The vixen stalked a few steps away and then dropped to the ground. She rolled onto her side to gaze directly up at her brother, her love for him obvious now. He was the runt. He’s small, but he’s tough. I don’t want him with me when I hunt. But he follows me. She tossed her head and growled at Pax, as though blaming him for her brother’s play.
In the Author’s Note preceding the narrative, Pennypacker makes it clear that there will be a compromise sort of anthropomorphizing of the animal characters in the novel. They will have the ability to make their communication know to the reader, but it will not be in the form of actual dialogue featuring quotation marks. She writes that what passes for dialogue and discourse on the part of the foxes will be displayed in italics. The excerpt above is an example of this in which the Pax, the fox co-protagonist of the story, has come across other foxes in the wild for the first. He is observing their behavior, especially that of a sexy little potential mate occupied in play with her brother.
Pax had been only sixteen days old when Peter had rescued him—a fatherless, motherless curl of charcoal fur, his eyes barely opened—and it wasn’t long before he’d come to trust the quiet, gangly boy who’d brought him home.
The reason why Pax has never come across his own kind in the wild is explained here. This is a story about a boy and a fox and their friendship that is as real as that between a boy and his dog, a girl and her horse and a boy and a girl. It is a friendship that cross the barrier of species and becomes something each depends upon. In his discourse with other foxes, Pax consistently refers lovingly to Peter as “my boy.” The claim of ownership which characterizes the relationship between a human and an animal is shown to cut both ways and it is not the ownership of possession, but the ownership of love and understanding. The relationship between the fox and the boy is not quite portrayed as that of equals in the sense of the fox being personified into a human equivalent, but it is still a little ambiguous and ambivalent.
War came to the land where I lived with humans. Everything was ruined. There was fire everywhere. Many deaths, and not only of the war-sick, the adult males. Children, mothers, elders of their own kind. All the animals. The men who were sick with the disease spilled their chaos over everything in their path.
The story is set against a backdrop of a war taking place among the humans. In fact, it is only because of the outbreak of this war that Peter and Pax are separated and it is that separation which instigates the crux of the plot: the journey by Peter to find Pax. The author makes a truly fascinating choice to give no concrete details about the war. There are no subtle clues which indicate that it is a famous war already given a name. Likewise, there is no forwarding of information that indicates it is a prediction of a future war. It is simply another in the long and never-ending series of pointless conflicts marking the history of mankind. The point of not making the details of the war precise is the point itself: all but a very, very few wars are essentially interchangeable in that are started for stupid reasons and once they end everything usually goes back to pretty much the way things were before.
