Felix the Red

Felix the Red

Stefan Francis Kelleher

Copyright © 2021 Stefan Francis Kelleher

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2021

ISBN 978-1-63710-064-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63710-065-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

For Skylar

Prologue

Africa

Our story begins with a ship sailing into harbor.

It is the first vessel of its kind to ever reach these shores, and the excitement it stirs in the surrounding jungle is nearly frenzied with anticipation. To the sailors onboard, however, all appears calm. What their eyes can not detect are the thousand different life-forms hidden from view behind a thick curtain of vines and trees, creatures who excitedly spread the news of the fabulous bird that had suddenly alighted in the warm waters off the shore, its towering sails billowing like a pair of giant white wings against the blue African sky, and who creep ever closer to the shoreline now in order to further investigate the strange new arrival.

Word of the ship is like a lightning strike, spreading like a wildfire through the untold number of creature communities that thrive largely hidden in the dense and twisted maze of jungle greenery. Before long, a thousand eyes gaze in stunned silence and a thousand animal hearts race with excitement as the sailors lower their boats from the side of the ship and begin to row ashore. To the men rowing, however, unaware that they are being watched, they are the only species that exist on the planet at this moment.

Naturally, their mission tells them otherwise and reminds them that the jungle is fairly teeming with a whole host of exotic and mythical creatures, some of which they have been sent here to capture for their emperor, Caesar Augustus. Indeed, not a few sailors, mostly the youngest among them, had nervously lain awake the previous night, with the ocean rolling beneath them, imagining the fearsome beasts of popular legend that they might encounter on this day: saber-toothed cats capable of tearing them limb from limb, pterodactyl birds ready to sweep them off the ground and carry them aloft to their mountain aeries, snakes as long as the hull of a ship that could mesmerize a man into submission with their hypnotic eyes and swallow his entire body whole.

Always these fears of predation, of consumption, came to them at night, borne of the blood knowledge humans instinctively possess that Man shares the earth with a vast number of populations, some of whom might look upon them as nothing more than a convenient snack. Courage returns only with the dawn, when the sun burns away their darkest fears and allows them to imagine—as the sailors are imaging even now while pulling their boats up onto the virgin sands of this new world they had discovered—that they are cibum catenam summo, top of the food chain.

This kind of courage, based as it is on a false premise, requires a certain amount of willful ignorance to live by. And so it is that the sailors allow their nighttime fears to be dissolved in the startling sunlight overhead as they inch their way cautiously across the burning hot beach toward the tree line ahead. They are no longer mere sailors now that the sun has unburdened them of their fears.

They have become hunters.

*****

He was one of the creatures they were hunting, though he could hardly conceive of such a notion when Dakari, the chattering gray parrot, first brought the news of the ship to him and his brothers as they wrestled together in a circular clearing carved out of the jungle underbrush.

Have you seen? Have you seen? the annoying bird called down to them as they rolled about and tussled in the sand.

At first, they ignored him and continued with their play since Dakari was always screeching about something and hardly ever kept quiet. All the creatures who lived in this part of the jungle knew him to be a tiresome nag and frequently ignored him, just as the brothers were choosing to do so now. But Dakari was possessed by a fever of excitement, even more so than usual, and would not be shut out.

It is a great winged thing, but it does not fly! Rather, it creeps across the skin of the water and was born from the place where the ocean meets the sky!

Pollux unclamped his teeth from the scruff of his brother’s neck and lifted his head to tell the bird to go away and leave them to their fun. The momentary lapse in hostilities was just what his brother needed to twist free of him, however, and to scramble to freedom. A second later, he joined the others, all younger and smaller than their eldest sibling, and dived with them through the leaves, taunting him to give chase.

Pollux, though powerful and agile, was nonetheless exhausted by the relentlessness of his brothers’ combined assault. And so he let their teasing words fade before him as he directed his full temper at Dakari.

You are the stupidest creature of the jungle! he called up to him, his pride still smarting from his brother’s escape. Far and wide, it is agreed that Dakari does not have a single wise thought in his head!

But it is true! the bird fired back, ignoring Pollux’s insults. A great winged thing that creeps across the water! Never before seen! Magnificent! You must come and look!

And with that, Dakari lifted himself from the high branch he had been perched upon and flew off in the direction of the beach.

