The damp moss squelches and gives under the little fox's claw-dragged toes. Round pebble. Spin. Flip. Catch. Another round one. Spin. Flip. Catch. She tilts her head, listening to the soft green hush of the valley and the tiny click of her paws against the stones.
She snatches a river stone from the shallow trickle, holds it up where the grey mist swallows the edges. It squiggles like a sleeping snake, thick at the belly, thin at the tail. Not round. Not round at all. Her whiskers flatten against the cool fog.
THUMP. Her front paw slams the ground and a star-burst of wet soil splatters across her chest and ears. A low growl rumbles under her jaw, shaking the moss. Beyond the thinning mist, the hillside blazes amber. She looks up, claws digging deep, nostrils wide and wet.
She starts up the hill. The mist has thinned to a grey scarf wrapped tight around her ankles. Flat sandstone — flip. A curling vine yanked free from the dirt, coiling in her grip. The path tilts steeper, steeper. Her paws find new rocks with every step.
She presses her nose to a cluster of round wildflower buds, bumping each one softly. Round. Squiggly. Round again. Her whiskers tickle against the tight petals, and she sniffs once, twice, the green smell flooding her muzzle. The buds don't burst yet. They hold their shape, patient and small.
WHIP! The yanked vine springs back and stings hard across her whiskers. She huffs, kicks a pebble into the stream — clatter, splash, then nothing. 'Stupid V,' she thinks, teeth bared in a tiny snarl. She stumps up the hill, paws churning loose dirt, the grey scarf of mist now only around her ankles.
She stops beneath a wide maple. A gust rips through the branches — and a leaf splits clean lengthwise. Two jagged points. A perfect V. She cranes her neck up, up, up, ears swiveling like tiny satellite dishes catching the thin rustle of tearing silk in the still air.
Far above, the cleft between two mountain peaks holds the last bruised-orange light. Two strokes meeting sharp. Her paws lock flat to the warm stone path. The air under the maple smells of wet bark and old copper, thick and still. The sun drops another inch. Gold floods the space directly behind her.
She spins. In the shallow mirror-pool at her feet, two tall needle-sharp points of her own ears catch the low sun. The exact shape the chalk had scored on the board. She freezes — all four paws flat, tail pinned tight. The pool ripples. The V shivers, breaks apart, reforms.
She pads back down the wildflower path, head cocked, pausing at every fork where two stems part like a V. Tiny canines show. 'Found you,' she murmurs to the daisies. Below, the mist has gone violet-soft. One last stripe of gold rides the tips of her ears as she trots home.
