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| Fennec Fox, Wikimedia Commons, Khonstan |
On the day before she gave birth, a fennec fox dug deeper into the den. She had made her home in a bluff overlooking a dry stream bed. Her older sister lived an hour's trot to the west. When she delivered her pups, the fennec licked them clean to discover they were the color of the desert sands.
"Beautiful," her mate whispered.
"And hungry," she replied. The four pups cried. She fed them, and then her mate fed her.
For a week, the fennec stayed home in her den. Her mate brought her meals, morning and afternoon. But one evening, he did not return. What had happened, she didn't know. She was aware her territory included coyotes, wolves, bobcats, jackals, and bison. Any of them could have killed her mate. There had been a rain and a flash flood on the day he left, too. The water could have washed him down the streambed and into foreign territory.
She knew she had to hunt. On the day after her mate had failed to return, she ventured to a colony of cactus mice. They lived under a sequoia. She hovered in the shadows of nearby rocks and watched them. The mice dashed from place to place, aware of her gaze. She found them hard to spot as they made their sprints from hole to hole, cactus to cactus. After a failed attempt to grab one, she gave up and headed home.
In the den, she nursed her pups, aware her milk was running dry,
The next morning, she trotted to where young jerboa lived under a ledge near the stream bed. She heard one or two of them, either of which would have made a meal for her. Again, they failed to show except for a brief flash across the sands, which she missed. She grew impatient and returned home.
When she got there, she discovered two of her cubs missing.
Frantic, she dashed across the expanse. She tried to track one set of paw prints in the sand, then another. A thought interrupted her panic and she dashed back home to make sure the other two pups still lived.
"Ah, here you are," she murmured as she nuzzled one of the remaining pair. He cried and crawled forward to nurse.
Her sister found her with the remaining pups drinking the last of her milk. The older vixen trotted across the stream bed with a lost pup in her mouth. She put it down at the entrance to the burrow.
"This is yours," she said.
Hardly daring to breathe, the younger fennec clambered to her feet. She advanced to the entrance of the burrow and sniffed her child, now returned to her.
"Has your mate died?" her sister asked.
"I think so," she confessed, although she held out hope. "He has been missing for three days."
"Why have you not gone out to hunt?" The older sister studied her and saw how thin she had gotten and how low on milk.
The fennec described her attempt at the cactus mice. She told her sister about her trying to hunt the jerboa.
"You didn't stay to catch anything," her sister pointed out.
"True."
"You didn't even find your children. You traced them only part of the way."
"I feared losing more, yes."
Between them, the formerly-lost pup crawled down from the entrance of the den. He wandered deeper into the shade. He didn't cry for food like his siblings. She realized this was because he had nursed on her sister, earlier. She felt flush with gratitude. Her sister remained stern.
"Your mate has died, probably, and you haven't gone anywhere or done anything about it." The elder fennec made a decision. She stood taller. "My mate and I can help but you must commit to this, too. You've done nothing."
"I meant to hunt. Even now, I could find my other pup, maybe."
"No, you can't do everything at once. That's what you've been trying to do. You must make a choice. And you must choose only one or two things, not everything. Allowing yourself too many directions to try has meant no forward progress at all."
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