Pollux shook his head in disgust and turned back toward his home. His mother, no doubt, would be waiting with chores for him to do as the oldest and most able. She always had chores for him to do, a fact that made him weary in the contemplation of it, even as he took his first steps in that direction. Why was it that his brothers got to frolic and play all day long while he, Pollux, was constantly made to labor on their behalf? It hardly seemed fair. But he knew with utmost certainty that it was useless to argue the point with his mother, for she would only give him that much more work to do for daring to question her in her wisdom.

Perhaps, though, he would be sent out hunting with his father and the other grown males, something he deeply enjoyed doing and which hardly seemed like a chore at all. Pollux admired nearly everything about his father and took great satisfaction in the way that all the other creatures of their kind looked up to him and thought of him as their undisputed leader. Hunting beside him as his firstborn son, Pollux would sometimes experience such a rush of pride that it would make the blood flow warm in his chest.

The only thing he disliked about being the offspring of such a noble creature, a thought that sometimes kept him awake at night, was that he himself would never be judged half as noble or good as his father was. It panicked him to think that having a father as virtuous and revered as his own would merely give others opportunity to measure how far short the son had fallen from the forebear. And it was this fear of eventually being exposed—as the son being a mere echo of the father—that sometimes caused him to act out with seemingly inexplicable violence toward his brothers, a condition that caused them to band together and to unite in mutual antipathy toward him.

Pollux never once broke stride toward home as these lapidary thoughts occurred to him, for they were the same ones that nearly always descended upon him unbidden whenever he was alone. They hardly registered as thoughts at all; they were as natural to him as breathing. No, it was something else entirely—the ground beneath his feet—that stopped him in his tracks just as he was about to dive back into the dense undergrowth that encircled the clearing.

At first, he felt the sands shifting with the approach of something large and fast-moving. Next, he observed how the low branches before him began to tremble, as though the trees they were attached to were being shaken from their roots. And lastly, faster than he could even gather the thought to somehow hide himself, the curtain of jungle off to his left suddenly burst forth, delivering two leopards, a he and a she, into the circular clearing along with him.

Though Pollux’s heart froze in instinctual terror at the sudden sight of the fearsome cats, the leopards paid him little mind as they raced across the sand and crashed back through the stand of greenery on the opposite side. An instant later, the leopards were followed into the clearing by a long unbroken line of creatures moving equally as fast to keep pace. There were the zebras, the lions, the chimpanzees, the addaxes, bonobos, mountain gorillas, the gazelles, and the striped hyenas. Each traversed the circle two by two with great haste, just as the leopards before them had done.

It was only when the last of these, the great gray elephants, had performed their similar transit and disappeared into the trees beyond that the earth ceased its trembling and an eerie silence fell upon the scene once more till eventually the only sound Pollux could hear was the sound of his own blood coursing in his ears. He had witnessed stampedes before in his lifetime but never one such as this. In the past, charges like these had been sparked by a single group of creatures fleeing in a panic from another. But here the creatures were intertwined, former enemies now united in a coordinated procession, and together they did not seem so much to be fleeing from something as toward it.

What could it be that compelled such mass hysteria that it made them disregard long-established enmities? Could this be the great winged thing that Dakari had trumpeted from the top of the trees? Had the foolish bird finally proclaimed some news worth proclaiming? And though he knew that he was needed back at home—that his mother would be waiting with his chores or his father would be waiting to begin the hunt—he also knew that he needed to see the mysterious new wonder that had arrived in their waters, a thing that had captured the imagination of the entire jungle.

When he arrived at the shore, the animals were gathered three rows deep behind the tree line, staring out at the water, each camouflaged in their fashion so as to seem not there at all, which is the unique gift of all jungle creatures. The strange truce between them continued to hold as they stood side by side stock-still and took in the wonderment unfolding before them. So thickly packed were they and so unmoving that Pollux had to dart between the legs of some of the larger animals just to make it to the front, where he, too, could witness the miracle that had been delivered unto them.

Dakari was right; the great winged thing was magnificent. Its wings, in fact, were so enormous and widespread that they seemed to embrace most of the visible sky, beating in a slow, even rhythm with the soft breeze coming in from the water. It lay stretched out on its long back, staring up into the cloudless dome, making little or no effort to stay afloat but somehow managing not to sink beneath the waves. Most remarkable of all is that it had recently given birth to a liter of peculiar men, who had apparently been delivered from its belly in buoyant half shells that had carried them to shore.

