Part 9 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEATH IN THE DARK]

For a second the young fox looked into the lidless, deadly eyes of the copperhead, with their strange oval pupils, the hall-mark of the fatal pit-vipers. All in one flash, the grim jaws of the snake gaped open, the two movable fangs of the upper jaw unfolded and thrust straight out like tiny spearheads, and the fatal crooked needles stabbed deep in the cub's soft side. Growling fiercely in his little throat, he clenched his sharp teeth through the snake's spine; but even as he closed his jaws, the fatal virus touched the tide of his life and he fell forward.

The wild folk have no tears, nor may they show their sorrow by the sobs and wailing of humankind, yet there was something in the dumb despair of the two foxes who had followed the trail of their lost cub, as they hung over the soft little body, that showed that the love of our lesser brethren for their little ones is akin to the love of humankind. Thereafter all the watchfulness and the love and the hope of the two were concentrated on the little fox with the black cross on his back. Night and day Mother Fox guarded him. Day and night Father Fox taught and trained him, until he had acquired much of the lore of fox-kind. He learned to catch birds and mice and frogs and squirrels, and even the keen-eared cottontail rabbit, whose eyes can see forward and backward equally well. He learned, too, the lessons of prudence and foresight which keep foxes alive when ice and snow have locked many of their larders. Once, when he was crossing a pasture with Father Fox, the latter stopped and stood like a pointing dog, one velvety black bent forefoot in the air, while with outstretched muzzle he sniffed the faintest of warm scents, which seemed to float from a clump of tangled dry gra.s.s. Stealing forward like a shadow, the old fox sprang at the tussock. Before he landed, a plump quail buzzed out of the cover like a bullet, to be caught by the fox in mid-air.

Underneath a fringe of dry gra.s.s was a round nest of pure white, sharp-pointed eggs--so many of them that they were heaped up in layers.

After eating the quail, the old fox carefully carried off the eggs and hid them under layers of damp moss, where they would keep indefinitely and be a resource in the famine days that were yet to come.

Another day the cub learned the advantage of teamwork. On that day the two old foxes were hunting together, and, as usual, Blackcross tagged along. Near the middle of a great field, a flock of killdeer were feeding--those loud-voiced plover, which wear two rings around their white necks. For a moment the two foxes stood motionless, staring at the distant birds. Then, without a sound, Mother Fox turned back. For a moment Blackcross could watch her as she made a wide detour around the field, and then she disappeared from sight. Father Fox lay still for several minutes, with his wise head resting on his forepaws. Then, while Blackcross stayed behind, the old fox started deliberately toward the flock of feeding birds. At times he would stop, and bound high in the air, and scurry up and down, waving his flaunting brush and cutting curious capers, moving gradually nearer and nearer to the flock.

The killdeer, which are wise birds in spite of their loud voices, moved farther and farther away toward the end of the pasture, ready to spring into the air and flash away on their long narrow wings if the fox came too near, but evidently much interested in his antics as they fed. Gradually the curveting fox edged the flock clear across the field, until they were close to a thicket that lay between the field and a patch of woods beyond. Then he redoubled his efforts, prancing and bounding and rolling over and over, while his fluffy tail showed like a plume above the long gra.s.s, and the birds stopped feeding and watched him with evident curiosity.

Suddenly, when the attention of the whole flock was fixed on the performing fox, there was a rustle in the thicket, and out flashed a tawny shape. Before the flock could spring into the air, Mother Fox had caught one bird in her teeth and beaten down another with her paws.

Another morning Blackcross learned what happens to foxes who poach on their neighbor's preserves. In the early dawn-light, he was loping along the upper end of the valley with Father Fox. Suddenly the fur bristled all along the latter's back, and he gave a little churring growl. Right ahead of him, trotting along a path made by a generation of red-fox pads, came the old gray fox who lived by Cold Spring, a dead cottontail rabbit swung over one shoulder. The poacher was caught with the game. With another growl, the old red fox sprang at the trespa.s.ser. The gray fox was a mile from his burrow, and knowing that the red fox could outpace him, decided to fight for his booty. With a quick flirt of his head, he tossed the rabbit into a near-by bush, and with bristling back awaited the attack.

