A flash of red flits; secretive, swift, and silent through the trees and underbrush. The late day sun glints green--golden soft off the late summer leaves, illuminating and etching time. A fox stands, testing, tasting the air, and recognizes the scent of a field mouse. Her soon to be weaned kits wait for their last lesson in hunting ... before the snow falls, they will have to go searching, and surviving on their own. They crouch nearby, watching intently, hunger burning in their bellies. But they wait, knowing their turn will come.

Time stands still for the mother fox. She freezes; not one whisker, nor one muscle moves. The mouse blinks and it is hers. She deposits it to one of her young, and the smallest kit quickly gulps the morsel down. And the wind picks up, promising the coming of fall. They move away, into the hills--she teaching, the young, learning.

And a figure, wrapped in a dark cloak, moves along the path that leads to the spring and caves of the wildwood. A recluse, a worshipper of things not made by man, the woman is the one who speaks to the wild things. The one who protects them from outsiders.

She speaks to herself of the fox mother. So beautiful and patient. So wild and free. As she soaks in the beauty, and breathes deep the clean air, a pixie ring at Ceridan's feet begins to circle, the tiny voices barely audible as they sing an autumn song. She quietly shushes the mushrooms as she steps out and over them, and follows the trail of the deer, unseen, and unheard.

Across the valley the sun is beginning to ascend, slowly, as if reluctant to go, and the brilliance of her rays brighten more than usual as raindrops the size of daisies begin to splatter and splash. Ceridan lays her cloak to the leaves, and so the time had come to do the Mummer's Dance. She circles the clearing, and as she spins around and around in the last of the late summer sun, she lays bare her body to the gods as the sunshower rains down good fortune, and good luck.

The fox mother shakes her coat of the water and licks her kits good--bye. She has done her job and has blessed them with the power of the sun. She does not look back as she disappears into the young shadows ... and when she is gone, the clouds and thunder roll over the blue hills, ushering in a new season. Her time. Her season in the sun.