by Harper Smith
Content warning for animal death and blood.
The morning is cold.
She creeps along quietly, soft paws pattering along the surface of the ice, slick with the same salt water that stains the air.
She smells something, among the sharp biting wind and tang of the sea spray. Something warm, something sweet, something alive.
There are prints in the fine dusting on snow beneath her paws, small and stick-thin.
Bird.
That’ll do.
The fox runs.
Wind ruffles her white fur as she speeds across the ice, turning her head this way and that. Searching.
She has left her litter behind, on the dryer land where they will not run off. They are young, a week old, and they demand food. She will not deny them. They need their strength.
The day is young, but so are they. A bird may be enough, it may not.
She will have to see.
The ice is solid beneath her, but she can see, when she lifts her head, that some is not. Grease ice, little flakes of white, drifts along the surface of the ocean, watery and barely formed. Bigger chunks float past that, worn and smooth, liquid dripping off their sides. Melting.
A lot has been melting, recently.
The fox wonders what she’ll do if this one slips away as well, disappearing back into the sea water like it’d never been there at all. She can already see it starting, the rounded edges getting smoother and smaller with each passing day. She hopes it stays.
It has to stay.
She keeps running.
The ice she’s on is very thick, upturned a little. It doesn’t crack when she moves, but the clinking sounds of her claws echo.
The bird is closer now.
She slows.
It’s an arctic tern, back again from its long journey. It moves around the ice, pecking with its thin beak to find some sort of sustenance for its flight.
It will never have the chance.
She crouches, low, flattening her ears against her skull. Readying herself.
She pounces.
Feathers fly.
She catches it with her teeth, first, sinking into the tern’s soft neck. It struggles–they always struggle–twisting this way and that beneath her small, strong form.
She wins, eventually, blood staining her jaw and teeth as she carries the creature’s corpse back across the plains of sea ice, oceans spray flying around her, wind rushing.
The fox thinks this will be enough. At least for the strong ones to eat. The strong ones will always eat.
She holds her head high as she prances back to her litter, infused with the thrill of a successful hunt.
I win.
Her paws skate across the slick ice, and it doesn’t crack once.
The Lighthouse 