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[Illustration]
THE HEART OF A DOG
[Illustration]
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The Heart of a Dog
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
Illustrated by MARGUERITE KIRMSE
[Illustration: YOUNG MODERNS]
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
COPYRIGHT, 1924
BY DOUBLEDAY & CO., INC.
CL
_Copyright, 1921, 1922, 1923 and 1924,
By George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1920, by The Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1921, by International Magazine Company
Harpers’ Bazar_
THE HEART OF A DOG
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_My book is dedicated to_
MY FRIEND
MARK SAXTON
THE ONLY BOY WHOM THE CONSERVATIVE SUNNYBANK
COLLIES HAVE HONOURED WITH THEIR
FRIENDSHIP, AND WHOM THEY HAVE ACCEPTED
AS A LOVED PLAYFELLOW
CONTENTS
PAGE
ONE: Fox! 1
TWO: The Coming of Lad 43
THREE: The Meanest Man 67
FOUR: The Tracker 95
FIVE: “Youth Will Be Served!” 123
SIX: Lochinvar Bobby 143
SEVEN: “One Minute Longer” 187
EIGHT: Afterward 205
[Illustration]
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ONE: Fox
[Illustration]
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[Illustration]
ONE: Fox!
When the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., went into the wholesale raising
of silver foxes for a world market, its two partners brought to the
enterprise a comfortable working capital and an uncomfortable ignorance
of the brain-reactions of a fox.
They had visited the National Exhibition of silver foxes. They had spent
days at successful fox farms, studying every detail of management and
memorising the rigid diet-charts. They had committed to memory every
fact and hint in Bulletin No. 1151 of the United States Department of
Agriculture—issued for the help of novice breeders of silver foxes.
They had mastered each and every available scrap of exact information
concerning the physical welfare of captive silver foxes. But, for lack
of half a lifetime’s close application to the theme, their knowledge of
fox mentality and fox nature was nil.
Now one may raise chickens or hogs or even cattle, without taking
greatly into account the inner workings of such animals’ brains. But no
man yet has made a success of raising foxes or their fifth cousin, the
collie, without spending more time in studying out the mental than the
physical beast.
On the kitchen wall of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., was the printed
dietary of silver foxes. On the one library shelf of the kennel was all
the available literature on silver fox breeding, from government
pamphlets to a three-volume monograph. In the four-acre space within the
kennel enclosure were thirty model runways, twenty by twenty feet; each
equipped with a model shelter-house and ten of them further fitted out
with model brood nests.
In twenty-four of these thirty model runways abode twenty-four model
silver foxes, one to each yard at this autumn season—twenty-four silver
foxes, pedigreed and registered—foxes whose lump value was something
more than $7,400. Thanks to the balanced rations and meticulous care
lavished on them, all twenty-four were in the pink of form.
All twenty-four seemed as nearly contented as can a wild thing which no
longer has the zest of gambling with death for its daily food and which
is stared at with indecent closeness and frequency by dread humans.
But the partners of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., failed to take
note, among other things, of the uncanny genius certain foxes possess
for sapping and mining; nor that some foxes are almost as deft at
climbing as is a cinnamon bear. True, the average silver fox is neither
a gifted burrower nor climber. But neither are such talents rare.
For example, King Whitefoot II, in Number 8 run, could have given a mole
useful hints in underground burrowing. Lady Pitchdark, the temperamental
young vixen in Number 17 run, might wellnigh have qualified as the
vulpine fly. Because neither of these costly specimens spent their time
in sporadic demonstration of their arts, in the view of humans, those
same humans did not suspect the accomplishments.
Then came an ice-bright moonlit night in late November—a night to stir
every quadruped’s blood to tingling life and to set humans to crouching
over fireplaces. Ten minutes after Rance and Ethan Venner, the kennel
partners, finished their perfunctory evening rounds of the yards, King
Whitefoot II was blithely at work.
Foxes and other burrowing beasts seek instinctively the corners or the
edges of yards, when striving to dig a way out. Any student of their
ways will tell you that. Wherefore, as in most fox-kennels, the corners
and inner edges of the Stippled Silver yards were fringed with a
half-yard of mesh-wire, laid flat on the ground.
