Epilogue - Megan
Three months later
The proof copy arrives in November, and I make Harris open the envelope because my hands are shaking. He's at my kitchen table, in my cabin, with a broad smile on his face.
The Little Lost Fox. My name on the front in a font I fought about for a week and a fox on the cover coming out from under a fallen trunk with a curious expression on his face.
He goes through it without saying anything, one page at a time, and takes so long examining the pictures that I go put the kettle on to stop myself asking if it’s any good.
Then he turns back to the dedication at the front.
For Harris, who taught me to see the wild things properly.
He puts his hand flat on the page for a second, like he’s soaking up the words with his skin. Then he closes the book and pulls me down into his lap and holds me, telling me how good it is, and we stay like that until the kettle clicks off.
His show opened the first Saturday of October.
Bettina Hollis got a hundred and forty people through the door on the first day, which she tells me is unheard of out here.
Delphine wore a caftan that competed with the artwork for attention.
Gram told everybody who came within range that she'd known about the photographs for years, which is a magnificent lie.
Russell stood in front of the moose for a long time and said “Wow!” which is his highest form of praise.
And at some point in the afternoon there were nine or ten people standing in front of the photo of the owl coming off the fence post. Harris was over by the door with his hands in his pockets, watching them look at it.
All of them sold. He's got a woman from a magazine in Portland emailing him now, and interest from a museum in the city.
Winnie came up for the opening and stayed in Snowflake Falls. She’s been weird ever since; vague about her weekends, starting sentences and not finishing them. I've decided to let her tell me in her own time. She'll crack by Christmas.
The morning it happens, the frost is thick enough to see every blade of grass in the yard. I'm at the kitchen window with my coffee when something moves at the treeline.
Kit, sitting where he always sits, with his brush curled over his feet and his one eye on the house.
Behind him, back in the bracken where the shadow is, there's a second fox.
She's smaller than him and darker, and she’s way more cautious. She stands with one foot up and her ears going, checking the yard, then the porch and then the yard again, ready to be gone.
And then, out of the bracken past the pair of them, come the cubs.
They're nearly grown, all legs and no judgment, not much smaller than Kit and about a tenth as composed. One of them gets its face into a frozen puddle and leaps sideways. The other launches itself at Kit's tail and gets a stern look.
I put my coffee down and pick up my phone.
Come outside. Right now… be quiet and don't slam the door.
Harris stops halfway down his steps.
I come and stand beside him. He takes my hand without looking at me, and we watch them for a long time in the cold.
The vixen never does come out of the bracken.
Kit lets the cubs yip and tumble over him, and after a while he gets up and goes to her, and the four of them move off along the treeline and slip into the trees one after another until the yard is empty and quiet again.
Harris squeezes my hand. “All these winters he's been coming… Never brought anybody with him.”
“Maybe he wanted you to see.”
He looks down at me.
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe he did.”
“All these years I've been going out to photograph somebody else's family,” he says. “Deer. Foxes. A pair of geese one winter, all the way through to the goslings flying. Never once occurred to me to want a family of my own.”
“And now it has?”
“Now it won't leave me alone.” He's still looking at the gap in the bracken where they went. “I'm forty in the spring. I'm not asking you for anything this morning; I'd just rather you knew it.”
I turn and clutch his jacket.
“Harris Trent,” I say. “I think it’s high time I moved in.”
It takes him a moment. When he gets there, the look on his face makes my heart swell as he lifts me clean off the frozen grass and kisses me over and over again.