Mother Fox and her Kits
By
Valerie L. Egar
Mother Fox lived
in a den at the edge of a meadow with her four kits. They were handsome, with
glossy red fur and white-tipped tails.
Mother Fox taught them every clever fox trick she knew: walking in a
stream of water, so predators couldn’t track them and doubling back on their
own tracks to confuse predators.
As the kits grew,
they frolicked in the meadow, playing games. Hide and seek was a favorite. Tag
was fun, too. Sometimes they played hunting games and tried to find a mole or
mouse. At night, they slept cuddled next to Mother Fox in the warm den.
One day when the
foxes and their mother roamed the woods, they saw two kits hiding in a briar
patch. Their fur was rumpled and they
looked skinny. They hid when Mother Fox called them.
“Where’s your
mother?”
The larger one
poked his face out from under the briars and took one step forward. “She went for food and didn’t come back.”
Mother Fox
sighed. She didn’t want to think what
might have happened, but she knew the two kits weren’t old enough to take care
of themselves. They looked two or three weeks younger than her kits and
needed food and a good cleaning up. “You’re hungry,” she said. “Come with us,
I’ll feed you.”
“Mom,” growled her
oldest, and she cuffed him lightly.
The new kits hadn’t
eaten in days, and gobbled all the food Mother Fox gave them. “I’m hungry,” said her second oldest. “I need
more food.”
Mother Fox shook
her head. “You’ve had your share.”
After dinner,
Mother Fox gave each of the kits a bath, licking each kit’s fur until it was
shiny. The new kits took longer because they hadn’t been cleaned in days.
“Mommy, you spent
more time with them than me!” said her youngest.
“They needed more
time today,” said Mother Fox.
Her youngest ran
to a mud puddle and jumped in. “Now I
need more time.” Mother Fox shook her head and cleaned him off for the second
time.
Getting settled to
go to sleep that night took forever. None of Mother Fox’s kits wanted the new
kits to sleep close to their mother. Pushing and shoving, they finally tired
themselves out and fell asleep.
The next day,
Mother Fox noticed that when the kits played, the older ones were rough with
the two younger kits. The little ones didn’t run as fast or jump as high, and
she heard the older ones laugh at them. Mother Fox scolded her children. “Huh,” said her third kit. “You love them
better than us.”
“Do you think we
could count all the rocks in the stream?” she asked.
“What! That would
take a long time,” said her oldest.
“It would,” she
said. “But, after we counted them, there
wouldn’t be any more, right?”
“I suppose,” said
the third kit. “But I hope that’s not what we’re doing tomorrow!”
Mother Fox
laughed. “Don’t worry, we’re not. But when I love you, and you, and you, and
you, and you, and you,” she said hugging each in turn, “it doesn’t mean I don’t
have any love left for anyone else. Love isn’t like rocks in the stream.”
The kits thought
about it. When Mother Fox divided a few sandwiches picnickers left behind, they
each had a smaller portion because there were six of them, but maybe love
wasn’t like that. If it were, it would soon be gone!
“With love,
there’s always more to give,” said Mother Fox. “It’s not like food, or stones
in the creek or even stars in the sky. There’s always more, and the more you
give away, the more you have.”
“And mommies have
a lot of love to give,” said her youngest.
“That’s right,”
said Mother Fox. “They do.”
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Copyright 2017 by Valerie L. Egar. May not be copied or reproduced without permission from the author.
Published May 14, 2017 in Journal Tribune Sunday (Biddeford, ME).
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