Whitefoot chose a spot six inches on the hither edge of a border-wire
and began his tunnel. He did not waste strength by digging deep. He
channelled a shallow tube, directly under the flat-laid wire. Indeed,
the wire itself formed the top of his tunnel. The frost was not yet deep
enough or hard enough to impede his work. Nor, luckily for him, did he
have to circumnavigate any big underground rock.
In forty-two minutes from the time he began to dig, his pointed black
nose and his wide-cheeked stippled black face was emerging into the
open, a few inches outside his yard.
Wriggling out of his tunnel, he shook himself daintily to rid his
shimmering silver-flecked black coat of such dirt as clung to it. Then
he glanced about him. From the nearby wire runs, twenty-three pairs of
slitted topaz eyes flamed avidly at him. Twenty-three ebony bodies
crouched moveless; the moon glinting bright on their silver stipples and
snowy tailtips.
The eyes of his world were on the fugitive. The nerves of his world were
taut and vibrant with thrill at his escapade. But they were sportsmen in
their own way, these twenty-three prisoners who looked on while their
more skilled fellow won his way to liberty. Not a whine, not so much as
a deep-drawn breath gave token of the excitement that was theirs. No
yelping bark brought the partners out to investigate. These captives
could help their comrade only by silence. And they gave him silence to a
suffocating degree.
With their round phosphorous eyes they followed his every move. But
twenty-two of the twenty-three forbore so much as a single motion whose
sound might attract human ears. Couchant, aquiver, turning their heads
ever so little and in unison to watch his progress, the twenty-two
watched Whitefoot make for the high wire boundary fence which encircled
the four-acre kennel enclosure—the fence beyond whose southern meshes
lay the frost-spangled meadow.
Beyond the meadow reared the naked black woods, sloping stiffly upward
to the mountain whose sides they draped;—the mountain which was the
outpost of the wilderness hinterland to southward of this farm-valley.
But, as Whitefoot set to work at the absurdly simple exploit of digging
under this outer fence—a fence not extending underground and with no
flat width of wire before it—the twenty-third prisoner could stand the
emotional strain no longer. Young and with nerves less steady than her
companions’, little Lady Pitchdark marred the perfect symphony of
noiselessness.
She did not bark or even yelp. But she went into action.
By natural genius she was a climber. Up the side of her ten-foot
run-wire she whizzed; her long-clawed feet scarce seeming to seek
toe-hold in the ladder of meshes they touched. Like a cat, she sped
upward.
To provide against such an unlikely effort at jail-breaking, the four
wire walls of the run sloped slightly inward. At their summit, all
around, was a flat breadth of wire that hung out for eight inches over
the run; projecting inside the walls. As a rule such deterrents were
quite enough to bar an ordinary fox from escape. But nature had taught
Lady Pitchdark more than she teaches the ordinary fox. She was one of
the rare vulpines born with climbing-genius.
Up she scrambled her fierce momentum carrying her to the very top of the
fence; to the spot where it merged with the eight-inch overhang. Here,
by every rule, the vixen should have yielded to the immutable law of
gravity and should have tumbled back to the ground with a
breath-expelling flop.
This is precisely what she did not do. Still helped by her momentum, she
clawed frantically with both forefeet at the edge of the overhang. Her
claws hooked in its end-meshes. Her hindfeet released their hold on the
in-slanting fence and she swung for an instant between moon and earth—a
glowing black swirl of fur, shot with a myriad silver threads.
Then lithely she drew herself up, on the overhang. A pause for breath
and she was skidding down the steep slope of the fence’s outer side. A
dart across the yard and she reached the kennel’s boundary fence just as
Whitefoot was squirming to freedom through the second and shorter tunnel
he had made that night.
Diving through, so close behind him that her outthrust muzzle brushed
his sensitive tailtip, Pitchdark reached the safety of the outer world
at almost the same instant as did he. Whitefoot felt the light touch at
his tail. He spun around, snarling murderously, his razor-keen teeth
bared. He had won his way to liberty by no slight exercise of brain and
of muscle. He was not minded to surrender tamely to any possible
pursuer.
But as he confronted the slender young vixen in her royal splendour of
pelt and with her unafraid excited eyes fixed so mischievously upon him,
the dog-fox’s lips slipped down from their snarling curl; sheathing the
fearsome array of teeth and tushes. For a fraction of a second Whitefoot
and Pitchdark faced each other there under the dazzling white moon; twin
ebon blotches on the frost-strewn grass. Twenty-two pairs of yellow-fire
eyes were upon them.
