Scary Stories for Young Foxes

Paws frequently appear throughout Scary Stories for Young Foxes, serving alternatively as symbols of incapacitation and liberation, depending upon when and how the image appears in the plot. For example, because Uly’s paw lacks functionality and creates a cumbersome obstacle to his mobility, it symbolizes his overall physical weakness. His sisters see him as a target because of his disability and aggressively prevent him from accessing his share of the family’s resources, which in turn leads to greater weakness due to malnourishment. Uly is finally freed from the dead weight of his paw when the alligator severs it, and he rapidly adapts and gains new physical prowess with only three functional legs, for he is no longer forced to carry the burden of a limb that he does not need. With that freedom, he simultaneously succeeds in renouncing the limited identity that the crueler members of his family imposed upon him.

Paws also appear in a more incidental fashion throughout the novel. For example, Mia’s mother’s paw is injured when she is caught in Miss Potter’s trap; Mia hears her mother’s voice again but does not know that her mother is permanently incapacitated by the injury. As the storyteller, she later learns from Young Mia that her mother bore the burden of a paw exactly like Uly’s for the remainder of her life, a reminder of the time in her life when she lost her children. Similarly, Mia’s own leg is caught in a trap when she escapes the Lilac Kingdom; though she eventually recovers, she spends several months nursing her injury and trying to adapt to life with a temporary disability. During this time, Uly encourages her just as she encouraged him, and she is given an opportunity to empathize with his previous experiences.

Finally, the rotting paw that Mia discovers next to the trap in which she is caught stands as gruesome evidence that another fox was once in similarly dire straits and used courage and desperation to engineer its own escape. That fox abandoned its own paw to ensure freedom, and thus it is appropriate that Uly and Mia used the same paw to secure their own liberation in their psychological attack on Mr. Scratch.