Pollux had seen men before, and he had considered them nothing more than yet another species that occupied the jungle along with him, though he instinctually knew that they were dangerous and that he should steer clear of their kind. The men who had been birthed from the winged thing, however, were different from the ones he had seen before while lingering on the outskirts of their encampments. These were not like the ones whose coloring resembled that of his own coat, with their earthy brown and dark sable skins. These strange new arrivals were without any color at all; they were bleached as white as bone. They smelled differently than the darker ones, too, a fact delivered to him on the breeze, and they draped themselves in strange and unfamiliar hides.

These colorless men seemed far less capable of any real violence than the previous ones that he had encountered, with their pointed sticks that he had seen them use to spear smaller creatures like himself. He knew that the dark ones, like his own kind, ate the flesh of the creatures they managed to capture with their weapons, and Pollux knew to be wary of them, lest he ended up one day on the end of one of their sharp sticks. But these? These colorless ones? What harm could they possibly do? They were like newborn pups in the world, seemingly unaware and defenseless against the many dangers that he took for granted. Any one of the creatures standing at his back, he knew, could make a quick meal of them the instant they stepped foot into the jungle. Yet these colorless men still stumbled forward blindly, inching ever closer to their own doom.

Perhaps it was pity for how vulnerable they appeared to him, how unaware of the dangers they were moving toward, that caused him to set foot out onto the sand—the first creature of the jungle to reveal himself to their eyes. Perhaps it was this, although the thought that preceded his decision to do so was less a thought and more a memory.

In the memory, he was his younger self once more out on his first hunt and struggling to keep up with the others as they raced to track down a family of ground squirrels who had foolishly tried to pass through their territory. Falling behind, he had come across an isolated pygmy mouse barely concealed beneath the brush on the side of the path. Somehow the creature’s two hind legs had been crushed, perhaps beneath the feet of the others who had trampled upon him, unaware that they had done so in their hunger for larger game, and it was panting in pain, unable to move, as it stared up at him from the ground unblinkingly.

His hunger directed him immediately to eat the injured mouse. But as he was moving to do so, he became aware of another watching him from the path up ahead. It was his father, staring down at him from the top of a small rise, communicating to him in the way they did, not through sound or word but through a silent kinesis of thought.

Even in the midst of the hunt, there is room for mercy.

The idea whispered itself into his brain as his father continued to look down from on top of the rise, waiting for him to interpret its meaning. And while he was not able to fully grasp its significance in the moment, with his hunger so great, he saw how pleased his father was when he made the decision to turn away from the mouse and to join him in continuing onward.

How much prouder would his father be now to see him extend the idea of mercy to these strange new foreigners who had come ashore, to see in these vulnerable white ones the same injured mouse he had witnessed out on the path that day? Perhaps after Pollux told his father about it later that night in silent whispers—after the chores had been done, the food eaten, and his family all settled in for sleep—his father would look at him with a pride so great that Pollux could finally put aside his doubts about himself and trust that one day he, too, would be great, as great as his father was.

With these thoughts circling in his head, Pollux advanced across the sand toward the white ones to warn them of the dangers they were inching toward. The white ones stopped and smiled as he moved to narrow the gap between them. They had no pointed sticks, no weapons. They were completely harmless. Despite the thin hides they wore on their backs, they were defenseless, as good as naked in the world, and Pollux felt it was his duty to make them turn back, to show them mercy.

But how would they be able to know what he was trying to express? The darker ones communicated in sounds, he knew, in a language he could not comprehend, not in thought, the way that higher creatures like his own did. Would the white ones be different, or would they need him to speak their language in order to grasp his warning? And if so, how would he ever be able to bridge the divide between them and make his message of mercy known to them?

This thought concerned him even as he stopped and stood within easy arm’s reach of the first white one, who towered over him now like a god, seeming far less naked in the world with the sunlight haloing his silhouette from above. Whether the man was defenseless or not, Pollux would make him understand, would make him see, and would bring great pride to his father in doing so. For he was Pollux the Polecat, son of Zeus, and this great act of kindness, witnessed by all out on the beach, would be the true beginning of his rightful ascendance to his father’s side.