Then on impulse the two refugees touched noses. As though by this act
they established common understanding, they wheeled about as one; and
galloped silently, shoulder to shoulder, across the frosted meadow to
the safety of the black mountainside forest.
Sportsmanship can go only just so far; even in cool-nerved foxes. As the
couple vanished through the night, a shrilly hideous multiple clamour of
barking went up from twenty-two furry black throats. The tense hush was
broken by a bedlam of raucous noise. The prisoners dashed themselves
against the springy sides of their wire runs. One and another of them
made desperate scrambling attempts to climb the inslanting walls that
encircled them—only to fall back to the frozen ground and add their
quota once more to the universal din.
Rance and Ethan Venner came tumbling out of the nearby house, grasping
their flashlights and shouting confusedly to each other. Instantly blank
silence overspread the yards. The foxes crouched low, eyes aflame,
staring mutely at the belated humans.
The briefest of inspections told the brothers what had happened. First
they found the tunnel leading forth from Whitefoot’s run. Then they
discovered that Pitchdark’s run was empty; though they could find no
clue to its occupant’s mysterious vanishing until next morning’s sunrise
showed them a tuft of finespun black fur stuck to a point of wire on the
overhang, ten feet above ground. Last of all the partners came upon the
hole under the fence which divided the kennel from the meadow.
“Whitefoot was worth an easy $600 as he stood,” grunted Rance Venner,
miserably; as his flashlight’s ray explored the hole under the fence.
“Nearer $700, in the coat he’s carrying this fall. And Pitchdark isn’t
more’n a couple of hundred dollars behind him. Two of the best we had. A
hundred per cent loss; just as we’re getting started.”
“Nope,” contradicted Ethan. “Not a hundred per cent loss. Only about
fifty. The pelt of either one of ’em will bring $300, dressed. Any of a
dozen dealers will pay us that for it.”
“If they was to pay us three million, we wouldn’t be any richer,”
complained Rance. “We haven’t got the pelts to sell. You’re talking
plumb foolish, Ethan.”
“We’ll have ’em both by noon to-morrow,” declared Ethan. “Those two
foxes were born in a kennel. They don’t know anything else. They’re as
tame as pet squirrels. We’ll start out gunning for ’em at sunrise. We’ll
take Ruby along. She’ll scent ’em, double quick. Then all we’ll have to
do is plant the shots where they won’t muss the pelt too much.”
“We’ll do better’n that,” supplemented Rance, his spirits rising at his
brother’s tone of confidence. “We won’t shoot ’em. We’ll get out the
traps, instead. They’re both tame and neither of ’em ever had to hustle
for a meal. They’ll walk right into the traps, as quick as they get the
sniff of cooked food. C’mon in and help me put the traps in shape. We
ought to be setting ’em before sunrise. The two foxes will be scouting
for breakfast by that time.”
The newly optimistic Rance was mistaken in all his forecasts. The two
fugitives were not scouting for breakfast at sunrise. Hours earlier they
twisted their way in through the narrow little opening of an unguarded
chicken-house belonging to a farm six miles from the kennel. Thither
they were drawn by the delicious odour of living prey.
There, like a million foxes since the birth of time, they slew without
noise or turmoil. There they glutted themselves; carrying away each a
heavy fowl for future feasting; bearing off their plunder in true
vulpine fashion with the weight of the bird slung scientifically over
the bearer’s withers.
Daybreak found them lying snugly asleep in a hollow windfall tree that
was open at either end and which lay lengthwise of a nick in the
hillside, with briars forming an effective hedge all about it.
Nor did the best casting efforts of Ruby, the partners’ foxhound,
succeed in following their cleverly confused trail across a pool and two
brooks. In the latter brook, they had waded for nearly a furlong before
emerging on dry ground at the same side.
Thus set in a winter of bare sustenance for the runaways. They kept to
no settled abiding place, but drifted across country; feasting at such
few farmsteads as had penetrable hencoops; doing wondrous teamwork in
the catching of rabbits and partridges; holing in under windfalls or in
rock-clefts when blizzards made the going bad.
