpose.
Foxes are the ones that dig tunnels between worlds. The inner workings of foxholes are subject to debate, as is which world foxes came from originally, but the people who think about such things don’t particularly care. Perhaps foxes were never confined to one world or another. Why they stay on Earth isn’t evident: they are better suited to the other world, which is a softer, quieter place.
There are people, of a sort, in the other world. They call themselves the Azarans. Those who know nothing of the Azarans call it Purple, but it was never their world to name.
Azara conducts energy better than our own world. Things whisper. The light is dim and gets lost easily, like perpetual dusk. Darkness is not black, but silver. Much of Azara, at least where the foxholes are, is something like sparse forest, with flowering trees rising from grass or moss. Purple is the dominant color, from grass stalks tickling at reddish trunks to the leaves above, and the tiny purple flowers light against the dusky violet sky.
It smells purple there, in the same way Earth’s forests smell green: rich and alive, but with a hint of something Earth lacks. It mostly floats on the breeze, this Other scent, like far-off music. There are a few bushes scattered about, but not in cluttered, choking masses like Earth bushes. They leave space. In Azara, life takes what it needs and leaves the rest.
Foxes slip through it all, strangely silver and shadowless.
But where there is beauty, there are those who would destroy it for their own gain. Foxholes aren’t picky. If they detect fox, even incomplete fox, they’ll let it through, along with whatever it’s attached to.
In Earth’s black-dark corners, people whisper of a world called Purple. The fox parts that serve as crude tickets there are in high demand, and they are not so hard to obtain. You need only know where to look — and be willing to kill. There are no laws against poaching in Azara. Like the wild things, you simply take what you deem yours.
And so foxhunters came to be.
The people from this world are foreigners in Azara, with their dull skin and heavy features. They wear guns on their hips and boots that crush small things. They walk through the world like brazen kings, breaking what they touch. They fire their guns into the air. The wild things, their ears attuned to the hushed sounds of Azara, panic, springing from nooks and hollows and calling to one another, and the foxhunters laugh. The bullet lands somewhere in the purple, sharp and angular against the softness.
In this way, the foxhunters take advantage of the wild things. The creatures of Azara respect quiet. They step softly so as not to strain it. When they call, it is in hushed voices. The thing about quiet creatures is that they are often very fragile. The thing about guns is that they are often very effective.
A typical foxhunt goes like this:
A man sets out a bit of cheese or ham from Earth. He shoves his way into a patch of bushes. He lays down on his stomach, the scent of purple vegetation filling his nostrils. Perhaps he swats at a few curious will-o-the-wisps as they float by. His gun is a black void in the silver darkness.
He waits.
A vixen slips by. She is small, a streak of red with dainty black stockings. She has a den of young kits nearby, their coats still grey. She hates to leave them alone, but her mate vanished just before they were born, and she must eat occasionally. She does not know his fate, but she suspects by now that he isn’t coming back.
Her nose twitches as she sniffs the meat lying in the middle of the clearing. She opens her jaws to take it. Then her head snaps up and she scents the air, the pungent reek of man curling in her nostrils, and she tenses, but it’s too late. The gun fires. The clearing errupts. Fear has an odor, though the hunter cannot smell it over his own scent. It smells musky and metallic, like the silver blood lacing the purple grass stalks. It puddles around the vixen and trickles like mercury over her red fur.
The hunter hurries to his kill, carelessly crushing small things on the way. As he slings her over his shoulder, he does not see tragedy, or waste, or even beauty. He sees riches. The tail will fetch the highest price, and then the ribs. He carries the corpse back to his world, its eyes blank, its open mouth spilling silver down his back.
But there is something the foxhunter does not know. In Azara, you must kill something twice before it truly dies: first its body, then its soul. The souls of the half-killed foxes are reborn into clumsy kit bodies. But the kits are growing up, and they have not forgotten. In silver-dark corners, young foxes gather. Someday when the hunter surfaces they will be waiting, lined up in a row with their silvery coats and shining eyes.
And then it won’t matter how many guns he has.
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