Scary Stories for Young Foxes

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 8-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 8 Summary: “The Snow Ghost”

Part 8, Chapters 1-7 Summary

As told by the storyteller:

Uly and Mia travel north as winter descends, struggling to find sufficient food beneath the heavy snow. One day, Uly asks Mia if she would ever consider having kits. When Mia says no, Uly is privately wounded, thinking that she doesn’t find him appealing, but Mia continues on to say, “It’s just…families can up and die. Just like that. Or they can leave you and never come back” (258). When a blizzard threatens to freeze them to death, Uly and Mia search frantically for a warm place to shelter. They find a hole in the side of a hill and sneak inside, where they find five tiny fox kits. Mia wants to leave and absolve herself of any responsibility for them, as they are struggling to take sufficient care of themselves, but she and Uly both know that something terrible may have happened to their mother to have kept her from her litter. Uly persuades Mia to remain with the kits while he ventures out to hunt food. Mia tries to protect herself against feeling any affection for the kits, who are so helpless that she is overcome with sadness, reminded of her siblings. Against her better judgment, she gives each of them a name. Uly has little success in hunting. At the banks of an icy river, he is briefly elated when the scent of dead animals reaches his nose, but when he discovers their corpses, he realizes that something is wrong. The creatures, all small mammals, have been killed seemingly for the sake of killing, and not for food.

When a large clump of snow slides off the hill and covers the entrance to the den, Mia is forced to go out into the cold and dig around the opening so that Uly can find them again. When she gets back, she realizes that one of the kits is missing. She searches the entrance for footprints that would indicate where it might have gone but finds none. Instead, she digs in the snow around the den, where she uncovers the body of a vixen and realizes that she has found the kits’ mother. Mia fears that it was not the elements that killed her, but something far more sinister. When she comes back, she learns that all five kits had been safe in the den all along.

Part 8, Chapters 8-12 Summary

As told by the storyteller:

Uly follows the scent of a fox, following, hoping to discover the buried stores of food that it stocked for winter. Three of the caches he locates yield nothing, but the fourth is filled with baby mice. As he is storing them in his mouth to bring back to Mia, his father finds him. Mr. Scratch accuses Uly of being the real villain, insisting that if Uly leaves his food alone and adopts a submissive pose, Mr. Scratch will let him go. Uly pretends to comply and drives his paw into a gaping wound in Mr. Scratch’s flesh from his vantage point on the ground.

Meanwhile, Mia wakes from a doze to discover that one of the newly named fox kits, Bizy, is gone. She wants to look for Bizy but fears that if she leaves the other four kits, they may die without her protection. She searches the vixen’s body for clues, and when she finds a tuft of white fur, she is reminded of a lesson that Miss Vix taught her. Some foxes, Miss Vix said, have the advantage of blending in with their environment in a way that makes them impossible to detect. Mia knows that this fur belongs to a solid white fox, and she is convinced that this fox must have killed the kits’ mother while she was trying to defend them. She theorizes that the white fox came back and stole Bizy while she was clearing the entrance to the den. Mia positions herself warily at the entrance of the den to wait. She remains perfectly still as the snow-white fox sneaks into the den, picking up a kit named Marley in its jaws. Mia allows it to take him, leaving the kits bundled up against their deceased mother as she sets out to rescue Marley and Bizy by discovering where the fox is taking them.

Uly flees his father; Mr. Scratch is ferocious and fast but heavier than his son, who is nimble without a fourth leg to weigh him down. He leads his father over the fallen tree bridge over the river. The snow collapses, and Mr. Scratch is pulled under. Returning to the den with the mice still in his jaws, Uly is alarmed to find only three kits left and only the body of a frozen vixen to keep them company.

Part 8, Chapters 13-16 Summary

As told by the storyteller:

Mia sees Marley seeming to float in the white fox’s jaws. The white fox reaches the bank of the frigid river, so Mia howls. The white fox drops Marley, and Mia checks him for injuries. Whimpering from the riverbed below draws her attention to Bizy’s small, cowering form, and Mia finds a large wound in her side. Mia turns and sees the white fox creeping up to her. Horror overwhelms her as she realizes that the white fox is her brother, Roa. She pleads with him, trying to appeal to what reason might be left in his mind, apologizing for leaving him behind to be infected. However, her brother seems to be nowhere inside the white ghost. Mr. Scratch appears, and Mia tries to appeal to Roa to help her while threatening Mr. Scratch with the information that her brother is infected. Mr. Scratch, unable to resist answering a challenge, strikes out at Roa, and they battle ferociously. Roa sinks his teeth into Mr. Scratch, who tries to persuade Mia to let him take Marley. Uly appears, leaping onto his father. Their weight causes the ice at the edge of the river to break away, and they are sent floating away with the current. As the ice block teeters, Marley lies helpless between Uly and Mr. Scratch. Uly pretends to lunge but instead scoops up Marley in his jaws and slides between his father’s legs. As Mr. Scratch advances with his rabid fangs, Uly pretends to surrender. When Mr. Scratch lets his guard down, Uly leaps into the air, crashing down to rock the block of ice. Uly pulls Marley to safety just before Mr. Scratch plummets over the edge. Mr. Scratch tries to appeal to Uly’s good nature, calling him son, but Uly tips the ice again, sending his father down into the rushing river. Mia and Uly howl to one another as Uly and Marley bob downstream with the current. Mia tries to tend to Bizy, but her wounds are too severe, and Bizy dies by the riverbank. Mia buries her there. When she returns to the den, she finds the three kits safe and the pile of mice that Uly left.

