⊹ ☽ ⊹

Half a day’s carriage ride from the Rockefeller Manor. In front of a mine, where the boy had ended up going along because he couldn’t refuse the girl’s stubbornness.

“Who on earth would hire children like you?”

A miner clicked his tongue at the sight of the boy and girl. They said a few youngsters would be coming. D*mn it all. These are just babies who haven’t even lost their fuzz yet. Every time the miner grumbled, Lanen, pressed close behind Cedarwood, gave a little flinch.

When Cedarwood had tried to go to the mine for a day’s wages, Lanen had threatened him that she wouldn’t let him go unless he took her along too.

But this is a job I got through Mr. Nicholson’s introduction, so if I back out it’ll cause problems for me. I don’t care, then take me with you!

And so Lanen had come to the mine with Cedarwood. But they ran into trouble right from the start.

“The age meets the requirement. And my lady, I mean, my sister is….”

“I meet the age requirement too, I’m twelve!”

Lanen raised her hand toward the man with a spirited air.

The miner looked Cedarwood and Lanen over with a troubled expression.

“Age or no age, what am I supposed to do with a pair of runts smaller than a pickaxe? That’s enough, go home. You’d just be in the way.”

“But….”

The boy and girl looked at each other. Lanen kept stealing glances at Cedarwood with an apologetic look, feeling as though she had gotten him tangled up in this because of her. The miner looked at the two little ones who had gone glum in an instant. Flat caps pulled low, worn suspenders. Stuck together like that, they looked like a pair of orphans who had lost their parents.

‘Good grief, those Rockefeller people. First they bring in immigrant kids who can’t speak the language and work them half to death, and now they’re trying to put children like these to work.’

What a fine world we live in. The miner slung his pickaxe over his shoulder and sighed.

“Hey, you two. See that over there?”

He jerked his chin toward the side of the cart. There sat a small wooden box covered with a patchwork cloth. It held steamed potatoes, boiled eggs, the miners’ lunches.

“If you want to work so badly, keep watch over that. Chase off any foxes or rats that come sniffing around.”

“Foxes?”

“That’s right, foxes. The crafty things figured out how to open the lunch box lids. They don’t touch the greens, just swipe the eggs clean. Infuriating little beasts.”

The miner muttered gruffly.

“Catch a fox and I’ll give you each a coin. Don’t get your hopes up, though.”

At the man’s gruff words, Lanen’s and Cedarwood’s faces brightened. They nodded at once.

“Yes!”

The mine, now in full swing, was loud. As the morning sun grew gradually hotter and they had grown used to the low, echoing ring of metal from deep in the earth, Lanen, who had been observing a caterpillar, stood up.

“Cedarwood, don’t you hear a yipping sound somewhere?”

“A fox crying?”

“Yes.”

They turned their ears toward the forest. Just then, the miners who had finished the morning shift came pouring out of the mine in a crowd.

No longer needing to guard the lunches, the boy and girl each held a steamed potato in one hand and each other’s hand in the other, and headed into the forest.

“It definitely came from this direction. Let’s follow it.”

Lanen pulled the boy along by the hand.

She was not in her usual plain dress and loose bloomers but in a roomy shirt and dark blue trousers. Even if no one paid her any attention, it was obvious that the Manor would be turned upside down if word got out that the Rockefeller young lady had worked at a mine, so she had been put in his clothes instead.

‘I thought our heights were similar enough that the clothes would fit, but they seem a little big on her.’

Small, and slight. She looked like she would lose a fight with a fox after a long struggle.

I really do need to protect my lady. Cedarwood made a silent vow. If a fox picks a fight, my lady will definitely charge at it bravely, so I’ll have to hold her back if it comes to that. No, I should get rid of it before it even gets to that.

“Cedarwood, look, fox droppings.”

I should get rid of it. Cedarwood reaffirmed his vow.

“How can you tell?”

“Look. There’s orange fur mixed in. That means a fox is nearby.”

“To be honest, I’d rather not look.”

When the boy made no effort to hide his disgust, Lanen set down the stick she had been poking at the lump with.

“Just a little further.”

The girl laced her fingers through the boy’s hand again. She pointed toward the dense fir forest ahead and smiled brightly.

“We’ll catch it soon.”

Just as the girl had whispered, they spotted an orange tail not far ahead. The fox must have caught the scent of strangers, because it had been sniffing at the air, and the moment it sensed their presence it darted away. Cedarwood, let’s follow it! The boy and girl plunged through the undergrowth and ran.

The soles of a young child unaccustomed to mountain paths quickly turned red from rubbing against the hard shoe leather. But the children, their eyes fixed on the fox tail leaping and bounding ahead of them, ran on, forgetting the pain entirely.

⊹ ☼ ⊹

Rustle.

Lanen pushed through the hanging branches and exhaled roughly. How long had it been since she escaped the Manor? She raised her head and looked around. A large boulder. She had passed the bent pine tree too. The end of the journey that the map had walked her through, step by step, was coming into sight. Which meant.

‘Just a little further.’

Her heels stung from climbing the mountain path in uncomfortable shoes. The sun had already sunk low, and the path was growing hard to see.

