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“Why?”
A three-letter word. Said briefly, it could linger for an eternity.
It was a call to evaluate, to explain, to expose oneself. Why was the
word of choice for those of great intellect---or great innocence,
belonging to philosophers and children alike.
“Why,
Tuck,” Pauline asked the mouse who cringed in the plastic cage in
her hand, her claws shorter but no less sharper than Vana’s would
have been in the

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“Five,
I need five brave little souls,” said Pauline the next day. As
before, the mice lined up, taking lots from Peter’s cronies, the
white furred mouse pausing to run his hand suggestively under the
chins of two doe mice.
The
lecherous look in his eyes said what could not be spoken with words:
I
can do you a favor---exempt you from the drawing---but in return you
must do me one as well. Though
the mice had no

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An hour after his conversation with
Peter and the other elders, Pauline returned to pour a bounty of food
in through the opening like a benevolent goddess. “Boysenberries
and sunflower seeds today!” She chirped amidst the shower of
delicacies, a cheer of squeaks erupting from below. “Fresh from the
garden, do enjoy!”
The mice did exactly that. However,
Pauline was not just here to feed her loyal subjects

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“Is it true you come from the City?”
“What are Big People like?”
“Have you ever seen a predator?”
For the first time, Tuck had fans. On
TV he was but a prop, an interchangeable object for whatever greasy
food product the studio was pushing that week. But here, in the
enclosed world of the glass tank, he was a celebrity, crowded by
eager pups and young mice his own age, all wanting to know what it
wa

I’m in Pauline’s house. Hope
as Tuck had never known before well up in his breast, the little
mouse scampering down the hallway looking for any sign of the
raccoon. He’d slipped out from under Vana’s top shortly after she
crossed the foyer, and though Tuck would have normally done
everything he could to get her attention, he didn’t want to Vana
attacking the older raccoon to get to him.
She was such a nice lady, after
all.
So Tuck had hid in the long hallway,
far back as he could, wat

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“A moment of your time, Miss?” A
black and tan shepherd police dog said to Vana as she left the steps
of the apartment complex, dressed in a comfortable pair of gray pants
and a tight orange top that left her midriff bare and her bust
prominent.
She could have been mistaken for a
jogger, and indeed, Vana often wore athletic clothing on cross-town
walks. You never knew when an opportunity for a hunt might ar

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“Why not?” The vixen curled her
lips in a pout, disappointed, like a child denied a treat.
“I don’t want to be eaten.” The
little brown ball shuddered as the tongue rolled over him, Vana
having taken to cleaning Tuck off in the aftermath of her passion.
The mouse in her palm cringed with each caress, as if fearing the
next slurp would pull him into her muzzle. The vixen found this
unsettling even though s

*************************************************************************************
I’m going to die. The
admonition brought neither comfort nor closure to Tuck as he stared
into his own terrified face, reflected back by a pair of deep green
eyes. Still in his cage, he sat upon the kitchen counter of a
sparsely decorated apartment where the vixen lived, though he paid
little attention to it in favor of the fox staring hungrily into his
prison.
Below the eyes, a black nose rested
against the

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Besides electricity and indoor
plumbing, the night life in civilization was better than the Wilds.
The ease of access to food and security meant you got to spend the
evening hours doing something besides hunting while trying to avoid
being hunted yourself.
Movie theaters, and in the case of
where Vana found herself after skipping out on dinner with Al and
Pauline, night clubs, were everywhere. However, she had

************************************************************************************
Vana sure was acting strange today,
Tuck thought as he wrung the last traces of lime flavoring out of
his fur. Well, stranger than usual. Always reluctant to let
the fresh prey out of her mouth at the end of the taste-testing
shoots, the vixen had actually released him from the humid, hot
prison fairly quickly compared to her normal tongue-slathering,
suckling of Tuck.
Maybe she didn’t like yogurt, he
thought

*************************************************************************************

Waiting was the worst part, as any
mouse in the vending machine would attest. Getting eaten, your life
snuffed out quickly, was a relief following the hellish
eternity spent watching the predators peer through the tall glass,
sharpened, hungry gazes sweeping over you, judging your worth as a
fitting meal.
Truly, it was the only time one did not
want to stand out, to be chosen above others. Some of the “item