After having checked out the immediate area around his new den, it was clearly time to go wandering a bit.  The inside of the forest didn't feel as dangerous as before, so he headed back into the forest while it felt safer.

While he had missed most of the details during his run away from his old den, he returned more slowly, taking in the surroundings more closely.  He had become used to the twisted plants and animals near the old home, and was surprised by how he didn't spot any for nearly an hour while traveling back.  Eventually he did finally start seeing them again, about halfway back to his old burrow, he came across the first razor fern.  Shortly after he began seeing signs of twisted creatures, tracks too deep or too large for the animals that left them to normally make, shimmering scales on the ground, and even a glimpse of a squirrel with color-shifting fur.

Upon arriving back at his old den, he considered his memory of where the most abnormal creatures were, and set off towards that direction.  Worried about possible danger, he kept his ears perked up, twitching towards every noise he heard.  Everything he heard sounded threatening, though, such as the birds and the shuffling of insects in the fallen leaves.  Meanwhile, the feeling of fear and danger kept growing the further he went, but he suppressed it and continued going.

Shortly afterwards, he found a clearing with a tree growing out from between some extremely large bones; he watched, confused by it swaying against the wind.  As he approached, he brushed up against a flower—which burst into flame—he yelped as it burnt some hair off his side with a foul scent, before jumping backwards, rolling on the ground to extinguish the smoldering fur.  Standing back up, he carefully examined the flowers again from a distance, then moved around them to continue his exploration.

Avoiding the clearly dangerous flowers, he noticed a bird fly towards the tree, only for the tree to grab it out of the sky with a number of branches.  A moment later the corpse of the bird landed beside the tree, vanishing behind the bones as it fell.  Clearly this whole clearing was too risky to enter, so he left back the way he came and circled around it within the forested outskirts.  Fortunately, it appeared the forest was less dangerous than the clearing with the abnormal tree, as nothing else surprised him during the time he was passing it by.

Continuing onward, he ran across a snake nearly as large as he was, though it appeared sated, as it merely kept an eye on him as he avoided it, rather than acting hostile.  Before he even made it out of sight of the snake, he noticed an unusual plant, shining in the dim light which filtered through the forest canopy.  Remembering what had happened with the flowers earlier, he kept well away from it just in case it could also harm him.

Moving into a new clearing a few moments later, he immediately stopped at the sight before him.  An absolutely immense lizard with four legs just on the side facing him, back covered in spines that reached the leaves of the trees above.  As it breathed, yellow gas spread from pores on the sides of its body, sinking to a large patch of grass and underbrush, now dead and wilted.  The tail was long and whipped back and forth, while the head was facing away from him.  Additionally, the feeling of danger he had been suppressing had reached an extreme as he had moved into the clearing—far too intense to ignore now—in addition to the natural fear of the creature.  Before his luck could run out, he quickly turned and raced back into the forest as quietly as he could manage, and didn't stop running until he reached his old den once again.

Upon reaching his old den, he quickly ran back inside, resting for a while until he was able to calm down.  The lizard-beast clearly hadn't noticed him, or hadn't considered him worth the trouble, as something that size would have been easily noticed crashing through the forest.  The creature alone was terrifying enough to view, even if it wasn't actively chasing him.

After around half an hour he finally left the den again, heading back towards the edge of the forest where his new home was.  This time he took a less direct path, finding little of interest besides some more berry bushes and a few dens of various small creatures that he did not bother.  Arriving back at his new haven, he went to head to sleep; it had been a long and stressful morning.

Waking up around dusk, he decided to explore the edge of the forest, rather than going deeper into it like before.  With only two directions he could go, he simply picked one at random, facing the plains and heading right.

While he didn't find many creatures around, he did see signs of them, including some frightful ones, such as where an entire path into the forest had been carved, trees toppled as if they were grass.  In that case however, it was clearly quite old, with new trees growing in and already nearly as wide as he was.  Another frightening one was a path where nothing grew for several times his body length.  Other cases were less obvious, simple worn dirt paths surrounded by vegetation.

However, after a few hours of exploration, he ran across signs of humans.  Before him stood a clearing in the woods, numerous stumps where trees had been cut down, with each stump having a fire burning within it.  In the middle of the clearing stood a large wooden structure, timbers holding aloft a roof over a large collection of saws.  Alongside the tool storage was lumber storage, a significant quantity of processed wood, as well as a collection of fallen trees sitting to the side.  Humans scurried around the place chopping, cutting, and burning like they didn't have enough time to do everything.

As he looked around, he missed the watchtower, though the human within it didn't miss him.  A sudden blast of a horn caught his attention—and all the humans’— sending them racing towards a previously unnoticed mound that revealed itself to be a bunker within the earth.  Those watching from the towers simply leapt from the top, hitting the ground in a roll before racing toward the bunker as well.  As they neared one another, they shouted, before grabbing one another as they made it to the door.  As the last made it within, the doors shut with an immense clang, followed by the noise of metal against metal.

In shock to the rapid change, the fox simply stood there for a moment before darting off back into the forest, unaware that his coat had snagged on a bush, pulling loose a bit of his old winter fur.

Unsure if they were after him or something else, he decided that perhaps it would be best to go deeper into the forest instead of heading back towards his den.  Perhaps even back near his older den would be a good idea, as he knew the terrain there and had lost several hunters in the past near it.  Deciding on his plan, he headed back in roughly the right direction, made much easier by his new intelligence, allowing him to figure out approximately the right angle to head given the time he had traveled today and the time he had traveled to find his new den.