Dusk before Dawn

Dawn

The world was alive.  The fox kitten felt his skull throb dully with sound, the beating from within his head matching the pulse of his small, fighting heart.  
It's giving me a chance. 
When he felt, he knew not a word for it but that he was present at last, and his wet, newly-formed paws clutched a surface that he would know later to be soft. 
As compared to what his experience at that point conveyed to him, it simply was; but after a time —and upon discovering that other surfaces were harder—he would come to that conclusion, knowledge swelling in his brain like it would not be possible now, because he was fresh and recently born. 
What he could understand at that moment was that he was, just like his paws and the soft ground were; and, satisfied with this conclusion about the world he lived in, he fell back into the familiar black darkness that he had always known. 
— / —
When sight came to the fox kitten, it was in slow, light-dependent wisps, and always fuzzy, like a camera lens out of focus. He was aware of gray-and-gold smears accompanying milky smells, as well as a larger golden pelt that he had labeled as his mother and to which he was most attached. It was from her that came the substance of life, and to that he clung most desperately.
After a while, when seeing came to him more easily, he noticed the way that shadows defined and deepened the depths of his world, including his mother's face — the way her muzzle was darker at some points and lighter in others, conveying to him texture and space; and how it focused towards certain point that was accented by a wet nose and long whiskers, as well as how darkness brought out the glow of her eyes.
The kitten accepted that he was what she was, and decided that he must look something like her, too — with the elegantly curved muzzle, beautifully shaped eyes that gleamed with life and hunger, and the long, bushy red tail that he often worried with his gums when he was bored or nervous.
Another conclusion that the little fox came to with his increasing realm of stimulation were the existences of his siblings, who were the bane and annoyances of his life.  Whenever he tried out his small legs to explore the little hollow his mother had dug, they followed him, yipping, stumbling, and teething; and at any point he was prone to snap at them, tumble over, be beaten, and abandon his adventures.  They crowded his place at their mother's side and would bite him if he nudged, and they snored to raise the dead when they slept.  One day I'll be rid of them. 
That, at least, was certain; he felt it as surely as his mother murmured him to sleep at night.  Now that he was a proper living being, instincts flooded him at will, cramming his little brain with desires and urges that overtook him and were as likely to have him remorseful in the end as not.  One day he would leave, but not quite yet; he was urged by the forces to disobey his mother's wants and explore the world around him, despite the scrapes it would probably get him into; his siblings would disperse eventually and so would he; he would leave his mother one day (a thought he had barely begun to accept); he depended on his mother, so he must try to anger her as little as possible; and he was as vulnerable as he was alive, but much less so with larger, trustworthy foxes.
The kitten had decided himself that he knew and had discovered just about everything there was to be known about his life before the day when his mother nosed him to the top of the burrow and he saw just how insignificant he was.