It was the season when foxes as a rule run solitary. Seldom in early
winter do they hunt in pairs and never at any season in packs. But these
two black and silver waifs were bound together not only by early
association but by mutual inexperience of the wild. And while this
inexperience did not blur nor flaw their marvellous instinct, they found
it more profitable to hunt together than alone.
Only once or twice in their winter’s foraging did they chance upon any
of the high-country’s native red foxes. A heavy hunting season had
shifted most of the reds to a distant part of the county; as is the way
with foxes that are overpressed by the attentions of trappers and
hounds. In that region, pink coats and hunting horses and foxhound packs
were unknown. But many a mountain farmer eked out his lean income by
faring afield with a brace of disreputable but reliable mongrel hounds
and a fowling piece as disreputably reliable; eager for the flat price
of $10 to $12 per skin offered by the nearest wholesale dealer. This sum
of course was for the common red fox; silver foxes being as unknown to
the region at large as were dinosaurs.
(The dealer paid the farmer-huntsman perhaps $11 per skin. The pelt was
then cured and dressed and mounted and equipped with snappers; at a
total price in labour and material of perhaps $6 at most. After which,
in marketable form, it sold at retail from $60 to $75 or even higher.
Thus, there was money for every one concerned—except possibly for the
ultimate buyer.)
The two silver foxes had the forest and farmland largely to themselves.
The few reds they met did not attack them or affiliate with them at that
hungry time of year.
The winter winds and the ice-storms made Whitefoot’s coat shine and
thicken as never had it done on scientifically balanced rations. The
life of the wild put new depth to Pitchdark’s narrow chest and gave her
muscular power and sinew to spare. Quizzical Dame Nature had lifted them
from man’s wisest care; as though in object lesson of her own infinitely
more efficient methods for conditioning her children.
Late January brought a sore-throat thaw and with it a melting of drift
and ice-pack. Incidentally it ushered in the yearly vulpine mating
season.
Spring was early that year. But before the frost was out of the ground,
Pitchdark had chosen her nursery. It was by no means so elaborate nor
sanitary as had been the costly brood-nests at the kennel. Indeed it
would have struck horror to the heart of any scientific breeder.
For it was merely a woodchuck hole in an upland meadow, at the forest
edge, a short mile from a straggling farmstead. Even here Whitefoot’s
inspired prowess as a digger was not called into play. His sole share
toward securing the home was to thrash the asthmatically indignant old
woodchuck that had dug the burrow. Then Pitchdark made her way
cautiously down the hole and proceeded to enlarge it a little at the
shallow bottom. That was all the home-making done by the pair.
Then, of a windy night, just before the first of April, the vixen did
not join her mate in his expedition for loot. And as he panted homeward
before dawn with a broken-winged quail between his jaws, he found her
lying in the burrow’s hollow, with five indeterminate-looking babies
nuzzling close to her soft side.
Then began days, or rather nights, of double foraging for Whitefoot. For
it is no light thing to provide food for a den-ridden mate and,
indirectly, for five hungry and husky cubs.
Nor was the season propitious for food-finding. The migratory birds, for
the most part, had not shifted north. The rabbits for some silly reason
of their own had changed their feeding grounds to the opposite valley.
Farmers had suffered too many depredations from Whitefoot and Pitchdark
during the past month to leave their henroosts as hospitably open as of
yore.
The first day’s hunting netted only a sick crow that had tumbled from a
tree. Whitefoot turned with disgust from this find. For, though he would
have been delighted to dine on the rankest of carrion, yet in common
with all foxes, he could not be induced to touch any bird of prey.
That night he foraged again; in spite of having outraged his regular
custom by hunting in daylight. There was no fun in hunting, this night.
For a wild torrent of rain had burst out of the black clouds which all
day had been butting their way across the windy sky.
Foxes detest rain, and this rain was a veritable deluge; a flood that
started the spring freshets and turned miles of bottomland into soggy
lakes. Yet Whitefoot kept on. Grey dawn found him midway between his
lair and the farmstead at the foot of the hill.
This farm he and Pitchdark had avoided. It was too near their den for
safe plundering. Its human occupants might well be expected to seek the
despoilers. And just then those despoilers were in no condition to elude
the chase. Wherefore, fox-fashion, the two had ranged far afield and had
reserved the nearby farm for later emergencies.
Now the emergency appeared to call for such a visit from Whitefoot. A
moment or so he hesitated, irresolute whether to return empty-mouthed to
his mate or to go first to the farm for possible food. He decided on the
farm.
