The Fox and the Walrus

There once was a walrus who left his clan and traveled great lengths all over the seas of the globe. On his travels, the walrus fell in love with a deer. She was so graceful and her fur was as smooth as velvet and he felt a warmth that, for the first time, penetrated down beneath all his cold layers of blubber, and made him feel warm inside.

To live in the Arctic would be too hard on a deer, and to live in the mountains would be too hard on a walrus, so they settled down in a unique place where a river met the ocean and was bordered by a forest on one side and a meadow on the other. He would waddle long distances on his flippers to try and see the elusive magic of the forest that she loved so much, and she would come out to the beach to gaze out at him swimming in the strange ocean.

They had a baby fox. The walrus loved his son, even though he was so different from him in some ways. He named the fox his Fine Furry Friend, because he was so warm and fuzzy and it made him feel that way too. His son would sit on his lap and he would warm his cold flippers on the Fine Furry Friend’s purring belly.

During the day, the walrus would swim upstream and fish, and at the end of the day float downstream until he arrived home. While he was away, the fox cub would stay with his mother as she grazed in the meadow, but the fox cub could not eat grass, and his mother could not teach him how to hunt, so he learned to frolic and play and design clever little toys for himself. At dusk, he would wait by the shore for his father, and he would stare at the bend in the river so that he could see his father’s head come bobbing into view the moment he was visible. And Poppa Walrus would paddle ashore, a long line of fish hanging from his mouth, and the Fine Furry Friend would jump up into his arms with excitement. They would make their way over to the camp, and Poppa Walrus would cook his fish over the fire that Momma Deer had prepared for him, and Poppa Walrus and the Fine Furry Friend would drop sizzling tasty fish into each other’s mouths and guzzle them down.

One day, Poppa Walrus said, “You are getting old enough now. Today I will teach you how to swim.”

The Fine Furry Friend was scared by the water, but he wanted to be a great hunter like his father, and so he trained at swimming with his father each day for a summer. Gradually he got used to the water, but he was very slow to learn how to swim, and his father would get angry with him. This made the fox cub feel like not such a fine furry friend after all. But he would try harder, and eventually, he learned the secret art.

At the end of the summer, Poppa Walrus took him on his first hunt. They swam for miles upstream, until the Fine Furry Friend’s muscles burned and ached and he thought he could go on no more, but still they swam on. Poppa Walrus would leave the Fine Furry Friend behind, and periodically wait for him to catch up. This made the fox cub want to cry, but he knew that big boys didn’t cry, so he would paddle faster until, rounding the bend, he could see Poppa Walrus again and breathe a sigh of relief.

Finally, at noon, they stopped. “This is the first pool,” said Poppa Walrus. “Someday when you’re able to go farther, we’ll go on to other pools. But for today, we’ll hunt here, and then turn around and head back. Here, look.”

The Fine Furry Friend paddled over to the middle of the pool, and looking down, saw a beautiful sight. The crystal pool was round and clear, and a swarm of salmon clustered scarlet in the blue deep.

“Just pick which one you want first,” said Poppa Walrus.

And they hunted and guzzled raw fish until their bellies bloated, and they napped on the warm stones of the riverbank for a time, and then awoke and hunted again, stringing the second batch up to take home to cook. And when they got home, the Fine Furry Friend curled up exhausted by the fire.

This became their ritual. At first once a week, and then every other day, they would go out, further and further still, and the Fine Furry Friend became quite the swimmer.

As the fox cub got older, he began to notice something. Poppa Walrus and Momma Deer seemed to spend less and less time together, and when they were together, they quarreled. This distressed him quite a bit. At first he would hide when they did this. Then as he got older, he would sometimes try to help them reconcile, but his words never seemed to have any effect. Finally, he grew churlish, as teenagers do, and would yip at them and nip their heels when they fought. But nothing he did helped.

The day came that he could keep pace with Poppa Walrus on their swims. “Just wait, one day you’ll be even faster, and have to wait for me to catch up,” said Poppa Walrus. “You must increase, but I must decrease.” The Fine Furry Friend laughed in puzzlement at this. For he had heard all the stories of Poppa Walrus swimming across the globe in his youth. To him his Poppa was a god, and would never die.

One night, Momma Deer settled down to sleep a little further away from the camp where Poppa Walrus slept.

“What’s wrong?” said the fox cub.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just going to sleep further away is all.”

“But there must be something wrong,” said the fox cub.

She sighed, and said, “It hurts me to be around your father.”

This made the fox cub very sad. How could his father hurt his mother? That was a terrible thing. He slept next to his mother that night.

But the next night, Momma Deer slept further apart. And the next night further still. And then she stopped coming to the camp at all, and Poppa Walrus had to light his own fires and arrange his own camp. Momma Deer set up her own camp on the other side of the meadow.

“I can’t be with you both at the same time. What am I supposed to do?” said the fox cub.

“Be with me,” said Momma Deer.

“Be with me,” said Poppa Walrus.