Walking stiff-legged like two dogs, and growling deep in their throats, the two came together, until they stood sidewise to each other, sparring for an opening. Finally, the old red fox snapped at the other's foreleg, with a movement more like the slash of a wolf than the bite of a dog. The gray fox dropped his head, and the bared teeth of the two snicked together. Again the red fox made the same lead, and met with the same block. The third time he feinted, and as the other dropped his head, whirled and brought his brush, with a blinding, stinging swish, across the eyes of the gray fox. Before the latter could recover, the narrow jaws of the red fox had met in the soft flesh just above the gray hind leg. A wolf would have hamstrung his opponent and killed him at his leisure; but foxes rarely fight to the death. As the old gray fox felt the rending teeth tear through his soft skin, he yelped, tore himself loose, and started full-speed for his den. For two hundred yards the red fox pursued him, with such swiftness that he managed to nip his unprotected hind quarters several times. At each bite the fleeing gray fox yelped with the high, shrill, sorrowful note of a hurt little dog; and when Father Fox returned to claim the spoils of victory, all that could be seen of the other was a gray streak moving rapidly toward Cold Spring.

As the cub reached his full stature, he ranged farther and farther afield with the two old foxes. He learned all the hiding and camping places of the range, and how to sleep out in a blaze of sunlight in some deserted field, looking for all the world like a tussock of tawny blackened gra.s.s, or, if so be that he hunted by day and slept by night, he found that he wore a blanket on his back which kept him warm even during the coldest nights. As for his unprotected nose and four paddies, he wrapped them up warm in the fluffy rug of his thick soft brush. By the time frost had come, his fur had grown long and glossy and very beautiful, with the velvet cross of midnight-black bordered with old-gold, silver, and tawny-pink, his black brush waving aloft like a white-tipped plume.

Death came with the frost, in the form of traps, hounds and hunters.

Old Father Fox taught him how to escape them all. Many years ago he had lived across the hills on the lonely Barrack, where the Deans and the Blakesleys and the Howes and the Baileys and the Reeds have a far-away hill country of their own. Old Fred Dean lived there, and prided himself on both the wild and the tame crops which he raised on his hill farm. He made the whitest, sweetest maple sugar in the world, and harvested hickories, chestnuts, b.u.t.ternuts, and even hazel-nuts. It was his fur crop, however, which was the most profitable. Foxes, racc.o.o.ns, skunks, muskrat, mink--the old man knew how to trap them all.

In Father Fox's second year, he was caught in a trap which Fred had cunningly hidden in the snow among a maze of cattle tracks--the last place where a fox would suspect danger. The fox finally managed to work his imprisoned foot out of the gripping jaws; but it had cost him four toes to learn that the scent of man or iron meant death to foxes.

He never forgot, and he taught Blackcross to fear the tiniest whiff of either. As for dogs, the old fox taught his cub that no dog can overtake a fox going uphill or in the rough, and that s.h.i.+fting sand and running water are the fox's friends, since his scent will lie in neither. He taught him all the cut-offs, the jumps, and the run-backs of the range, and finally the cherished fortresses where, as a last resort, he might take refuge.

When it came to hunters, the young fox had to take his chances. In the last a.n.a.lysis a man's brain can outwit that of a fox. It was when the blaze and the glow of the crimson and gold frost-fires had died away to the russet of late fall that the fox family was most in danger, for the Raven Hunt Club needed a fox. Three times now the men had dressed themselves with great care, in wonderful scarlet coats and s.h.i.+ny top-boots, while the women wore comfortable breeches and uncomfortable collars; and they had all jumped fences and waded brooks and crashed through thickets; but never a fox could they find, so close had the dwellers in Fox Valley lain hidden. In fact, the last hunt had been a drag-hunt, and the pack had followed for hours the scent of a bag of anise which had been dragged the day before by a string, through the woods and across the fields, by a sleepy stable-boy on a broken-down hunter. But you cannot rise in your stirrups and shout ”Tally-ho!” or ”Stole away!” or any of the other proper hunting remarks, over a bag of anise. Then, too, the hounds have nothing to worry and kill at the end of the hunt; nor can the brush be cut off for a trophy, for an anise bag hasn't any brush.

Thanksgiving was two scant weeks away, and it was absolutely necessary for the happiness of the Hunt that a live fox be secured at once.

Accordingly the Raven Hunt Club offered fifty dollars for a live red fox. Grays were barred, because they prefer to hide in burrows and be safe rather than run and be killed. For a week all the farmers' boys for miles around Fox Valley trapped desperately, but without success.

Father Fox had not paid four toes for nothing. Then they sent for Fred Dean. Thereafter, one night Blackcross, while hunting over a hilltop pasture, noted a long, freshly turned furrow that ran straight across the field, which was filled with old chaff taken from deserted barns and smelt delightfully of mice. Along the furrow and through the litter the young fox nosed his way, ready to pounce upon the first mouse which darted out. Suddenly there was a snap, and Blackcross was caught by his slim dark muzzle. There the old trapper found him the next morning, hardly alive; and when he saw that he had secured a cross-fox, demanded a hundred from the committee instead of the offered fifty. Said committee took the fox, and advertised far and wide that the Thanksgiving Hunt would be after such a fox as had never been hunted before in the memory of man.