Had he gone to the burrow he would have known there was no further need
to forage for those five beautiful baby silvers, so different in aspect
from the slaty-gray infants of the red fox. A swelling rivulet of rain
had been deflected from its downhill course by a wrinkle in the soil;
and had poured swishingly down the opening of the woodchuck warren and
thence down into the ill-constructed brood nest at its bottom.
For the safeguarding of newborn fox-babies, as of the babies of every
race, dry warmth is all-essential. Chilled and soaked, despite their
young mother’s frantic efforts to protect them, the five ill-nourished
and perilously inbred cubs ceased to nurse and began to squeak right
dolefully. Then, one by one they died. The last of them stiffened out,
just before daybreak.
Rance and Ethan Venner would have cursed luridly at loss of so many
hundred dollars in potential peltry. But the bereft little mother only
cuddled her ice-cold babies the closer; crooning piteously to them. They
were her first litter. She could not realise what had befallen them, nor
why one and all of them had ceased to nurse.
Meantime, her mate was drifting like an unobtrusive black shadow through
the rain toward the clutter of farm buildings at the base of the
hill-pasture. His scent told him there was a dog somewhere in that
welter of sheds and barns and houses. But his scent told him also that
there were fowls aplenty. Preparing to match his speed and his wit
against any dog’s, he crept close and closer, taking due advantage of
every patch of cover; unchecked even by the somewhat more distant
man-scent; and urged on by that ever stronger odour of live chickens.
Presently he was skirting the chicken-yard. It and its coop were too
fast-locked for him to hope to enter with less than a half-hour’s clever
digging. He had not a half-hour. He had not a half-minute to spare.
Slinking from the coop, he rounded a tool-house. There he halted. For to
his nostrils came again the smell of living food, though of a sort
vaguely unpleasant to him. Hunger and the need to feed his brood formed
too strong a combination for this faint distaste to combat.
He peered around the corner of the half-open door of the tool-house.
From the interior arose the hated dog-smell, ten times stronger than
before. But he knew by nose and by hearing that the dog was no longer in
there.
He was correct in this, as in most of his surmises. Not five minutes
earlier, the early-rising Dick Logan had opened the tool-house door and
convoyed thence his pedigreed collie, Jean, to the kitchen for her
breakfast.
In the corner of the tool-house was a box half filled with rags. Down
among the rags nestled and squirmed and muttered a litter of seven
pure-bred collie pups, scarce a fortnight old.
Man-scent and dog-scent filled the air; scaring and disgusting the
hesitant Whitefoot. Stark hunger spurred him on. A fleeting black shadow
slipped noiselessly swift into the tool-house and then out again.
Through the welter of rain, Whitefoot was making for his mile-distant
lair; at top speed; pausing not to glance over his shoulder; straining
every muscle to get away from that place of double peril and to his
waiting family. No need to waste time in confusing the trail. The
sluicing rain was doing that.
Between his teeth the fox carried a squealing and struggling fat collie
puppy.
Keen as was his own need for food, he did not pause to devour or even to
kill the plump morsel he had snatched up. Nor did his pinpoint teeth so
much as prick through the fuzzy fat sides of his prey. Holding the puppy
as daintily as a bird dog might retrieve a wounded partridge, he sped
on.
At the mouth of the warren, Pitchdark was waiting for him. She had
brought her babies out of the death hole; though too late. They lay
strewn on the rain-sick ground in front of her. She herself was crouched
for shelter in the lee of a rock that stood beside the hole.
Whitefoot dropped the collie pup in front of his mate; and prepared to
join her in the banquet. Pitchdark nosed the blind, helpless atom of
babyhood; as though trying to make out what it might be.
The puppy, finding himself close to something warm and soft and furry,
crept instinctively toward this barrier from the cold and wet which were
striking through to the very heart of him. At his forward motion,
Pitchdark snarled down at him. But as his poking nose chanced to touch
her, the snarl merged suddenly into a croon. With her own sharp nose,
she pushed him closer to her and interposed her body between him and the
rain.
Whitefoot, the water cascading from his splendid coat, stood dripping
and staring. Failing to make any sense of his mate’s delay in beginning
to devour the breakfast he had brought along at such danger to himself,
he took a step forward, his jaws parting for the first mouthful of the
feast. Pitchdark growled hideously at him and slashed at his advancing
face.
