Pax Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker

Illustrated by Jon Klassen

There’s a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

ONE

Pax ran. He always ran – nearly a year after he’d last been caged, his muscles still remembered the hex wire.

This morning the running was different, though. This morning the fox ran because below the hard, matted forest floor, below the crusts of snow that remained in the deepest pine-shades and below the wafers of ice lacing the puddles, he smelled it: Spring. New life surging up – up from the bark and the buds and the burrows – and the only possible response to up was go.

And then suddenly he stopped. Rabbit.

Bristle was always hungry these days.

Pax canted toward the scent and found the warren. It had been abandoned only hours before. It held two kit carcasses, one dead many days, one lifeless a single night.

This was the third time in as many days that Pax had come upon dead young. The first, a field mouse burrow, held an entire litter. He had brought home the freshest body, but Bristle’s snout wrinkled in disgust.

The second was a chipmunk nest. Bristle had refused the meal of dead pups, too, so Pax didn’t bother with the rabbit kits. Instead, suddenly tired, he turned for the Deserted Farm that he, Bristle and Runt had claimed since leaving the place where Runt had lost his leg.

Bristle wasn’t in sight, but she was near. He trotted along her trail to an old shed. A hole had been tunneled under its steps, freshly scraped dirt scattered all around. Pax followed her scent inside.

Bristle was curled at the back of the new den, her bright fur clumped with sand. She opened one sleepy eye to her mate, then settled her face back onto her paws. Pax was baffled. The morning air was already warming and held no threat of storm. Even more perplexing, there was a scent in the den he had never encountered before, but which he knew as well as his own. It was of Bristle, but it was not Bristle.

He nosed her neck, asking her to track the air. New?

Yes, new. Us.

Pax still did not understand. Bristle rolled onto her back and stretched out her round belly. Kits. Soon.