A gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the wood, bringing scents of aster and the dry brush of summer. 

I took up the carved wooden clasp of the dark brown cloak before me, and in memory I felt again the withered hand of my Aunt Ceris as I comforted her on her deathbed. Her hand was thin and brown as knotty twigs but still solid as a tree branch, even in her illness.

On the walls were the wildlife paintings that made her a local celebrity, deep and detailed paintings of the intricate beauty of nature. I loved the pictures, but I knew they were only of monetary value to my mother and would be sold the day after the will was settled.

Aunt Ceris saw me staring at the walls. “Back of the wardrobe, to the right,” she rasped out. “Take that cape, if your mother leaves you nothing else of mine. The word is ‘springthaw’. Use it alone, run quietly, stay safe. Summer is safest to start. You have good wood-sense, I can trust you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, but it was already too late. 

I hid the cape in my backpack before telling mom that Aunt Ceris had passed, and managed to keep it safe from her through the spring months. During that time I felt it calling to me from its hiding place. It wanted me to take it out to the woods and put it on.

Now, it was time. I slipped the cape around my neck and spoke the word; I felt a connection between the word and the wooden clasp like a static discharge. It spread through my body and the trees started to grow higher around me… no, it was me. I was shrinking. My watch fell off my wrist and my other clothes loosened and collapsed, but the cape shrank with me and around me, forming to my flesh as I dropped to all fours. It wrapped around my fingers and toes, bent my arms and legs to and fro, slid along my back and puffed into a red-orange tail, wrapped my head like a hood and gave me a snout and tufted ears. I was a fox with little black socks, and I stared at the tiny reflection in my watch crystal until I understood what had happened.

Aunt Ceris had done this too and had come back from it. So I relaxed and set off amid the giant trees and rocks, getting the fox eye view. I passed an arbor vitae with little pods on it like natural holiday ornaments, each one had a little bug in it that jumped when I sniffed it. I saw the undersides of bushes, and the birds covering their nests. I saw spiders circling the centers of their radiant webs and watched the silk stretching from their spinnerets. I looked closer than I’d ever seen at the ants, and saw that they bore little golden hairs. It was like entering a half-alien world, and I understood the source of that amazing natural detail that had filled all of Ceris’s artwork. She must have worn this foxbody often, and spied upon  nature at peace, the world untroubled by human presence.

I reached a little glen and smelled something interesting, something like me, it was another fox. He ran to me and sniffed me as I circled him, then he leaped up in the air as if wanting to pounce on me. I dashed around him and suddenly we were running side by side, darting through the tall grasses, startling a grazing rabbit and sending it bouncing away into the bushes, its white tail high! My fox friend and I jumped together, chased after butterflies and whirring grasshoppers, then curled up side by side to have a little nap.

I awoke an hour later, something told me that it was time. I left my sleeping friend and sought out where I’d left my clothes; strangely, it was the smell of my watch that led me back to where I’d been. As I nosed my clothes I felt the cape slipping off me. The clasp parted, leaving me to get dressed quietly as the breeze picked up in the trees overhead and the birds sang their songs.

I was glad deep in my heart, and I knew I would be returning often to the woods. Ceris had left me a true treasure, one that my mother would never be able to take from me.