Piqued and amazed at her ungrateful treatment, he hesitated a moment
longer; then trotted glumly off into the rain; leaving Pitchdark
crooningly nursing the queer substitute for her five dead infants. As he
ran, he all but collided with a rain-dazed rabbit that hopped out of a
briar clump to avoid him.
Five minutes later he and Pitchdark were lying side by side in the lee
of the rock, crunching unctuously the bones of the luckless bunny; while
the collie pup feasted as happily in his own fashion as did they,
nuzzling deep into the soft hair of his foster-mother’s warm underbody.
Why the exposure to rain and cold did not kill the puppy is as much a
mystery as why Pitchdark did not kill him. Nevertheless—as is the odd
way of one collie pup in twenty—he took no harm from the mile of rainy
gallop to which Whitefoot had treated him. More—he throve amain on the
milk which had been destined for five fox cubs.
The downpour was followed by weeks of unseasonably dry and warm weather.
The porous earth of the warren was dry within a few hours. The lair bed
proved as comfortable for the new baby as it was to have been to his
luckless predecessors.
By the time May brought the warm nights and the long bright days, the
puppy weighed more than twice as much as any fox cub of his age. He had
ceased to look like a sleek dun-coloured rat and resembled rather a
golden-and-white Teddy Bear.
On the moonlit May nights and in the red dawning and in the soft
afterglow, he and his pretty mother would frisk and gambol in the lush
young meadow grass around the lair. It was sweet to see the lithe black
beauty’s complete devotion for her clumsy baby and the jealous care
wherewith she guarded him. From the first she was teaching him the
cunning caution which is a fox’s world-old birthright and which is
foreign to a man-owned collie. With his foster-mother’s milk and from
his foster-mother’s example he drank in the secrets of the wild and the
fact that man is the dread foe of the beast.
Gaily as the two might play in the moonlit grass, the first distant
whiff of man-scent was enough to send Pitchdark scuttling silently into
the burrow; driving the shambling pup ahead of her. There the two would
lie, noiseless, almost without breathing; while man or dog or both
passed by.
This was not the season for hunting foxes. Their pelts were
“off-prime”—in no condition for the market. Thus, the pair in the burrow
were not sought out nor harried.
Back at the Logan farm there was bewilderment at the puppy’s mysterious
vanishing. His dam, returning from the kitchen after breakfast, had
broken into a growl of sudden wrath and had changed her trot for a
handgallop as she neared the tool-shed. Into the shed she had dashed,
abristle and growling, then out again, sniffing the earth, casting in
ever widening circles, and setting off presently on a trail which the
deluging rain wiped out before she could follow it for a hundred yards.
The stolen pup was the only one in the litter which had not been sold or
else bespoken. For the Logan collies had a just fame in the region. But
that one pup had been set aside by Dick Logan as a future housedog. This
because he was the largest and strongest and liveliest of the seven; and
because of the unusually wide white ruff which encircled his broad
shoulders like a shawl.
Dick had named the youngster “Ruff,” because of this adornment. And now
he was liked to have no use for the name.
Ruff, meantime, was gaining his education, such as it was, far more
quickly than his super-domesticated collie mother and Dick together
could have imparted it to him.
By example and by swift punishment in event of disobedience, Pitchdark
was teaching him to crouch, flattened and noiseless, at sound or scent
of man or of alien beast. She was teaching him to worm his pudgy little
body snakelike through grass and undergrowth and to make wise use of
every bit of cover. She was teaching him—as foxes have taught their
young for a million years—the incredible cunning of her race and the
fear of man.
By the time his legs could fairly support him on the briefest of
journeys, she was teaching him to stalk game;—to creep up on foolish
fieldmice, to confuse and head off young rabbits; and the like. Before
he was fairly weaned she made him try his awkward prowess at finishing a
rabbit-kill she had begun. With Ruff it was a case of kill or starve.
For Pitchdark cut off natural supplies from him a full week earlier than
his own gentle mother would have done.
Pitchdark was a born schoolmistress in Nature’s grim woodland course of
“eat or be eaten.” To her stern teachings the puppy brought a brain such
as no fox could hope to possess. Ruff was a collie—member of a breed
which can assimilate practically any mental or physical teachings, if
taught rightly and at an early enough age. Pitchdark was teaching him
rightly, if rigidly. Assuredly, too, she was beginning early enough.