Epilogue Summary

In the present:

The runt, the last remaining kit, asks what happened to Uly. The storyteller says she could ask him herself, but he is late. The kit seems to be uncertain whether the storyteller is joking. The storyteller is touched to learn that the runt’s name is Mia. The runt explains that this is why she had to stay to the end of the story, to find out whether the fox who shared her name survived until the end. Young Mia explains that she was named after her great-great-great-great aunt, who saved her mother, Young Mia’s great-great-great-great grandmother, from a human trap and that ever since, there has been a Mia in their family. Together, they come to the realization that this Young Mia is a descendant of Mia’s mother, who went on to raise more kits after leaving Mia at Miss Potter’s house and who bore the mark of her journey in the form of a debilitated paw just like Uly’s.

At this point in the story, Heidicker begins referring to the storyteller by her name, Mia, explaining that she had told their story to every generation of young foxes they had raised. In this moment, she now comes to the realization of just how far the line of foxes she raised with Uly has expanded into generation upon generation. As Mia-the-storyteller walks home, Uly appears, sad that he missed his dramatic entrance at the end of the story and the opportunity to scare the young kits. In the distance, they hear the sounds of trees being felled as loggers encroach into the Antler Wood, and Uly and Mia lament that there are lessons that these young kits will have to learn that even they cannot prepare them for: “They’ll have to learn themselves,” he says, “like we did” (312).

Part 8-Epilogue Analysis

Before Mia and Uly discover the abandoned kits, Mia’s reaction to all of the losses she has suffered is to try to steel herself against developing any further connections to anyone else, aside from Uly. Like many young foxes (and perhaps humans) who have had dysfunctional home lives, Uly is excited and eager to create his own family so that he can share with his loved ones the love and nurturing that he is longing to give. Having seen how wrong things can go, Uly is eager to do his best to do everything right. Mia, by contrast, had a very happy, idyllic family life that was crushed into oblivion when the sudden infiltration of the yellow sickness decimated her family and left her all alone in the world. She loves Uly but has found that hidden threats can destroy even the most secure of situations and can present themselves at any time. When the two foxes stumble upon the orphaned kits in the den, it seems to Uly like fate. Neither understands at first why the kits’ mother is gone, and based on their own individual traumas, they speculate accordingly. Mia initially wants to blame the kits’ mother and judges her for failing to do her duty and protect the kits. When Mia discovers the vixen body and learns that she died protecting the five young kits, she softens, not only in her judgment of this vixen but also in the judgment of her mother, especially when the kits are kidnapped by the white fox and Mia must choose whether to go after them or protect the remaining kits. Like Mia’s mother and Mercy, Mia begins to understand that a vixen with many children may be forced to make impossible choices in which there simply is no ideal outcome that allows everyone to survive unscathed.

This last misadventure resonates strongly with the dual theme of Developing Identity and Choosing One’s Own Family. These lost kits, like Uly and Mia, have been orphaned, and it is deeply significant that Mia and Uly’s first official litter of kits are orphans just like themselves. When Mia gives the kits the names of her siblings and Uly, she is conferring upon them her devotion, allowing those she loved so dearly to live on through this new generation. In the section of the novel subtitled “The Snow Ghost,” Mia and Uly are both forced to confront the specters of their pasts. Uly must confront his father, and Mia must confront the ruined wreck of her brother Roa, whom she believed to be long dead. For Uly, who has grown into a confident and even assertive young fox, his father has become more of a nuisance than a threat, particularly after Uly’s decision to raise the litter of orphaned kits as his own. When Uly tips his father off the edge of the sheet of ice, Mr. Scratch demonstrates his own failure to change or to renounce his evil ways, for his sudden act of claiming Uly as his son is merely a ruse to appeal to Uly’s superior sense of morality; Mr. Scratch only wishes to save himself and does not love his son. Fortunately, Uly has learned to discern the difference between those who love him and those who don’t, and he secures his father’s defeat relatively easily. With Mr. Scratch confirmed dead, Uly need never fear his father again. For Mia, the realization that the white fox is actually Roa, still sickened by rabies, is a heartbreaking reunion. Discovering that her brother has lived with this sickness for so long is gut-wrenching for her. Despite what she knows and understands about the yellow sickness, she still pleads with her brother for help, appealing to a sense of reason and love that he simply no longer possesses. In the end, when Roa and Mr. Scratch battle each other, the most agonizing aspects of Uly’s and Mia’s recent traumatic experiences converge to draw a stark line between their pasts and their futures.

It is also significant to note that the kit who stays until the end is not the bravest of the litter; as the runt (a designation often associated with being the weakest member), Young Mia shares qualities with Uly, and it might be expected that she would be the most timid and frightened of her siblings. Instead, she is the one who remains, not because she lacks fear but because, despite being the most afraid, she is also the most adept at mastering her fear. The inclusion of her own name in the story and the knowledge that a very special and important original Mia is her namesake propel her to commit to finding out what happens. The revelation of her distant connection to the storyteller emphasizes the deeper philosophy underlying many of the vixen mother’s most difficult decisions throughout the story itself. Thus, this last chapter illustrates the importance of ensuring the safety and success of future generations of young ones: a philosophy that applies just as well to young humans as it does to young foxes. The important lessons that Young Mia learns by bravely staying to listen to the very end of the tale therefore highlight the validity and importance of Heidicker’s own attempt to use Horror as a Teaching Tool for Young Readers.