Free Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt

britches. Seems like everyone in a three-mile radius is after him.”
    Most bears retreated into the woods and kept to themselves once spring came and there was food to eat, voles and rabbits and mice and mushrooms and slugs, even. But not this one. He was still out raiding trash cans and chasing barn cats and rummaging through the sugarhouses, where sap collected from the maple trees was boiled down into syrup. Mr. Archer, the owner of Archer’s Sheep Farm, was especially intent on ridding the area of the bear. He was determined not to lose even one of his sheep to it.
    Kapow! Another shot, this one farther away. Jules felt a rush of pity for the bear. Weren’t mother bears supposed to tell their babies to steer clear of garbage and syrup and sheep? Where was its mother? For a second she felt anger toward the mother bear. But then she realized that maybe the bear was just like her, without a mother, and he had forgotten everything she ever told him about being a bear.
    And that led to another sorrow.
    â€œDad,” she said. “I don’t remember her.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about, honey?”
    â€œMom. You and Sylvie always talked about Mom together. Stories that you remembered.”
    â€œWe did. Yes, we did.”
    â€œBut I don’t remember her.” Her throat tightened. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
    Dad pulled a chair up to the table and pushed the pile of homework to one side. Then he rested his hands palm down on the flat surface of the table and looked right into Jules’s eyes. “You don’t need to be sorry, honey. You were a tiny little thing when she died. I’d be surprised if you remembered anything more than a few flashes.”
    â€œBut it was your ritual,” she managed to gulp out. “There’s no one to remember Mom with now.”
    â€œJuley-Jules,” he said. “There are plenty of other rituals. Old ones, new ones. Like popcorn and a movie with my favorite eleven-year-old. That’s a ritual I can get behind.”
    After a minute Jules nodded. Yes. That was a ritual she could get behind too.

19
    S enna was fox through and through. In the weeks since her birth, she and her brothers had grown fast, the way foxes do. She had lost most of her baby fluff and her coat was a deep auburn color, with tips of black on her feet and nose and tail. Her mother and father guided her and her brothers in the ways of fox, ways that had been passed down for generations. A thousand years of fox knowledge soaked into Senna and her brothers.
    But Senna also knew things that her brothers and parents didn’t, because she was Kennen. Unlike Younger Brother, who was linked to the wind, his element; and unlike Older Brother, who was linked to water, Senna was linked to the human girl Jules.
    The day she asked her mother about the gray-green bars that appeared sometimes, colliding soundlessly in the air around them, her mother had shaken her head.
    â€œYou are Kennen, daughter.”
    That was all she said. But her voice was filled with a sad wonder, and the gray-green bars appeared just at that moment. Senna stared at them, following their movements with her eyes. Her mother’s eyes were on her. It was then that Senna realized her mother didn’t see the gray-green bars. Her mother didn’t hear the whispered Kennen . Her mother wasn’t linked to a human, the way her daughter was, and this worried her mother.
    But why?
    Being Kennen made sense to Senna. She did know things that Older Brother didn’t know, but wasn’t that a good thing? She knew, for example, that the enormous cat, the one shadowing the young male human who walked through these woods, was no threat to her or her fox family. Catamount. He, too, had a purpose; Senna was sure of it.

20
    T he morning of Jules’s return to school came too soon. She knew she had to go back because her father was going back to work, and she couldn’t stay there all alone