To the imparted cunning of the fox, Ruff added the brain of a highly
sensitised collie. The combination was a triumph. He learned well-nigh
as fast as Pitchdark could teach. If nine-tenths of the things she
taught him were as reprehensible as they were needful, he deserved no
less credit for his speed in mastering them and for his native ability
to add to them.
At an age when his brethren and sisters, back at the farm, were still
playing aimlessly around the dooryard, Ruff was grasping the weird
secrets of the wild. While they were still at the Teddy Bear stage of
appealing helplessness, his fat body was turning lean and supple from
raw food and from much exercise and from the nature of that exercise.
While they were romping merrily with an old shoe, Ruff was creeping up
on fieldmouse nests and on couchant quail, or he was heading off
witlessly racing rabbits which his foster-mother drove toward the
cul-de-sacs where she had stationed him.
For a pup situated like Ruff, there were two open courses—abnormal
thriving or quick starvation. Ruff throve.
By the time he was three months old he weighed nearly eighteen pounds.
He was more than a third heavier than Pitchdark, though the silvered
black vixen had the appearance of being fully twice his size. A fox is
the most deceptive creature on earth, in regard to bulk. Pitchdark, for
instance, gave the impression of being as large as any thirty-pound
terrier, if of far different build. Yet, stripped of her pelt, her slim
carcass would not have weighed eleven pounds. Perhaps it would not have
weighed more than ten pounds, for she was not large for her kind.
Before Ruff was six weeks old, Whitefoot had tired of
domesticity—especially with so perplexing a canine slant to it—and had
deserted his mate and foster-son.
The warm days were coming on. The woods at last were alive with
catchable game. The chickens on many a farm were perching out of doors
at night. Life was gloriously livable. There seemed no sense in
fettering himself to a family, nor for helping to provide for a huge
youngster in whom his own interest was purely gastronomical.
More than once Whitefoot had sought to slay and eat the changeling. But
ever, at such times, Pitchdark was at him, ravening and raging in
defence of her suckling.
Then crept the influx of spring food into the valley and mountain. There
was dinner to be gotten more easily than by battling a ferocious mate
for it, a mate who no longer felt even her oldtime lonely comradeship
for the dog-fox, and whose every thought and care was for the sprawling
puppy. Apart from this, the inherently hated dog-scent on Ruff was a
continual irritation to Whitefoot; though maternal care had long since
accustomed Pitchdark to it.
Thus on a morning in late April Whitefoot wandered away and neglected to
return. His mate was forced to forage for herself and for Ruff. But the
task was easy in this new time of food lushness. She did not seem to
miss her recreant spouse.
She and Ruff shifted their abode from the burrow whose narrow sides the
fast-growing pup could scarce squeeze through. They took up changeable
quarters in the hinterland forest. There Ruff’s training began in grim
earnest.
So the sweet spring and the long drowsy summer wore themselves away.
Through the fat months Pitchdark and Ruff abode together; drawn toward
each other by the queerly strong tie that so often knits foster-dam and
child, in the fourfoot kingdom;—a tie that is prone to be far stronger
than that of normal brute mother and offspring.
This chumship now was wholly a thing of choice. For no longer did Ruff
depend on the vixen to teach him how to catch his daily bread. True, he
profited still by her experience and her abnormal cunning, and he
assimilated it and improved on it—as is the way with a collie when he is
taught something that catches his bright fancy. But he was
self-supporting.
He continued to live with Pitchdark and to travel with her and to hunt
with her; not because he needed to, but because he loved her. To this
temperamental black-and-silver vixen went out all the loyal devotion and
hero-worship and innate protectiveness which a normal collie lavishes on
the human who is his god.
Together they roved the mountain, where Pitchdark’s technique and craft
bagged illimitable game for them. Together on dark nights they scouted
the farm-valleys, where Ruff’s strength and odd audacity won them access
to hencoop after hencoop whose rickety door would have resisted a fox’s
onslaught.
Twice, Ruff forced his way through the rotting palings of a sheepfold
and bore thence to his admiring foster-mother a lamb that was twice as
heavy as Pitchdark. Once in open field he fought and outmanœuvred and
thrashed a sheep-herding mongrel; dragging off in triumph a half-grown
wether.