See? he thought as the first white one crouched down on his haunches and held out his hand for him to nose closer. Mercy needs no language to make itself known. My father was right. And I am Pollux, the son of Zeus.

*****

The mistake, of course, was in thinking that the outstretched hand was not itself a weapon, a weapon more deadly than any sharpened stick borne through the jungle by one of the darker kind. For how much more pain and suffering have been unleashed upon the earth by a single white palm held open in friendship than any spear could ever cause? Be it by stick or palm, however, Man will have his dominion, and in the standoff between Homo sapiens and all other species, the only ones who would ever require mercy are those found standing in Man’s path.

A short time later, after the first white man had seized him around the neck and lifted him off the ground, Pollux, a North African polecat, Ictonyx striatus, found himself imprisoned in the dark belly of the great winged thing along with many others of his kind, who threw themselves against the hard ribs of the beast in a desperate bid to escape even as the ground beneath them rolled and swayed. The white ones had proved themselves far more adept at defending themselves against the creatures of the jungle than Pollux had first imagined.

From the half shells that had carried them ashore, they produced smaller but sharper sticks than the darker ones favored, and they used them to slash and spear their way through the first line of animal observers, sending the others fleeing. Then with the nets they dragged behind them, they gathered up as many of Pollux’s kind as they could and brought them out onto the beach to load back into their transports.

Once Pollux, too, had been thrust into a net and roughly slung over the shoulder of the one who had offered him his hand, he observed the other men laughing merrily through the rope mesh around a fire that they had built along the water’s edge. His senses racing and confused, he could have no way of knowing why they were doing what they were doing. He only knew that he had been foolish in thinking that they could ever have required mercy to be shown to them by the likes of him.

Being a polecat, Pollux would have been unable to fathom that it was the sixth century AD in human history (for what does time mean to a polecat?) or that a great emperor from across the sea, the Greatest White One of All, had sent these men to round up as many of Pollux’s kind as they could find. The emperor had expanded his dominion from Rome recently to take in the Balearic Islands to the west, and he was anxious to use his newly conquered territory as a trading post at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Rabbits, however, were swarming over the islands, spreading their disease (or so it was thought at the time), and the emperor had become determined to eradicate them by importing an army of African polecats to ferret them out and destroy them.

Pollux was entirely incapable of understanding these strange and horrible machinations of Man. He only knew that he was scared now in the belly of the winged thing and that he had thrown his life away the moment he trusted the outstretched hand of the first white one. He also knew that the winged thing was carrying them away across the water and that he would never see his mother or his father again, that he, Pollux the Polecat, son of Zeus, was now enslaved for all eternity to the white ones.

Somewhere in the dark close by, he could make out the familiar yelps of his brothers as they joined in the bedlam of crying and thrashing against their fate, for they, too, had been captured along with him. Perhaps in time this would prove a consolation, that he was not so alone in his grim new reality. Perhaps in time he would gather the courage to comfort them in their despair as an older brother should. He knew that his parents would want this of him, that, however distant he was from him now, his father would somehow look upon him with pride that he had summoned the strength in darkness to do so.

But for now, Pollux could only curl himself into a dark corner against the beast’s side and listen to their anguished cries echoing through his mind. Something he had seen back on the beach through the net he was held inside of continued to haunt him and drained away all his desire to help. It was what he had seen when he had looked out upon the white ones gathered around their fire, shoving one another playfully like brothers, the teeth in their mouths as sharp as any spearhead he had ever looked upon.

Suspended above the fire he saw Dakari, pierced through with a stick and turning lifelessly. His beak was open wide to sound one last alarm, one that would never come, and his feathers were consumed in flames.

Part I

England

Chapter 1

The year is 1883.

Nearly twelve centuries have passed since Pollux the Polecat was taken from the jungle and forced into the service of Man. Gone is the great emperor Caesar Augustus and his all-consuming dream of a vast Mediterranean empire. Gone, too, are his outposts on the Balearic Islands and the African polecats once brought there to eliminate the indigenous rabbit population. Gone is any outward sign that stories such as these ever actually took place.

Time passes.

