Mr. Buttercup Creates a Fox

Driven by his thirst for knowledge, the rabbit managed to sneak into the Natural History Museum just after 3 p.m. Unnoticed, he hopped past the sharp-eyed old lady at the ticket counter, who was busy explaining the merits of the large, full-color museum guide to a group of Spanish tourists. The human visitors stared at him, open-mouthed—but since he ignored them, they let him be. Only one American woman exclaimed, “Oh, how cute!”

As an experienced burrow-dweller, the rabbit somehow managed to navigate the maze-like layout of the museum. The map in the entrance hall wasn’t bad at all. There, for the first time in his life, he saw a taxidermied elephant and dinosaur skeletons from the Mesozoic era—remnants of crude primordial life. Feet had the irritating habit of stepping absolutely everywhere. The elevator ride was uncomfortable: nylon-clad legs, scraping leather shoes, the confined air. The elevator stopped with a ding! on the second floor and released all its hurrying, hopping passengers into the realm of mammals.

It took the rabbit a long time to find what he was looking for among the endless display cases filled with bones, diagrams, and stuffed specimens. But at last he read on a plaque:
“The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is the only native species of fox in Central Europe and is therefore commonly referred to as ‘the fox.’”

Behind the glass stood a barrel-shaped body on legs far too thin to support it. The tail was bushy. The whole appearance struck him as somewhat ridiculous. The rabbit hopped around the corner to get a better look at the upside-down triangle of the face: the nose gleamed black like a teddy bear’s. The white belly fur reached all the way up to a strangely delicate snout. The ears were enormous. Whiskers jutted out in all directions.
This was a fox!

Only two things were off: First, it didn’t reek. Second, the eyes lacked the typical look. Just thinking of it made his heart race. He felt the urge to drum his hind legs against the floor and whistle loudly.

The rabbit, by the way, was male, and his name was Mr. Buttercup.
“Now hush,” Mr. Buttercup told himself. “You’ve made it this far—now finish the job.”

He absorbed information with the precision of an engineer: a cross-section of a fox den—very impressive!—and a schematic of the fox’s digestive tract, which allowed it to consume mice, rabbits, earthworms, partridges, mallards, lambs, chickens, geese, fruit, carrion, trash, and compost. Mr. Buttercup learned that foxes in captivity could live up to fourteen years, and that a fox (38 chromosomes) could never reproduce with a dog (78 chromosomes).

By five o’clock, he was done. He hopped under the turnstiles, slipped past the museum staff, and out through the automatic doors. It was still cool outside. Mr. Buttercup sniffed the wind, thick with human smells, car exhaust, and dampness. As soon as there were no cars approaching, he crossed the street and made his way back into the forest.

Two meters below the sandy hillside, where alder trees sank their roots deep into the earth and a brook rushed nearby, it was dark. It smelled of warmth, children, and half-digested weeds. The narrow burrow echoed with a hundred voices: with every step, the colony’s residents bombarded Mr. Buttercup with questions. Had he found answers? What had he seen? Was he still sticking to the plan known throughout the colony? And were the carrots in the human city really that big?

He reached the nesting tunnel, where his mate and the five kits from their last litter immediately swarmed around him. His partner—her name was Elderflower—asked, “Do you really have to go?”

Out in the hallway, the others kept a respectful distance. But everyone thought Mr. Buttercup’s plan was madness, bound to bring disaster. On the other hand, he was the fox expert. After all, he had even visited the Natural History Museum.

What trouble could a long-eared burrow-dweller possibly cause? What kind of power could he wield?
The answer is: magic.

It spread through the forest like a low ground fog. Every creature, from the ant to the siskin, understood that matter and thought were made of the same stuff—and that an idea held firmly in the mind will eventually take shape in the world. Mr. Buttercup, driven by ambition, had been crafting a fox in his dreams since last summer—down to the last detail, from the whiskers to the tip of the tail. He didn’t want just any fox. He wanted the best possible fox. He wanted to think it through completely, and then force it into reality.

“But why a fox, of all things?” asked Mr. Rosehip, the oldest in the colony and respected throughout the forest.

Mr. Buttercup responded with stubborn silence. He didn’t really know. Maybe it was because the thought of foxes haunted him: the deaths of his father and mother, fifteen or sixteen siblings, cousins, and every level of friend and acquaintance—always a fox! And besides, the task was demanding, and he enjoyed that.

“But you must see that a new, improved fox will kill even more of us. It will make our problem worse, not better.”

Mr. Buttercup looked into Mr. Rosehip’s mumbling face. What could he say to such a primitive argument, so narrowly focused on practicality and usefulness? He thought of the horrific moments when he had examined the torn bodies of those caught by foxes. Every time, when he pieced the events together from the tracks, he noticed a kind of clumsiness. At some point he realized—he could do better.
Did that mean nothing? Shouldn’t every creature cultivate the talents nature gave them, to push the world a little further along?

And so it happened that on a bright day full of birdsong, Mr. Buttercup hopped into the clearing where the magic was strongest. Yellow ferns grew so tall they reached past his ears. The trees stood at a distance, as if making room for everything that was about to unfold beneath them. Mr. Buttercup settled into a shallow depression, hidden from view in case a hunter passed by. He lay down flat, tucked his ears back, breathed steadily, and entered a state of total concentration.

He still didn’t know if it would work.
He began by imagining a moving torso on legs far too thin, twisting and slinking—still only air. He imagined the snout with whiskers, the entire head, an upside-down triangle with large ears swiveling in all directions.
How hard it was to draw a boundary between the imagined shape and the air around it! The stuff of dreams is fickle and fleeting.

He imagined a beating heart, the web of veins and arteries down to every branch. He could zoom in on areas, rotate the fox in all directions, make it larger or smaller. How thrilling it was! He gave the fox lungs and blood and fur and eyes, a memory and knowledge of simple things like pouncing mice and complex things like strategies for hunting different animals. It exhausted him—he had to constantly keep the line between dream-fox and sunlit reality from blurring.
But it filled him with deep satisfaction.
He savored the feeling of something immense, something beyond reason, and the danger drawing ever closer.

That afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows across the clearing, everything seemed to freeze—like Mr. Buttercup’s pupils, fixed on the sky. The scene jolted, as if the world had stretched itself open just a crack to let something new slip through. Mr. Buttercup collapsed onto his back, as if struck by lightning.
He opened his mouth, bared his rabbit teeth, and felt tired, and spent—and blissful.

Suddenly, the fox was in the clearing.

He looked around, as if he had materialized on a stage in front of a silent audience. His yellow eyes flicked left and right. He saw the rabbit lying between the ferns. He felt an emptiness in his belly.
In short: he attacked.

Mr. Buttercup had just enough time to open his eyes and let out a whistle of terror before the fox tore him to pieces, splattering blood in every direction. The fox looked around again, as if he’d been caught in the act.
His white belly fur was soaked with blood.
Then he bent down and ate his maker.

This story was written at the end of 2009. It was influenced by some tales by the magical realist Jorge Luis Borges and the title of a children's book about a wolf that I saw briefly but have not read. This is one of my best stories so far...