“I know. Water Warriors. A joke—bunch of do-gooders, prancing around pretending to be real military.”
Peter didn’t feel that way. He agreed with Vola that it was exactly the right thing to do: repurpose the training, the equipment, and the workforce of the military to repair the damage done in the war. And the Junior Water Warriors seemed like a good idea, too—enlisting kids to help clean the water. He bit his lip, though. He wanted those ashes.
The war of the humans which ravaged through the backdrop of the introductory book about Peter and Pax is now over. And as is usually the case with war, once it is over the everybody gets to work trying to get things right back to where they were before with only limited efforts at putting lessons learned into action to improve things so that the next war might not take place quite so quickly. The Water Warriors is not just a replacement for the “real military” within the action of the book, the organization and their efforts become a replacement for the war within the reality of the reader coming to this book from its prequel. The Water Warriors become the symbolic example of the low-rent attempts to make the world better as a result of the effects of war.
At eight, it had seemed a shocking insight—that a single act could be viewed different ways—and Peter had fallen asleep pondering it. Actually, even at nearly fourteen, it still seemed kind of a magic trick.
What happened when Peter was eight was that he, his dad and Pax had all gone off on a camping trip together. On the last night of the trip, he had roasted marshmallows over the campfire and made the mistake of setting one down in order to let it cool before eating only for Pax to make a quick grab for the treat and burn his snout. Peter had acted as quickly as anyone could possibly expect and just a few minutes later Pax had a cool wet T-shirt wrapped around the burn wound. As Peter is expressing guilt an wondering of maybe his negligence meant he wasn’t ready to take care of a pet just yet, his father offers an alternative reading of the event: maybe what Pax was learned that night wasn’t that Peter was the cause of his pain, but was the agency responsible for taking care of him when he got hurt. What is really interesting about this memory and the passage above, however, is that this memory opens Chapter 20 while Chapter 19 draws to a close with Pax recalling the very same incident—in much greater detail—in a way that aligns exactly the perception offered by Peter’s father.
Then Pax described the vast box Peter and his father lived in, with other nest boxes inside. About the hard walls and slippery floors...Then he astonished her with a report of brooms, which were used to remove dirt from human homes. She was surprised at the permanence he described, also. How the human homes did not change, as fox homes changed with the seasons and with their travels. How humans slept in these homes under fair skies or storms…And the dens are not only for sleep. Inside, they rest and play also, they cook food…This was a mystery to Pax as well. The humans did not catch game, and their fruits and vegetables did not come from trees or land, they just appeared.
One of the joys of the reading the books about Peter and Pax is the perspective of humanity as seen through the eyes of a fox. The reality is never substantively different, but the language is altered enough to sometimes force a reader to stop and take note of themselves and how they live their lives. Of course, one cannot assume that such a perspective actually reflects the sensibility of a real fox, but within the context of the fiction the author makes the viewpoint of human life as seen through the eyes of a fox quite believable. Literarily speaking, it is a fascinating choice because the fox characters in this book are definitely anthropomorphized to an extent, but not so much that they become merely cartoonish animal version of humans. It is a gamble to take that pays off completely.
