Part 2 (1/2)
It was a late October evening, crisp and clear, with a moon almost full. I had come up from the meadow to the edge of the field behind the barn, and stood leaning back upon a short-handled hayfork, looking. It was at everything that I was looking--the moonlight, the gleaming gra.s.s, the very stillness, so real and visible it seemed at the falling of this first frost. I was listening too, when, as far away as the stars, it seemed, came the cry of the hounds.
You have heard at night the pa.s.sing of a train beyond the mountains?
the sound of thole-pins round a distant curve in the river? the closing of a barn door somewhere down the valley? Strange it may seem to one who has never listened, but the far-off cry of the hounds is another such friendly and human voice, calling across the vast of the night.
They were coming. How clear their tones, and bell-like! How mellow in the distance, ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, as round the sides of a swinging silver bell. Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the sound rising and falling through the rolling woodland, and spreading like a curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows.
I waited. Rounder, clearer, came the cry. I began to pick out the individual voices as now this one, now that, led the chorus across some mighty measure of The Chase.
Was it a twig that broke? Some brittle oak leaf that cracked in the path behind me? A soft sound of feet! Something breathed, stopped, came on--and in the moonlight before me stood the fox!
The dogs were coming, but I was standing still. And who was I, anyway?
A stump? A post? No, he saw instantly that I was more than an ordinary post. How much more?
The dogs were coming!
”Well,” said he, as plainly as anything was ever said, ”I don't know what you are. But I will find out.” And up he came and sniffed at my shoes. ”This is odd,” he went on, backing carefully off and sitting down on his tail in the edge of a pine-tree shadow. ”Odd indeed. Not a stump; not a man, in spite of appearances, for a man could never stand still so long as that.”
The dogs were cras.h.i.+ng through the underbrush below, their fierce cries quivering through the very trees about me.
The fox got up, trotted back and forth in front of me for the best possible view, muttering, ”Too bad! Too bad! What an infernal nuisance a pack of poodles can make of themselves at times! Here is something new in the woods, and smells of the hen-yard, as I live! Those silly dogs!” and trotting back, down the path over which he had just come, he ran directly toward the coming hounds, leaped off into a pile of brush and stones, and vanished as the hounds rushed up in a yelping, panting whirl about me.
Cool? Indeed it was! He probably did not stop, as soon as he was out of sight, and make faces at the whole pack. But that is because they have politer ways in Foxland.
It is no such walking-match as this every time. It is nip and tuck, neck and neck, a dead heat sometimes, when only his superior knowledge of the ground saves the fox a whole skin.
Perhaps there are peculiar conditions, at times, that are harder for the fox than for the dogs, as when the undergrowth is all adrip with rain or dew, and every jump forward is like a plunge overboard. His red coat is longer than the short, close hair of the hound, and his big brush of a tail, heavy with water, must be a dragging weight over the long hard course of the hunt. If wet fur to him means the same as wet clothes to us, then the narrow escape I witnessed a short time ago is easily explained. It happened in this way:--
I was out in the road by the brook when I caught the cry of the pack; and, hurrying up the hill to the ”cut,” I climbed the gravel bank for a view down the road each way, not knowing along which side of the brook the chase was coming, nor where the fox would cross.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DUST AND HOWLS”]
Not since the Flood had there been a wetter morning. The air could not stir without spilling; the leaves hung weighted with the wet; the very cries of the hounds sounded thick and choking, as the pack floundered through the alder swamp that lay at the foot of the hill where I was waiting.
There must be four or five dogs in the pack, I thought; and surely now they are driving down the old runway that crosses the brook at my meadow.
I kept my eye upon the bend in the brook and just beyond the big swamp maple, when there in the open road stood the fox.
He did not stand; he only seemed to, so suddenly and unannounced had he arrived. Not an instant had he to spare. The dogs were smas.h.i.+ng through the briars behind him. Leaping into the middle of the road, he flew past me straight up the street, over the ridge, and out of sight.
I turned to see the burst of the pack into the road, when flas.h.!.+ a yellow streak, a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust in the road, and back was the fox, almost into the jaws of the hounds, as he shot into the tangle of wild grapevines around which the panting pack was even then turning!
With a rush that carried them headlong past the grapevines, the dogs struck the warm trail in the road and went up over the hill in a whirlwind of dust and howls.
They were gone. The hunt was over for that day. Somewhere beyond the end of the doubled trail the pack broke up and scattered through the woods, hitting a stale lead here and there, but not one of them, so long as I waited, coming back upon the right track to the grapevines, through whose thick door the hard-pressed fox had so narrowly won his way.
CHAPTER III