‘At this rate….’

“We’ll catch it soon.”

She might get caught.

At the same moment, a rustling sound came from somewhere in the forest where not even the insects had been making noise. It was a quiet set of footsteps that, then as now, only she could hear.

Crunch.

From somewhere, she thought she could hear a fox crying.

Lanen half-ran down the sloping hillside.

“Ugh!”

She thought she had landed cleanly, but her shoe caught on a tree root and she tumbled. Lanen cursed under her breath and flung her shoe off. Who was the idiot who suggested putting frills on shoes?

“Don’t stop! If you stop, it’ll be gone in the blink of an eye!”

Her own voice from childhood came urging her on.

“Ha. I’m going to die, I really am.”

She gasped the words out like a sigh, then pushed herself back up.

‘Right, I can’t stop. Or I’ll get caught.’

And so she started moving again.

The presence that had gone still the moment she fell began quietly following her again. A composed presence. Heavy, unhurried footsteps that made no attempt to hide that he was there.

She had noticed long ago that Cedarwood was following her. She had been moving as busily as a field mouse, and to think he had already caught up. It made her feel wretched and miserable. And yet in this ridiculous chase, he was strangely not closing the distance. Even though he could.

‘Is he waiting for me to wear myself out and surrender?’

It was just like the gap between the children and the fox’s tail back then. The kind that never quite narrowed no matter how breathlessly you ran. That delicate interval of almost-caught, never-caught.

Rustle. She pushed quickly through the leaves. The silence of the forest, uncanny in its stillness, filled her lungs until she felt they might burst. In the quiet, what filled her mind completely was the sound of two pairs of running feet. A boy, a girl. Those carefree childhood footsteps, chasing after a fox.

“Do you remember the fox hunt we did before?”

‘So why did you have to say something like that.’

She had no desire to take a trip down memory lane right now. Lanen bit her lip.

If only she could have forgotten that memory, she might have been able to focus more desperately on running. She had abandoned Glen, her shoes, and every shred of a lady’s dignity in her determination to escape. But that one hazy fragment of memory was something she could not shake loose.

“It’s exactly the same as back then.”

She still had no idea what he meant by that. Back then it had been a memory closer to something beautiful, something bittersweet. And now, if anything, this was a chase closer to terrifying, closer to absurd.

‘A pursuit like this is only fun when you’re the one doing the chasing. When you’re the one being chased, it’s nothing but a disaster out of nowhere.’

And besides, back then, the girl. Lanen….

Far ahead, she could see the point where the fir forest ended. The entrance to the forest that he had told her about.

Stray memories flashed past.

“If you keep going straight through the fir forest, you’ll reach the entrance to the woods. And here, there may be no passing carriages, but there are automobiles and my men.”

“Show this letter to any one of them and tell them.”

The subtle expression on his face, the look in his eyes, when he said ‘I will let you go’….

“There, Cedarwood. It went that way!”

And the memory of childhood, of chasing a fox without a care in the world.

Back then, the reason the boy and girl had never quite managed to close the distance between themselves and the fox was not that the fox was fast. The fox was actually rather clumsy. 

Flustered by the sudden chase, it kept running its head into trees and rolling about in the fallen leaves. The boy and girl, on the other hand, were quick on their feet and knew how to hurl their steamed potatoes like sling stones. If they had set their minds to catching it, they could have caught it easily.

But at every decisive moment, the girl slowed her steps.

“W-wait a moment, Cedarwood. I, um… my hair got caught.”

When the fox was going in circles, she waited until it found the right path. Oh, this time a stone got in my shoe. When the fox failed to see a tree root and tumbled and couldn’t collect itself, she waited until it shook itself off and got back up.

The girl kept a delicate distance, never closing the gap between herself and the fox.

Because back then, the girl. Lanen….

‘I didn’t want the fox to get caught.’

“Hah… hoo, haah.”

At last, Lanen reached the entrance to the forest.

Lanen looked at the map and the bundle of letters he had pressed into her hands and caught her ragged breath.

It was over. This wretched chase.

Lanen leaned her hand against a tree and gasped for air. At the bottom of the slope were a black automobile and men dressed in imperial army uniforms, standing there as though waiting for someone. Exactly as Cedarwood had said.

All she had to do now was get down there, and it would be finished.

Lanen took a step. And then.

Clink.

His dog tag chain, which had been wound around the map, caught on a branch and stopped her in her tracks. In that moment, the letter that had been tightly bound together with the map fell to the ground with a soft thud.

Lanen turned her head.

‘The letter….’

Lanen quickly bent down and picked up the paper from the ground.

***

At last, the girl and boy of the memory arrived at the bottom of the slope.

The fox had its head stuck in a bush at the very edge of the slope and was yipping and crying.

“One moment, my lady.”

“Yes?”

The girl turned her head and looked at the boy.

“My lady, couldn’t we just let the fox go?”

“…Why?”

“Because if it gets caught, it will die.”

At the boy’s single sentence, the girl’s steps, which had been reluctantly heading toward the fox, came to a stop.

The fox was still completely trapped in the tree vines, its tongue lolling out, panting.