Yet fragments of the tale linger on, persist, for time itself can never truly erase what has been. Tiny parts of the past somehow survive into the present, gather up, and reconstitute into an entirely new chapter of the same story. The surviving fragment of Pollux’s story, his direct descendant across eons of time, is not even a polecat any longer. He has been made into something else entirely, something strange and new. And yet the blood of his African ancestor still beats inside him as he unknowingly prepares to become the hero of a tale that began a long, long time before he ever existed…

*****

Modern science would quickly identify the cause for Felix’s startling appearance as a failure of the adrenal gland brought about by the existence of an impinging tumor. These tumors were a common enough occurrence within his bloodline after hundreds of years of animal husbandry and crossbreeding, although he was unfortunate enough to be the only one in the barn to suffer from the condition in 1883, thus presenting himself as more of an aberration than later statistics would indicate. If only he had known then that there were others just like him elsewhere, he might not have felt so alone, so targeted for ridicule.

A talented and compassionate modern-day veterinarian might even suggest removing the tumor or the adrenal gland altogether through surgery in order to stimulate new hair growth and prevent bacterial or parasitic infection along the surface of the skin. But our story takes place long before such care and consideration were afforded to the likes of our hero, and the alopecia he suffered from birth as a result of his disorder was dismissed by his human handler as little more than further evidence of the mysterious workings of Providence.

Thus, deprived of proper medical treatment, the defect he was cursed to live with did not allow for even a single strand of hair to grow anywhere upon his body or along the thin tail that dragged behind him like a bald whip. He was neither sable colored, like most of the others in the barn, nor black, white, or any other color combination that patterned their thick coats of musky fur once they grew in. Rather, on account of his utter hairlessness, Felix was born a wretched grayish-pink anomaly, his skin so perpetually aggravated by its sheer exposure to the elements that its surface was forever erupting into painful constellations of tiny red sores. He appeared like something buried deep within the body, some shameful organ or muscle that had suddenly become dislodged from its fixed place and violently expelled, causing those who looked upon him to shudder at something recognizable within themselves.

It should be noted that the human heart is just such a reviled muscle. Though romanticized by artists throughout history and made anodyne with a false shape and pleasing coloration, nonetheless, it is, in actuality, a mean-looking pump repugnant to the eye when extracted from its dark cavity and held up to a cold surgical light. Who among us would not prefer to think of our own hearts as bearing more a resemblance to the counterfeit presentation of a hundred million greeting cards than the awful truth of this bloody mess?

Adding to his shocking pigmentation, Felix’s eyes had been an unnerving red from the moment he first opened them to the world. If the eyes allow us the ability to see inside another’s soul, as poets have long maintained, then Felix’s eyes, as shockingly upsetting as they were, gave his persecutors a kind of excuse to mock and deride him as a freak of nature, especially when considered along with his unnatural skin tone.

He was, in truth, a freak of nature, but so were all his brothers and sisters, although they were less obviously so. For Felix was a ferret, Mustela putorius furo, domesticated from the European polecat, a creature descended from the generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren that Pollux and his African brethren had left behind on the (now-)Spanish isles once their part in the tale was concluded.

All three—the African polecat, its European scion, and the modern ferret—belong to the same animal family, the Mustelidae. All are mustelids, along with their close cousin the weasel, whose bloodline was first accessed in crossbreeding to dilute that of the polecat. The differences between them are significant, yet each was authored by the hand of Man. For any time Man chooses to subjugate a creature to his will, to tear out what was once wild about its nature and domesticate it, unexpected consequences result, like Felix’s tumor, that call into question the wisdom of his desire to do such a thing in the first place.

In the case of the domesticated ferret as a whole, narcolepsy is the most obvious consequence of Man’s specious instinct to manipulate and control. Unlike their progenitors in the wild, the domesticated ferret is cursed with a kind of insidious torpor, a listlessness born of Man’s invasive experimentation, which requires them to sleep upward of eighteen hours a day. Their daily routine is thus characterized by a six-hour burst of high-energy activity surrounded on both sides by an inescapable, darkening slumber.

Put another way, before it is ever born, every ferret has three-quarters of its waking life stolen from it by Man. In Felix’s case, the loss was even more significant since the tumor pressing on his gland would no doubt have shortened his overall life expectancy in the end had it been allowed to exact its final toll. As it was, he was forced to live with its side effects and being singled out and branded an aberration. All ferrets suffer from the abnormality of sleep disorder, but only some of them, the ones that look like Felix, are thought to be freaks and punished for their compounded oddity.

