Backpack
An arctic fox backpack for carrying your day on your back: school, the bus, travel or work, hands free. On the front is Otto, a fox facing forward in a knit sweater, from my Animal Kinhood series, who guards an inherited notebook like a treasure.
Vulpes lagopus
Cold teaches you to listen. Everything else is noise.
Circumpolar arctic and alpine tundra: coasts and interior of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. It is Iceland's only native land mammal.
What Otto protects most is a hardback, handwritten notebook, with planting tables for plants that survive extreme cold. The reindeer-Kin who raised him left it to him, and he keeps it inside an airtight bag inside a wooden box, the way you'd keep something irreplaceable. Everything he knows about seeds comes from it. A backpack inherits that same way of moving through the world: you carry what matters and keep going, with your arms free.
It works well as a school backpack, a travel bag, or one for work: you sling it on, pack the day's things, and go. If you're going to wear it for eight hours straight, it might as well have a fox with character on the front, a calm one, unbothered by anything. Who he is and what he carries is in his biography; here he arrives light, in backpack form. And if you like how this fox fits into everyday life, he's part of a whole family of characters I make, Yago Partal.