The holiday turned out to be one of those rare and fleeting days of Indian summer which Autumn sometimes borrows from her sister. The pack was in fine fettle. The horses and the hunters were fit, and the hunt breakfast excellent. Everybody was thankful--except the s.h.i.+vering little fox. For days he had been cooped in a dirty wire cage, and eaten tainted meat and drunk stale water, and he was stiff and sore from his night in the trap and from lack of exercise. Just at sunrise on Thanksgiving morning, he was crammed into a bag, and then let out two fields ahead of the pack. As he shot into the sunlight, there was a chorus of shouts, yells, and yelps, and a crowd of men, women, horses, and hounds rushed after him in a tremendous burst of speed.

The young fox's legs tottered under him as he ran. Moreover, for a mile around the country was level. As he crossed the first field, the pack was already at the farther wall, and would surely have overtaken him in the third field if it had not been for one of the old fox's lessons. The pasture sloped up to where a sand bank showed as a great crescent gash in the turf. Springing to the side of the bank, the fox clung to it like a fly, scurried along its side, cleared the stone wall beyond, and headed for the thickets of Fox Valley. The s.h.i.+fting sand left no track or scent, and while the pack puzzled out the trail, Blackcross won to the shelter of the nearest thicket.

Up and down the hillsides, across marshes and through tangles of underbrush, he doubled, checked, turned, and twisted. Raven Hunt, however, boasted the best pack of fox-hounds in the state, nor had Blackcross either the strength or endurance for a long run. His pace became slower and slower, while the bell-like notes of the hounds and the shouts of the hunters sounded ever nearer and louder.

Only just in time the beset fox saw looming up before him the best hidden of all the fox fortresses in the Valley. It seemed only an impenetrable tangle of greenbrier on the hillside--that vine whose stems are like slim, green wires, studded everywhere with up-curved thorns through which neither man nor beast can force a way. Through the very middle of the tangle ran the naked trunk of a fallen chestnut, showing just above the barbed vines. As the pack scrambled through the barway at the foot of the hill, the little fox ran along the log, and with all his last remaining strength sprang far out across the interlaced tangle of vine and thorn, where the smooth needles under a little white pine made a tiny island in the thicket.

From there the fox bounded over a narrow belt of greenbrier into a ma.s.s of wild honeysuckle, whose glossy green leaves and bending vine-stocks carpeted the hill at that point fully two feet deep.

Across the yielding surface he hurried, until he reached the entrance of a little tunnel beneath the vines, entirely hidden from sight by the drooping leaves. Through this he crept noiselessly, beneath the green carpet, until he reached the entrance to a burrow which led far up the hillside and had no less than three well-concealed exits.

For a long hour the pack and the hunters and the horses circled and beat and trampled back and forth through the thicket, and as far into the greenbrier tangle as they could force a way; but no one of them found the lost trail. A hundred dollars had been spent and nothing killed. Everybody agreed that it was a most unfortunate ending to a good day--everybody, that is, except the fox.

As the months wore on, Blackcross hunted more and more by himself, nor did he use any of the family dens. This was partly because snow leaves a telltale trail, which he who hunts can read, and partly because of a difference in the att.i.tude toward him of the old foxes. Among the wild folk the love and care of parents cease when their children have become full-grown. This is part of nature's plan to scatter families, and prevent the in-breeding which will weaken the stock. At last the time came when Mother Fox no longer allowed him the freedom of the den in which he had been born, and Father Fox growled in his throat when he met him carrying his kill.

Then the love-moon of the foxes in February showed in the sky, and something drove Blackcross far afield--something that called and cried, and would not let him sleep, and took away even the interest and joy of a successful hunt. Across the ridges, through Fern Valley and beyond Blacksnake Swamp he journeyed, until, far beyond them all, he found a lonely valley shut in on all four sides by steep slopes, and untenanted by any of the fox-folk. On the crest of one of the hills stood an abandoned haystack, left by some thriftless farmer years before, and so bleached and weathered by sun and storm that it was useless as hay, but an ideal place for a fox-warren. Under this Blackcross dug a home with many entrances, all of them cunningly concealed by the overhanging hay. Through the centre of the stack itself, he ran a series of tunnels and rooms, besides the safer ones far underground.