This is StoryQuest. Today's story is, the odd fox.

In the far edge of Ashdown Wood, where the beaches stand like patient elders, and the

bracken keeps its own council, there lived a fox who was not as other foxes were.

He was not particularly large or small.

His coat was the proper red of autumn leaves,

his tail full and white-tipped as any gentleman's brush.

Yet from his earliest cubhood,

the other foxes had watched him with narrowed amber eyes and said, oh, there goes the odd one. For he did not take to the night,

as they did. When his brothers slipped from the earth at dusk, light as smoke, to pad silent through the hedgerows, he would linger at

the mouth of the den and look back toward the sinking sun. He liked the hour when the world

was still visible, when the last gold clung to the bark and the rooks made their blunt complaints

overhead. He liked, of all to listen.

Foxes are listeners by trade.

They listen for the scratch of vole beneath frost and the wing beat of careless pheasants.

But this fox listened for other things.

The creak of boughs rubbing together, the mutter of

the stream over stone, the far uncertain chiming of sheep bells from the downs.

He would sit, head tilted, as though the wood were telling him a story only he could hear.

It was said among the foxes that he did not hunt properly.

It was said he walked too openly, that he watched the wind instead of scenting it.

It was said he had once allowed a rabbit to escape because he had paused to admire the way

moonlight silvered its whiskers. Can you imagine a normal fox doing such a

...