I wish it would stop grinning, Clutch thought. It was grinning with its tongue hanging out, like a drooler. He couldn’t get over the fact that the Fox was, technically, a canine.
“I’m sorry I interrupted your prayer,” it said, changing the subject. “You appeared to be praying to a fading group of stars. This seemed unnatural to me, since a group of stars can’t do anything to help a person. That is why I thought you were rabid.”
The Fox seemed to be inviting him to explain his source of inspiration. A discourtesy. All people, most of all a Fox, know that hunters never give away their spirit helpers. It was time he took charge of this discussion: “What’s a Fox doing tiptoeing along a railway track? Looks sketchy to me. Perhaps you’re getting old and need to practice your balance.”
“The metal of the track doesn’t take a scent,” the Fox said.
“Coming home from hunting, are you? Empty-handed by the looks of it.”
“I’m guessing you’re not looking for another argument. You’re looking for two wounded raccoon youngsters who came this way.”
“Tell me where they are, and I’ll think better of foxes.”
“I can do that. But first, you should do something for your wounds so you can get to where you’re going. Follow me.” With this, the Fox wheeled around deftly and began trotting down the rail. No problem with that one’s balance.
Clutch hobbled along until he came to where the Fox was standing, overlooking one of the tributaries that made up Beaver Creek. Now, up close, he appeared to be an elderly Fox. The flop of his left ear indicated his age.
“What’s that tree?” Fox asked.
“It’s a Pine.”
“Let’s go and see what a Pine has for you.”
“Alright.”
Clutch stood beside the Fox at the base of the pine. The stranger was letting him get close. What was important about the pine?
“That’s Pine Sap,” the Fox said, pointing with his muzzle. “Rub a little of it on your wound, and you’ll be able to walk without pain.”
Clutch did as he was told. After all, the Fox was an elder, and he knew some things. Most foxes don’t get to grow old. The sap was sticky and he’d never be able to get it off his paws, but when he patted it on his left flank, it numbed the pain.
Foxes and Raccoons ought to be colleagues, Clutch thought. They have a lot in common. The independence and privacy of being hunters kept the two species apart.
“You can wash your paws in the creek, then follow it south and then west through the culvert. You’ll come out on the parkland surrounding the lake. Things won’t be what they seem. You’re in a tricky place, so you must use some trickery.”
“What kind of trickery?”
The Fox seemed to be consulting a circle of vulpine elders deep in his interior. “You smell like Creek Town aristocracy.”
“I do?”
“Something to remember. It will give you a cover. We’ll go our ways now. It was good meeting you.”
“Thank you. And thanks for the idea.”
The Fox blinked, and turned to go up the tracks. He called over his shoulder.
“Tally-ho!”
23
The excitement of the city overwhelmed Bandit, making his fear just another element in a continual intense high. Most stimulating of all was the spontaneous kinship of fully urbanized raccoons. People greeted him like a friend without asking where he was from or where he belonged in society. No one had a past here. There were no clan territories, no inhibitions about trespass. At night, the whole downtown with its laneways and back alleys became a communal feeding ground, with cubs underfoot everywhere and mothers foraging in small groups until dawn before sorting out their children and taking them home to sleep. There were raccoons of every age and hue. Among the mix, Bandit noticed newcomers from Raccoonopolis, the great city over the horizon. They too joined this panorama of individualists who gave the night streets the atmosphere of a carnival.
What permitted this urban commonwealth to flourish was the abundance of food. The first place Bandit went to after he left the river was the district where Primates enjoyed their nightlife, which involved a great deal of eating and drinking. Restaurants meant edible waste, and edible waste meant continual nightly provender. In the downtown core, waste pick-up was twice a week, giving raccoons two nights in which to pillage green bins lined up on the streets and blue bins outside of bars. On the non-partying nights, the organic waste in the smelly back alleys was picked clean by roving, high-spirited bands of raccoons. And the quality of the garbage was mouth-watering: on his first night, Bandit tasted food he never knew existed, food from far-off places around the world. And the kinds of alcohol left in bottles – glad he wasn’t a drinker. As well as the easy food there was an abundance of accommodation to support the growing raccoon population, though most of the lodgings were precarious dens high up in the vines that draped some of the downtown buildings or in the roof pastures which the Primates had fashioned. “As Primates evolve, so evolve Raccoons,” Bandit thought, remembering the saying of his mother’s.
The second biggest stimulation offered by the city, he soon discovered, was the sheer volume of communication. The scent-trails left by raccoons zigzagged everywhere, intersected, dispersed, concentrated again at major sites. And these trails were deposited in layers of time over the course of a night, composing an up-to-date, four-dimensional space-time map of city life. Bandit noticed that this map was checked regularly, in some cases compulsively, by the city dwellers. Who had gone to the outdoor Farmers Market. Who was just returning from sifting the river bottom. Who was on their way to visit their folks by means of the creek which traversed the city and was a thoroughfare for raccoon traffic. Another saying: “The nose is before your ears, so trust it first!”
