Short story · 4 min read ·
The Taxidermist's Last Fox
A taxidermist in an Ostmark side street has finished mounting a red fox that a client never collected, and each morning the glass eyes are turned a little further toward the shop door.
Emil Hausner had mounted animals for forty-one years, and he was proud of the work. Pheasants for the shooting lodges, trout for the hotel bars, a stoat with its winter coat half-changed for the schoolroom. He could take a dead thing and make it look as if it had paused in the middle of a sentence and forgotten the end. His hands knew the wire and the wax and the particular give of a skin that has been soaked and stretched and tacked over a form. When people asked him how he managed the eyes, he told them it was a matter of patience and a good supplier in Hamburg, and that was true as far as it went.
The fox came in on a Tuesday in October, in a cardboard box with the lid taped down. It was a vixen, a fine large one, the kind the estate keepers paid good money to have stuffed for the gun room. The estate had sent a letter with the order. It said the animal would be collected in a fortnight, and it gave the name of a Mr. Lindqvist, who had a country house near the river. The fee had been paid in advance, in full, in cash, in an envelope with the stamp torn off.
Emil worked on the fox for three weeks. He skinned it carefully along the belly, cleaned the hide, salted and dried it. He built the form from a mould of the body he had taken from the carcass, and he fitted the glass eyes, amber with a black slit, which he had bought specially for a fox of this size. He posed it in a low crouch on a slab of rock covered with dry moss, its head lifted, its ears forward, its tail curled round its feet. It looked alert and wary, as though it had just heard something in the hedge and had not yet decided whether to run.
Mr. Lindqvist did not come.
Emil waited the fortnight out and then another week. He rang the number on the order and got a recording, and then a disconnected tone. He wrote to the estate and received no answer. He put the fox in the back window of the shop, where the light from the street fell on it through the net curtain, and he went back to his other work.
The first morning he noticed the eyes, he thought he had set them crooked. He had not. He had fixed them facing the front, looking straight out at the room, as a fox in a crouch is meant to look. They were now turned a fraction to the left, toward the door of the shop, and the slits in them were narrowed, as if the fox were measuring the distance to the street.
He straightened them. The next morning they had turned again, a little further.
He began to sleep badly. He would lie awake in the rooms above the shop listening to the traffic on the Ostmark road and imagine the fox in the back window, very still, watching the front door through the gap in the curtain. In the mornings the eyes were always further round. On the Friday they were pointing at the door handle. On the Saturday they were on the step.
On the Sunday morning, when Emil came down to open the shop, he found the front door unlocked, and the bell cord broken, and the fox gone from the window. There was a pale dusty patch on the moss where it had crouched, and a line of paw prints across the boards to the shop door, neat and small and quite dry, and a single amber eye lying on the step, polished bright, facing outward toward the street.
Emil picked it up. The glass was warm. He put it in his waistcoat pocket and locked the shop and went out to find Mr. Lindqvist's house on the river, because he had decided that the fee had been paid, and a thing that has been paid for should be delivered.
The river house was empty, the windows dark, a sold sign hanging crooked on the gate. But on the lawn in front of the terrace, in the thin autumn light, a red fox was sitting on its haunches with its tail curled round its feet, looking up at the house. It turned its head when Emil came through the gate, and its remaining eye, the one he had kept in the shop, looked at him steadily, and he understood that it had not been mounted for anyone at all. It had been made to wait for someone to come back and look at it. He had been the only one who did.
He did not take the other eye out of his pocket. He turned round and went home, and when he reached the shop the back window was empty and the net curtain was moving, very slightly, in the draught from the street.