Demon! they jeered at him, the hobs (boys) that shared the barn along with him, performing their jerky weasel war dance around him from blood memory while pinning him back up against the wall. Meanwhile, the jills (girls) gathered in a tight circle in the hay on the opposite side of the barn, seemingly amused by the hobs’ cruelty at Felix’s expense.

How does a demon survive in the heat of summer without a coat to protect him?

How does a demon see from behind his red eyes?

Look, he’s upset! His eyes are tearing!

Those aren’t tears at all, you stupid hob. The freak’s melting in the heat!

The barn was filled with their laughter, hobs’ and jills’ alike, at these regularly repeated taunts. Sometimes it seemed that his sole function in their community was to serve as a target for their coordinated cruelty. Already, though, he could sense their energy winding down because he could feel it in himself as well. They were reaching the end of their six-hour stretch of waking life. Dusk could be seen falling across the sky outside through the half-opened barn door, and soon they would all be asleep once more in a great pile of fur, hardly remembering that this was the way they chose to spend the limited time they were given.

Felix would not forget, however. He would wake up sometime after dawn with all the rest and would assume his role as their common enemy. It was not lost on him that some of his persecutors might actually be his brothers and sisters by birth, although he was never fully sure if identifying them as such would temper any of their behavior toward him. Perhaps it would be the same. And yet his thoughts could not help but gravitate toward the idea whenever his back was up against the wall, and he would find himself searching their faces and their dancing, jeering bodies for some reflection of his own image.

In the past, he had made the mistake of approaching a few of them, the ones who bore some resemblance of movement or manner to him, only to be violently rebuffed. Though he was the only ferret in the barn that was completely hairless, the only one whose eyes were pink, there were a few among them whose features betrayed some variation on the theme—a thinning of the coat or pupils a shade slightly less inky black than normal, for instance. It was these, however, the ones most like him, who denied him the loudest whenever he tried to forge some connection, and he eventually gave up on any efforts to establish a common ancestry with them.

The one inescapable commonality between himself and all the other ferrets in the barn that none could deny was the tiny crucifix that each had stamped upon their right ear, a clear sign that they belonged to the same tribe of hunting ferrets. When each was but a kit (a baby), the Breeder would carry them by the scruff of their neck to a fire he had built beside the barn and stamp them with a tiny brand while they lay asleep across his lap. The pain of the hot brand would jolt them back to consciousness but only long enough to take in the stars in the nighttime sky before the worst of it would pass and they would slip off back into sleep. By morning, they belonged to him.

Even this shared physical attribute, though, had been turned to Felix’s disadvantage over time. For where the others’ cross was largely hidden from the outside world by the fur that had grown over it, visible only by turning the ear inside out, Felix’s crucifix stood out grotesquely on his translucent appendage, a gaudy tattoo of ownership that was impossible to hide. As a result, the brand had become yet another target of their shared derision, and many were the times he had heard one of his tormentors single out the cross for particular mockery, even when they themselves carried the same sign of their collective shame on the inside.

Chief among his tormentors was a hob named Scruffer, who was so close in age to his own that he might have been born of the same liter as Felix. Scruffer, too, possessed a peculiarity almost as striking as Felix’s alopecia; although his eyes were a dark marble, he was the only albino in the barn, his coat as blindingly white as a field of newly fallen snow. Familiar with being different, it should have been Scruffer who protected him from the others and bonded with him in solidarity against their attacks. The similarities in their circumstances, however, only inspired Scruffer to outstrip the others in aggression, as though drawing attention away from his own humiliating whiteness required him to direct that much more attention upon another more obviously cursed than himself. It was Scruffer, in fact, who had first hit upon the idea of calling him a demon and who made sure the others picked up on the moniker and did not refer to him by any other name.

Why would a creature that might very well have been Felix’s own brother treat him so poorly when all he desired to be was welcomed into their fold? The barn was warm and dry and, in most outer regard, a pleasant enough place to live; the Breeder saw to that. But its ceiling was arched and high, too high it seemed to him, and oftentimes Felix felt lost and lonely in the cavernous space, kept apart as he was by the others. How many times had he dreamed of joining with them in their games during the day while the elders were off hunting, of dancing the weasel war dance with them, or huddling at the center of the sleep pile they formed each night?

Always, however, his dreams were dashed by the first light of day as soon as the elders were