Change in Life

Chapter 13. A Hidden Past, Caught Up

Retribution had become one of the greatest fears for Blake once he threw down his father. The constant nagging in the back of his head had told him that what he had done was not right. It was never the place of an animal to resist human intervention. Lest of all control. So why was it wrong to stand against it?

Had that night taken place while he was still a man, Blake was sure he would have stood solemnly at his bedroom window, taken it on the chin and looked away like he did with everything he encountered. The fate of a nearly immediately forgotten life abandoned to look at a more selfish image and woes no one would hear; that pathetic part of himself he loathed. The part that did nothing with the options given to him and had chosen that the best course of action was to do diddly. The cuts on his fathers face would be nothing more than a work place hazard and the ever grinding wheel of life continued. His human self slipping forever into the endless pit, completely forgetting all those who surrounded him that cared for him.

Yet this felt different.

Blake was there, living in the skin of the fox he had only heard of beforehand. The situation appeared and a life choice was made within an instant. All the while, his human self stood on the sidelines, spectating with a distant apathetic frown. For him it was a struggle to judge what was real, and what was moral. For himself it was living. The choice to stand alone in the fields and then beneath the pine was a move he wouldn't believed he made himself.

The act to fight was noble. He was defending his friend from the worst of foes. There had been a reason to fight, a reason to put all at risk. So why was it difficult to see why it was right? Perhaps his father had more of an impact on his new life than he thought. Maybe the implications of that night were yet to set in. The only reason Blake could understand, much to his shame, was that he had betrayed his father. 

It seemed strange, but after a few days since that hunt, he moved on. The task of surviving was greater than wallowing in the mistake of the past. Yet that's exactly what his older mind did. The energy to push that part away so he could focus of the immediate things at hand - or rather paw - was hefty. His fox mind took charge when needed, though while he rested his human took the reins back. His idle mind took things out of preposition. To the point where dream and real faded.

Time had become irrelevant to Blake. Each night was clockwork of the previous. Before he knew it, he had settled into a routine and another month had passed. The final leaves were falling off the oaks, leaving nothing but the branches they grew on. The morning due couldn't dry fast enough during the day, so the leaf litter mulch decayed slowly into a brown mush that slipped with each paw fall. The wind had been chilly. Blake had only just gotten used to that before the spirits of the cold season blew harder and colder. Autumn had ended and now the cold nights of winter were upon them.

With the moonlight beaming through the skeleton-like trees, casting pencil line shadows across the ground, it made the woods a very eerie place to be. Although it was very easy to hide in and stalk prey for the most part while there were still colors from the fallen leaves marbling the ground. But being winter it also meant the lack of food. The animals the foxes hunted also became more wary with the longer nights. This balanced out with their increased hunting abilities. 

Nothing ever came easily.

Walking through the soaked leaves that lined the ground, Blake and Jade began to talk as he joined her not long after they set out. He had made it a habit to call out to Jade in the middle of the night, or whenever he felt lonely. Even though their chances of success while hunting were less than what it would be if they were alone, the company made up for it.

It was during these quite interesting talks that Blake discovered his boring and very uneventful human life was actually exciting in comparison to Jade's. Simply hearing how bad the human lifestyle was from Blake's perspective was not enough for Jade, and she has asked many things about his former kind. Those conversations had revealed more to him on an intimate level than they did for Jade on the intellectual kind.