The Smell That Wasn't

YY was halfway up the morning route when his nose went *empty.*

It was the kind of empty he had not noticed yet because nothing had ever been missing from this stretch before — like turning a corner in your own treehouse and finding the wall on the wrong side. He stopped. Sniffed. Sniffed again. Took a step backward, just to be polite, and sniffed where his last paw had landed.

Nothing.

YY squinted at the scratch-pine.

The scratch-pine looked the same. Tall. Pine-shaped. Bark scored in three long old gashes the size of a fox's reach, dark with the years they had been redone every winter. The air around the pine looked the same too.

It did not *smell* the same.

Where there should have been the sharp slightly-sweet old-fox tang — the smell that had organized this whole side of the woods for as long as YY had been counting trees — there was only pine and cold and the morning's regular nothing.

YY blinked.

"Well," he said.

He took one step past the pine. Then another. He waited for something to feel wrong. Nothing did.

He was on the rocky shoulder.

He had never been on the rocky shoulder.

The rocky shoulder was a *fox* shoulder, and had been since before he had had a name for it. He had walked the line of it every spring of his life and gone the other way. Now he was on it, with all four paws, and the rocks were the same warm gray-brown rocks he had always seen from the wrong side, and his fur was reading the air for danger and finding none.

He scampered.

He scampered the way a squirrel scampers in a place a fox has been holding for fifteen of its winters — small fast hops, one ear back, one paw landing where the next one had not yet thought to. He weaved among the rocks. He sniffed at crevices. The shoulder smelled like rocks and last fall and a faint warmth coming up from somewhere under the stones.

Halfway across, he found the crevice.

It was a frost-cracked split in a flat stone, and inside it — pushed in deep, the way something falls when something else has knocked it — were two whole hickory kernels.

Whole.

*Whole* hickory kernels.

From last fall, dropped from the canopy, missed by every mouth in the woods because every mouth in the woods had stopped at the scratch-pine.

"*Excuse me,*" YY informed the crevice.

He pried. He sneezed. He pried again. The first kernel came loose with a little stone fragment still stuck to it, and YY blew the fragment off and ate the kernel right there on the shoulder, sitting on his haunches, looking out across a piece of ground he had not been allowed to look at from this side.

The taste was *clean.* No mush. No winter softening. A kernel that had spent the winter under a stone the way a coin spends a winter in a pocket — kept.

"You," YY told the second kernel, when he had pried it free, "are coming home."

He did not eat it. He did not even tuck it into his cheek. He carried it in his paw the whole way back, climbed the trunk of the treehouse, and set it on the back of the pantry shelf — the deep shelf, the one he had not used since November.

Then he sat down on the windowsill and looked out at the rocky shoulder from his usual side.

The scratch-pine still looked the same.

It smelled like nothing now, though, and he had a kernel on the shelf that knew exactly why.