To say that Nathan was an ambitious rabbit would be like saying that grass was green. But as the Hopps rabbits could tell you at great length, there is much more to grass than its colour, and Nathan's ambitions were grander than mere personal glory. He planned to be first in line when the Clan grew to the point where it required a council to make decisions, rather than it just being the chief's responsibility. That required more than just impressive deeds to his name. That required the Clan to believe him to be of sound judgement and impeccable honour.
So when Nathan's vigil paid off and he saw the fox creeping out of Judy's household, he stayed his paw. When he trailed behind and saw him leaving the burrow entirely, he stayed his paw. If the fox broke into a run or left Hopps lands, then he would be able to strike it down and have there be no doubt in anyone's mind that he had acted correctly.
So when the fox walked into a small copse of trees on a patch of land too gnarled and rocky for the Clan to have bothered clearing and didn't emerge on the other side, Nathan was forced to reassess.
As Nathan entered the trees, alert for any trace of his quarry, he was quickly thrown into confusion by a sound that had been muffled from outside: the steady ringing of bronze on stone. When he caught sight of it, it didn't help clarify matters for him - the fox, illuminated by a single candle, was chiseling runes into a large standing stone, perhaps half again the fox's height.
Nathan's first thought was that the fox was leaving messages for his tribe - the one he'd claimed was wiped out - but the copse was deep within Hopps territory. There would be no way for a fox scout to reliably penetrate this deeply undetected. And even if that was the plan, he could have written the message on papyrus or carved it into a bit of wood or something instead of laboriously chiseling it into a massive stone. Which left one main possibility: this was religious.
This put Nathan on a lot shakier ground. Like his father, he was initiated to the King of the Rabbit Gods, but apart from the rituals of combat and the wording of sacred oaths he had never really paid much attention to religious matters. After all, the Hopps clan was too small to support anything but a tiny communal shrine to the King of the Gods, that was really just Stewart's personal shrine that he shared with his sons and grandsons. So there were no dedicated priests in the Clan to learn of such matters from, and he had never gone on a pilgrimage to visit a temple of one of the other Clans.
He lurked in the undergrowth for some time, gnawing on his lip thoughtfully while he watched the fox work and considered theological matters he had never given much thought to in the past.
To be honest, Nick thought, he was probably wasting his time. There surely had to be innumerable rituals and incantations that went into the creation of an anchor stone and the enshrining of an Ancestor that he had no idea of. But over his lifetime he had been forced to tend to the blasted things enough times that he could remember every rune carved into them, and maybe, he hoped, replicating that with the names and deeds replaced would be sufficient. And that the relatively modest deeds would suffice. He thought that a mother that had managed to feed and raise her son enough that he had reached adulthood relatively fit and well-nourished, despite them both being trapped on the bottom rung of fox society, was plenty impressive, but he was fairly biased on the subject.
It cost him nothing but lost sleep to make the attempt. And if there was even a chance of giving his mother an anchor to free her spirit from the howling void, he owed it to her to try. Nick paused in his chiseling as he got to the part where the name of the fox that had enshrined the Ancestor was to be carved, and after thinking about it for a while, he carved 'Nick of Clan Hopps'.
With that, the work was done. He watched the standing stone for a long moment, hoping for some sign that it had done something, but of course he knew nothing he could observe would happen, because how to channel the wisdom of the anchored Ancestors had been a very well-kept secret in his tribe. He shrugged to himself, and reminded himself of one of his mother's lessons to him - to recognize that which he could not help, and not to gnaw on the issue fruitlessly. He just hoped that if it did work, his mother would be content to oversee this clan of rabbits.
Nathan had considered confronting the fox, and had almost revealed himself to do so a dozen times while he watched, but each time he was stopped by a wave of unaccustomed unsurety. He very rarely found himself in a situation where he wasn't completely sure of what he was doing, and charging forward on uneven footing seemed to be a dangerous prospect. He knew the rabbit gods were said to be vengeful when offended, so who's to say that the fox ones wouldn't be? If the fox was just setting up a shrine to his own gods, then spilling the fox's own blood upon it was practically guaranteed to end badly.
For the first time, he cursed his own inattention to theological matters not directly tied to combat. He had never considered that he would be facing a situation like this. All he could really think to do would be to slink away and ask his father's advice, which would surely undermine his own ambitions for clan leadership.
Nathan was so lost in thought that he almost didn't notice when the fox had finished chiseling, and tucked away the hammer and chisel inside a small roll of leather. But he definitely noticed when the fox looked around the copse and announced, "I'm going back to the burrow now, so you might as well walk with me."
Nathan considered remaining hidden, but decided that it'd just embarrass both of them. With as much dignity as he could muster, he emerged from his hiding spot, and was gratified to see surprise flash over the fox's face - the fox had been scanning the undergrowth much further from him than where Nathan had actually been hiding.
After a moment of tense silence, Nick turned and started to walk back to the burrow and Nathan fell in beside him. Nick took mercy on the rabbit and answered his unspoken question; "I smelled you a while back. Though to your credit it was just for a moment or two. Still, shouldn't have been upwind at all."
Nathan winced. "I though you were going through the copse so I circled around it at first. Going around it upwind was faster, and I was worried I'd lose track of you." Nick just nodded in response. "So, what is it you were doing?"
Nick hesitated before answering, not particularly feeling like explaining fox mythology to the rabbit he saw as his biggest threat in the burrow. "A shrine."
"To fox gods?"
"Fox ancestors."
"In the middle of the night?"
"I was taught that night is when the spirit world is closest to this one. So night is when such things are done."
"And Judy knows of this?"
"Of course. She supplied the tools."
Nathan fell into silence again at that, returning to his thoughts. The two of them walked side by side in uncomfortable silence the rest of the way back to the burrow, where they parted ways - though Nathan, of course, waited to see that Nick really did return to Judy's household.
In the coming days, things remained tense between Nathan and Nick, but the tenseness became tinged with the beginnings of mutual respect.