This scent-map was accompanied by an oral map, offering a matching volume of detail and a great deal more meaning, though much of it was untrustworthy. Bandit listened keenly to the news from talkative fellow raccoons he kept bumping into. They conveyed anecdotes, gossip, urban myths, transient enthusiasms, trivial sightings, ghost stories, affectionate accounts of cats, aids to meeting other raccoons for the purposes of mating, and irrational outbursts of rage. The common theme of the oral map, if it had one, was the state of the world. Its common tone was that of an upbeat fellowship of survivors enduring Short-Sighted Stupidity in High Places. Tonight the news was about Migrants Pressing on the Borders, the Serious Den Shortage, Is There a Future for Cubs? Dangerous Drugs in the Food, and Raccoons Killed by Cars. Everywhere in this mix of scarcely reliable and flagrantly false information, one personage figured repeatedly. It was the One with No Name.
Accompanied by his High Guard, he had fought a distant Battle on the Southern Frontier thought to be at the lower tributary of Beaver Creek behind Creek Town. Whether this was a Heroic Victory over Criminal Invaders or a Crushing Defeat inflicted on No Name and his Maggots depended on which version of the news one heard. In any case, it was agreed that the migrants must have been starving to attempt a passage up the creek in broad daylight. But no sooner had this newsflash rippled through the population than it was replaced by notice of another event. No Name was Coming! Following his Mighty Victory, he had decided to deal with the Diseased Migrants already in the city, hiding out in the general population. In fact, he was coming to the city to Study the Problem Himself. Indeed, he might have already arrived and was holding High-Level Consultations with the City Elders. Bandit discarded this false news. How could No Name be in two places at once? More to the point, there was no problem of illegal immigration to study, and the legendary leader had no jurisdiction on the West Bank of the River, least of all in the Commonwealth City. Yet Bandit felt an obscure pride in the fact that the subject of so much of the news was his father.
Nowhere in the spoken exchanges did he hear news of Sensibella.
She’d like it in this place where people dreamed out loud, sharing their innermost feelings with strangers who listened sympathetically, waiting for their turn to do the same. But beneath the open-spirited greetings and exchanges lay a margin for trickery. And Sensibel, while she enjoyed trickery as much as the next raccoon, wasn’t street-proofed against a casual urban deceit which required, Bandit came to realize, an equally open-spirited skepticism. He realized this when without introducing himself a male raccoon promptly invited him home to his den. (Bandit declined.)
How could Sensibel survive this seductive deceit? And she barely had any experience with motor vehicles. She would be terrified.
He’d arrived in the downtown a whole night later than her because he had awakened at the break of day when it was dangerous to travel. And he’d done what she’d likely done on arrival: use the night to find a place to sleep, then spend the following day in privacy to de-stress. He had to reach her before Smartwhisker and her prospective in-laws found her.
But where to begin?
Bandit went back to where he’d spent his first night in the city, under the bridge carrying traffic across the river beside the factory of sugary tastes, and looked at the reflection of the moon on the water. Because no one had seen her using the Crosstown stream, she must have gone east, skirted the Heights where her father’s people lived, then entered the River and let the current carry her down to the city. Brilliant! Where was the likeliest place for her to come ashore? The question became useless as soon as he asked it. There were too many possibilities and it would take the rest of the night to sniff each of them out. Even then, it wasn’t certain if he could pick up her trail at the riverbank. Ask a different question. Where were the unlikely places for her to come out?
This question worked immediately. It eliminated the whole shoreline from the bridge he was sitting under to another bridge at the Heights to the north. So he’d start his search a short distance downstream where the current slackened as the river broadened.
Bandit worked his way along a steep shoreline parallel to a railway track that ran out of the factory. Suddenly he broke out into forested parkland. This was a surprise. It seemed to be designed by the Primates so they could stroll through specially planted settings of trees and flowers. He came to a pond contained by shale rock just as if it was a piece of wilderness. He stopped to drink, watched by the statue of Primate child, then continued south. At night, the park was a fragrant silence amidst the smell and noise of the city. He came to a grass lawn wide enough to hold all the raccoons in the city. At its far end were tables and chairs: an outdoor restaurant. Check for threats. None. He scurried across the lawn, ignored the waste collection bins outside the kitchen, and found himself on a wooden plank floor overhung by tree branches. It smelled of dropped salad bits, bread crumbs, ice cream, and of creatures who had come to clean it up: sparrows, mink, ants. Here was a water bowl for droolers. Down below where the shoreline curved in to make a cove was a dock for boats. Every instinct in his body advised that this was where Sensibel had made landfall. It was sheltered, close to the downtown, and free of raccoons.
Wait! That shape on the dock. It was clearly a raccoon. It held something long and thin that glittered in the moonlight. Why would a raccoon expose themself at the end of a dock? Ah, the sugary scent of alcohol. It must be that one’s habit to drink alone here. That meant it saw things which normally passed unnoticed, for instance, the arrival of Sensibel.
