A long time ago white foxes were more common. I know this because I used to live in a village where white foxes were spotted every spring. Some of them mated with red foxes and produced cubs with mixtures of red and white fur. The red foxes were said to be mischievous creatures, always playing tricks on humans. White foxes could be quite cheeky as well, but usually they were more powerful, their white fur signifying that they were forest spirits.

Generally speaking, the foxes kept to themselves, choosing to avoid humans whenever possible. I can’t say I blamed them, for humans are greedy creatures. The village leaders wanted to tear down more of the woods to make way for new fields, but those were the wooded areas where the foxes made their burrows. The elders tried to stop them, but the leaders were insistent.

One of the families dared to speak out, fearing that the forest spirits would retaliate for this act. The woods were sacred, and the village had no inherent need to grow more crops than they could eat. But the leaders insisted, and the forest was cleared.

In the spring seeds were sown and by summer they had risen from the earth. It would seem that that year would be a bumper harvest, one that the village could look forward to. Poor settlements like that barely had enough to eat for themselves, as many of the crops they grew were given to the local lords as payment to farm on the land. Meals were supplemented with plants and mushrooms gathered from the woods, occasionally topped with meat of small animals caught in snares.

Though the village had never come close to starvation, they would have no such fears in the future, either, for the bumper crops grew marvelously on the old forest land.

By autumn the harvest would’ve been well under way. That is, if the crops hadn’t become stricken with disease. The leaves turned brown and then black, tumbling off the stalks before they crumbled into dust. Anything that was harvested was eaten by rodents who crawled through holes in storage areas.

What had once been the promised bumper harvest became a winter famine. A couple families with ties outside the village quickly left for their other relations. Those left behind quickly tried to buy food from other villages, but they were mostly out of luck, for there was little left to buy at the markets. It seemed that all they could do was forage in the woods. But even the woods rejected them. People sent in either came out with nothing, or never returned at all.

It was like the village had been cursed, and no one knew exactly why.

But the elders knew why. They had seen this coming. They blamed the village leaders for clearing away the fox’s woods, for now the fox spirits were angry and unleashing their wraths. But the village leaders didn’t believe this, for they considered themselves practical folks. They scoffed and said that fox tales were for children, and that this year was just a bad harvest probably brought on by the sudden clearing of the woods.

But when winter came those words were the only things eaten, for there was nothing else for the people to live on. It was difficult to find tubers and other plants in the woods, for the heavy snows covered most of the woods, blocking the people in their homes.

People soon ran out of food, and eventually out of firewood. All they could do was huddle close to the hearth, burning anything they could to keep warm.

I’m told that of the two families who left the village, one of them fell down a ravine and broke their necks on their way out. The other family, the one who had tried to speak out against the clearing of the woods, made it safely to their relation’s home in another village.

When spring came once again that family returned to the village, but when they stepped out of the woods they were met with silence. No one came out to greet them.

They proceeded to check every house, for it was odd that no one was out gathering food or preparing the fields.

What a horrific shock it must’ve been to find that in every house there were piles of corpses, corpses of all the families who had stayed behind. Having perished from famine and cold, their bodies had frozen in the very places they’d called home, and now that the warm season had come the ice had melted, and their bodies only just beginning to decay.

It seemed this land was cursed, so the family quickly said prayers to the forest spirits in the hopes that next year would be better. Then the family set out again, back for their relations far away, for who would want to continue living in such a cursed place?

Or, so my mother told me.