Acrid air, like iron-tinged rabbit liver, an echo of the afterlife. The sun was low. Perma-night ran fast on quiet paws toward this side of the world, and the tails of the gods writhed in green and red above. This was a night of the hunt.
Fast, quick, beautiful smells sang on the wind, and they guided Methusala. The invisble prints of a vole caught the light of the moon like shimmering coins.
He’d seen them, forever playing in his mind - impossible objects. The coin.
Loud humans, sounds echoing always, and Methusala stayed away. Stay away. Stay away!
That was the scream, mandate, and constitution of his mother, aunt, and grandma, back millennia, before time. And when his litter could emerge from the den for the first time in this spring, ah -
it was not the swell of pride, but a hardening around the eyes to think that yes, they will join the arena. Of snow ice light dark the hunt and the icy dagger of life sinking right into your heart like waking up to the crown of the sun. Dripping icicles! Amen.
— and he would tell the same to his children; stay away! stay away!
Because some things were to be attended to and most were to be fled from. Fled, until lungs burned with iron and the light of the stars, twinkling, a thousand fox eyes winking down to say here too, we are fighting - there is no permanent sleep. Just as there is no permanent waking.
You will be born, and you will die.
But it was not a vowl, no. It was a trap.
And just like that, Methusala knew, it was his time. The cold, metal jaws closed on his neck with six hundred pounds of pressure, and his third and fourth vertebrae separated. His lungs and heart ceased to function, but the spark of his synapses kept running like a dog does in its sleep, and he remembered that one time he not stayed away, despire the screams of the ancestors stay away stay away stay AWAY and he, in his arrogance, had thought, no. Just once. No. Just once.
And he had crept, so quiet, like a shadow made of light, to the strange black flat ground that must have been the underworld that had been brought up to the above ground, and he wondered, is this the afterlife? What he could not identify as cars and vans arranged in lines in what he could not identify as a parking lot.
But the thought fled, for there was a smaller human - still a towering canyon of a figure, to be sure, as a fox is a fox and a fox is rather small in comparison to these sweaty bipeds - and Methuselah, younger then, a cub, had frozen like the ice beneath his white paws.
Its movement was strange. Arrogant, stupid, yet curious. Not evil. But alien. It dropped something and made a noise.
And that’s when he saw it, a shimmering circle, impossibly perfect, glinting, rolling, right up to Methusala’s nose. And what could he do? Should he run? He knew not what this thing was! It could fly, it could jump, it was bigger than him, so it must surely be able to run faster. So he remained motionless, knowing from the myths his grandparents told, that these creatures spent most of their lives in a sort of blindness…
Though they did not understand why it lifted sometimes, randomly, and they could change, like the wind. Become terrible.
The shimmering circle stopped. And Methusala did something utterly irrational. He went over and sniffed it.
It smelled like bronchioles twisting and snapping, like the rocks by the sea. It smelled like blood, and yet it clearly contained an ounce of the sun itself, the way it gleamed, all on its own, impossible bright. A source of energy? A captured soul? And methusalah knew it was all of these things - it was a star, a soul, taken from the sky. Methusalah called it it, and the shape looked at him. The shape froze. They stayed like that a long time. It did things with its face that seemed to communicate interest.
Then it picked up the soul and it moved away.
This was Methusalah’s last thought -
Not the certainty that he had seen, that day his soul being collected, and taken away into the sky, to its next life. No, though he did think that as bleed seeped down into his orbital, blotting his fading vision.
No, his last thought was this - did the soul collector know what it felt like to die? For in some act of mercy, Methusala’s head had been snapped upwards, to see the dancing of the gods in their greens and reds. And he thought no, the soul collectors, though they are numerous, they could not know the beauty of death. If they did, that small soul collector would have handled his soul with more care, and not drop it. But Methusalah was glad he did, because it meant he got to meet a baby god, and to see that it was just as gentle and naive as a cub, and it was strange to behold the infancy of a god as a more junior entity than oneself. Terrifying and calming all at once.
“Hey Bjorn!” said a voice in Icelandic, hours after the fox’s consciousness had faded. “We got another one! Still warm.”
“Great,” said Bjorn. “We still have room on the cart. I think with ten of them we should have a good enough batch for the scientists to work with. If not, they can fuckin deal with it. I’m ready for bedtime.”
“It’s too late for bedtime Bjorn - it’ll be morning soon,” said the other man, looking up at the stars, the cold black abyss above them tinged with the first traces of the morning’s pink.
“Never too late,” Bjorn said, putting a hand on his colleague’s shoulder, breath with a slight edge of whisky. “And don’t forget that. Never too late.” And then Bjorn looked up at the sky and breathed in the air and he thought, maybe I should become a writer. Then I could tell the folks at home what it’s like out here, on a night like this.
And it never crossed his mind that the fox that lay dead at his feet had experienced something much more profound that night than perhaps he ever would, every day of its life.