Barefoot Eden

The mosquito had been biting her neck for eleven seconds. Inase counted them, because counting was the only thing left she could control, and because the alternative was to scream and scare off the boy who was watching her from behind the fig tree.

He wasn't hiding, exactly. He stood in the open, one hand flat against the trunk, the way a person leans on a doorframe to watch a room. The fig tree was enormous, older than the mission, older than the village, maybe older than the idea of villages. Its roots had split the red earth into slabs. The boy's feet were bare, and so was the rest of him, and he wore this fact the way Inase wore her canvas trousers and her father's old field shirt: without thinking about it, without apology.

She reached up and slapped her neck. The mosquito died against her palm. The boy didn't flinch.

"Bonjour," she said. Her voice came out wrong, too loud in the clearing, a tourist's voice. She tried again, softer. "Bonjour. Je m'appelle Inase."

The boy tilted his head. His ears moved with the tilt, and that was when she saw them properly for the first time: not human ears, but tall and triangular and furred, tipped with black, swiveling toward the sound of her like two small animals listening. His face was a boy's face. Brown skin, dark eyes, a mouth that hadn't decided yet whether to smile or run. But the ears were a fox's ears, and the tail that hung behind him, low and russet, was a fox's tail.

She had known. That was the thing nobody would believe later, that she had known, that she had walked three days upriver on the strength of a drunk fisherman's story and a single footprint in the mud, and she had known.

"Il ne comprend pas," said a voice behind her.

She turned. The old man from the village stood at the edge of the clearing with his arms crossed. He had guided her here, but he wouldn't come closer than the treeline. He hadn't told her his name. He had told her, three times, to go home.

"He understands French," Inase said.

"He understands everything. That's not the problem." The old man spat into the grass. "The problem is you don't."

The boy took a step out from the fig tree. His tail lifted. He looked at the old man, then at Inase, then back at the old man, and something passed between them that she couldn't read, a flick of the ears, a tightening of the jaw. The old man uncrossed his arms. He looked, for the first time since she'd met him, afraid.

"Don't follow him," he said.

The boy turned and walked into the forest.

Inase followed him.

---

She had come to this continent with a grant, a machete, and a thesis advisor who had stopped answering her emails. The grant was for a survey of pre-colonial settlement patterns along the eastern river system. The thesis advisor had told her, at their last meeting, that she was wasting her time, that the eastern river system had been surveyed to death in the fifties, that the only thing left to find out there was malaria.

She had not told him about the footprint.

She had found it in a museum archive, pressed into a slab of dried clay, catalogued as a ritual object of unknown function. It was the length of her forearm. It had five toes, and the toes had claws, and the arch was too high for any human foot, and the heel was too narrow. The cataloguer had written, in pencil, in the margin: *probably a hoax.* Inase had photographed it and said nothing and spent nine months getting a grant to go somewhere else.

The river had taken her three days. The forest had taken her two more. She had a tent and a satellite phone and enough dried food for a month. She had a map that ended at the river. She had a compass that spun when she held it near certain rocks. And now she had a boy with fox ears walking ahead of her through the undergrowth, not looking back, not slowing down, his bare feet making no sound at all on the leaves.

She was making plenty of sound. Every step was a crack and a rustle and a curse.

The boy stopped. He turned. He looked at her feet, then at her face, and he did something with his mouth that was almost a smile.

"Chut," he said.

It was the first word he'd spoken. It meant *shh*. He said it gently, the way you'd say it to a child, and then he crouched and untied her boot.

She let him. She didn't know why she let him. He pulled the boot off, then the sock, and then the other boot and the other sock, and he set them in a neat row beside a root and looked up at her, waiting.

The ground was cool. It was soft. It was, she realized, the first time in her adult life that her bare feet had touched bare earth, and the sensation was so strange and so immediate that she had to put a hand on the boy's shoulder to steady herself. He didn't move. His shoulder was warm and thin and covered in a fine down of fur she hadn't noticed before, and under the fur, muscle, and under the muscle, bone, and he was just a boy, just a child, and she was a stranger in his forest with her boots off and her hand on his shoulder and her whole career balanced on the edge of this moment.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

He stood. He pointed at her feet, then at his own. He walked three steps, silent, and looked back.

She walked three steps. The leaves didn't crack. The ground held her. She had spent her whole life learning to read the past from what people left behind, from the broken pots and the buried walls and the bones in the clay, and now here was a present so strange that her training was useless, and she was following a fox boy through a forest because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.

---

They walked until the light went orange and then grey. The forest changed around them as they went, thinning and then thickening and then thinning again, and somewhere in the middle of the afternoon they crossed a stream where the water ran clear over stones the color of milk, and the boy stopped and drank from his cupped hands and offered her the same, and she drank, and the water tasted like nothing she had ever tasted, cold and sweet and faintly of pine.

She asked him questions. He didn't answer. She asked in French, then in English, then in the two African languages she'd picked up in grad school, and he listened to all of them with the same patient tilt of the head, and eventually she stopped asking and just walked.

At dusk they came to a clearing that was not a clearing. It was a village, but not like any village she'd seen. There were no walls. There were no roofs. There were platforms built into the lower branches of the trees, woven from vines and covered with broad leaves, and there were fires burning in stone rings on the ground, and there were people. Fox people. Men and women and children, all of them with the ears and the tails and the bare brown bodies, all of them turning to look at her as she stepped out of the trees behind the boy.

Nobody screamed. Nobody ran. A woman by the nearest fire looked up from the fish she was gutting and said something to the boy, a question, and the boy answered, and the woman looked at Inase for a long moment, and then she went back to gutting the fish.

The boy led her to an empty platform. He climbed up. He looked down at her and pointed at the woven floor, and then at her, and then at the floor again.

She climbed up. The platform held her weight. The leaves overhead moved in a wind she couldn't feel, and the firelight from below threw shadows across the boy's face, and he sat down cross-legged and closed his eyes and within a minute he was asleep, or pretending to be, his tail curled around his feet like a cat's.

Inase sat. She took out her notebook. She wrote the date, and the coordinates, and then she sat with her pen over the page for a long time and didn't write anything else, because there was nothing she could write that wouldn't be a lie.

Below her, the village went quiet. The fires burned down. Somewhere in the dark, an animal called out, and another animal answered, and the two calls braided together and faded, and the forest closed over the clearing like water over a stone.

She was the first person from her world to see this place. She knew that. She also knew, with a certainty that sat in her stomach like a swallowed coin, that she was not the first person to come here, and that the others had not gone home, and that the old man at the treeline had been trying to tell her something she was only now beginning to understand.

In the morning, she would ask the boy his name.