At first, he stayed with Momma Deer all the time. She was a defenseless deer, after all, not big and powerful like Poppa Walrus. But then he began to visit Poppa Walrus from time to time. Years went by, and they continued to live apart, and he developed a habit of changing every week from one camp to the other.

“It must be nice to have two homes,” one of his woodland friends said to him once.

“No,” he replied. “Instead it ends up feeling like I have no home.”

“Oh,” his friend said, “That sounds very sad.”

“Yes,” he replied, “But I choose to believe that home is carried with me in my heart.”

When the fox cub became a man, it was sudden and not sudden all at the same time. He looked at himself in a still pool and thought: I see an adult male fox in the pool. And for the first time he realized that he had actually been a man for quite some time. And yet, he somehow still was not a man until he recognized himself as so.

“I’m going out on my own,” he told his father one day. “I’m a man.”

“Yes you are,” Poppa Walrus said.

This surprised the fox, for Poppa Walrus had never said so before.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I knew that you already had it in you,” he said. “But I also knew that you needed to realize it for yourself. Go forth, and have an adventure, and don’t forget to come back.”

And so he did, and all his adventures are written in the Book of the Fox. But the Fox (as he came to be known) returned after all his adventures, and saw his mother and father again, and began to live near them in a camp of his own. And he would visit them and sometimes he would go on swims with Poppa Walrus again.

But Poppa Walrus went much slower now. And the Fox noticed that Poppa Walrus kept to himself nowadays, and didn’t really leave the camp anymore except for to go on a swim once every two weeks. The only soul he spoke to in the world anymore was the Fox.

“You should get out,” said the Fox. “Have an adventure.”

“The time for my adventures is over,” said Poppa Walrus. “It’s your time for adventures now.”

“Your time doesn’t have to be over,” said the Fox. “I believe in you.”

“No,” said Poppa Walrus. “It is over. You must increase, but I must decrease.”

And Poppa Walrus resumed puttering about the camp, whistling to himself.

And indeed, he had decreased. While the Fox had grown tall and strong, Poppa Walrus had wasted away. All his blubber was gone, and he was always cold, and he barely looked like a walrus anymore. He often got sick, but he had plenty of salted salmon to eat off of and could always drink from the stream.

And then one cold winter day, the Fox came over to Poppa Walrus’s camp, and Poppa Walrus was gone. The Fox shrugged and went back home, but when he came back next week, Poppa Walrus was gone again. And the next day he was still gone.

The Fox swam upstream farther than he had ever gone and searched all over the banks and bushes, under brush and in quagmires, everywhere he could think to look. He searched the beach and the meadows and places that Poppa Walrus hardly ever went, but to no avail. Poppa Walrus was never found.

Seasons came and went, and came and went again. And the Fox remembered everything that Poppa Walrus had ever done and said, remembered the way he swam and the sound of his voice and the way he would warm his flippers on the Fox’s belly next to the fire. In his dreams, he would see Poppa Walrus’s head bobbing on the water coming around the bend, but then he would wake up and there was no one there.

And he tried to make sense of his life and his father’s life. So many things about Poppa Walrus seemed mysterious to him and he wanted to understand him. So he talked to Momma Deer about his father, about how they met and why they married and why she left. And he talked to his friends about Poppa Walrus, but they didn’t know what to say. So he embarked on a journey all the way to the Arctic, where Poppa Walrus was from, and he talked to Poppa Walrus’s people, and found out that they hadn’t called him Poppa Walrus of course, because that wouldn’t make sense. To them he was the runt of the litter and an oddling, someone they had never understood either.

And so he understood more, and understood less all at the same time. When he came back from his Arctic trip he was somehow different, a quieter, slower version of himself, and people began to call him the Grey Fox because of his greying beard. 

And one day he woke up and realized he was now Poppa Fox. He had children and a wife and his children would soon have children of their own. And he realized that none of them knew Poppa Walrus, and realized that he soon would die, and after another generation, no one would remember him either.

But he somehow accepted this in a way that he had not for Poppa Walrus, for he was old now, and ready to go on whenever his Sun decided to set. But until then, he would enjoy his grandchildren, and take them on adventures. He stopped frequently to catch his breath and tell them: “You must increase, but I must decrease.” And they would laugh at him. And he would laugh with them, and resume walking at his slow pace, whistling to himself.

Feedback

As always, feedback is welcome.

Author Notes

I’ve always enjoyed a good fairy tale. This is a wild experiment for me to try and combine a fairy tale style with a heavy theme like grief, so I’m especially curious to see how it resonates with people.

What’s Going on in My Life

I’m going to a couple of science fiction writing conferences this summer, including UtopiaCon here in Nashville on 6/21, and Bubonicon out in New Mexico on 8/23. Bubonicon has a great line-up of writers speaking, including George RR Martin himself, so between the conferences and the big trip to the Northwest that we’re planning to take in our camper van, we have a pretty exciting summer lined up.

Book of the Week

This week I reviewed The Spiritual Poems of Rumi. You can read more here.

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Until next week!