The first trap the fox escaped was his mother’s jaws. When she had recovered from the trial of birthing her litter, the mother fox looked around at her kits and sighed. It would be hard to feed so many children, and truth be told, she was hungry after her ordeal. So she snatched up two of her smallest young and made a quick meal of them. But beneath those pups, she found a tiny, squirming runt of a fox with a patchy coat and yellow eyes. “I should have eaten you first,” she said. “You are doomed to a miserable life.” To her surprise, the runt answered. “Do not eat me, Mother. Better to be hungry now than to be sorry later.” “Better to swallow you than to have to look upon you. What will everyone say when they see such a face?” A lesser creature might have despaired at such cruelty, but the fox saw vanity in his mother’s carefully tended coat and snowy paws. “I will tell you,” he replied. “When we walk in the wood, the animals will say, ‘Look at that ugly kit with his handsome mother!’ And even when you are old and gray, they will not talk of how you’ve aged, but of how such a beautiful mother gave birth to such an ugly, scrawny son.” She thought on this and