There were things about Pitchdark the young collie could not understand;
just as there were traits of his which baffled her keen wits. To him a
grape vineyard was a place whose sole interest centred about any
possible field-mouse nests in its mould. An apple orchard had as little
significance to him. He would pause and look in questioning surprise as
Pitchdark stopped, during their progress through an orchard, to munch
happily at a fallen harvest apple; or while she stood daintily on her
hindlegs to strip grapevines of their ripening clusters.
The fable of the fox and the sour grapes had its basis in natural
history. For the fox, almost alone of carnivora, loves fruit. Ruff cared
nothing for it. Few collies do.
Also, he could see no reason for Pitchdark’s rapture when they chanced
upon the rotting carcasses of animals. True, he felt an æsthetic thrill
in rubbing first one shoulder and then the other in such liquescent
carrion and then in rolling luxuriously over on his back in it. But it
was not good to eat. Ruff knew that. Yet Pitchdark devoured it in
delight. On the other hand, when the two came upon a young hawk that had
fallen from its pine-top nest, Pitchdark gave one sniff at the broken
bird of prey; and then pattered on, leaving it alone. Ruff killed and
ate it with relish.
By the first cool days of autumn, Ruff stood twenty-four inches at the
shoulder. He would have tipped the scales at a fraction above fifty
pounds. His gold-red winter coat was beginning to come in, luxuriantly
and with a sheen such as only the pelt of a forest-dweller can boast.
His young chest was deep. His shoulders were broad and sinewy. His build
was that of a wild beast; not of a domesticated dog. Diet and tremendous
exercise and his mode of life had wrought that vast difference.
He had the noiselessly padding gait and the furtive air of a fox.
Mentally and morally he was a fox; plus the keener and finer brain of a
collie. His dark and deepset eyes had the glint of the wild, rather than
the straight-forward gaze of a collie. Yet those eyes were a dog’s and
not a fox’s. A fox has the eye of a cat, not of a dog. The iris is not
round, but is long and slitted, like a cat’s. In bright sunlight it
closes to a vertical line, and does not contract to a tiny circle, like
dog’s or man’s.
Nor did Ruff have the long and couchant hindlegs and short catlike
forelegs of Pitchdark. His were the honestly sturdy legs and sturdy pads
of a collie.
The wolf is the dog’s brother. They be of one blood. They can and do
mate as readily as dog and dog. Dog and fox are far different. Their
cousinship is remote. Their physique is remoter;—too remote to permit of
blending. There is almost as much of the cat as of the dog in a fox’s
cosmos;—too much of it to permit of interbreeding with the cat-detesting
dog.
Yet Ruff and Pitchdark were loving pals. They profited materially from
their association; so far as food-getting went. They were inseparable
comrades, through the fat summer and autumn and in the lean winter which
followed.
In the bitter weather, when rabbits were few and when most birds had
flown south and when rodents were holed in, it was young Ruff whose
daring and strength enabled them to snatch fawns from snow-lined
deer-yards in the mountain creases and to raid sheepfolds and rip
through flimsy hencoop doors. He kept them alive and he kept them in
good condition. Daily he grew larger and stronger and wilier.
At a year, he weighed a full sixty pounds; and he had the strength and
uncanny quickness of a tiger-cat. It was he now who led; while Pitchdark
followed in meek adoration. Such foxes as they chanced to meet fled in
sullen terror before the collie’s assault. Ruff did not like foxes.
The next autumn brought forth the hunters. A few city folk and farm-boys
ranged the hills with fowling piece and with or without bird dog or
rabbit hound. These novices were ridiculously easy for Ruff and
Pitchdark to avoid. They offered still less menace to Whitefoot ranging
in solitary comfort on the thither side of the mountain wall.
But the real hunters of the region were a more serious obstacle to smug
comfort and to safety. They were lanky or stumpy men in woolly old
clothes and accompanied by businesslike hounds. These men did not bother
with mere sport or pot hunting. Red fox pelts brought this year $11.50
each, uncured, from the wholesaler down at Heckettville. Fox hunting was
a recognised form of livelihood here in the upland valley district.
It was not like quail shooting or other sport open to any amateur. It
was an art. It called for craft and for experience and for a rudimentary
knowledge of the habits of foxes and for perfect marksmanship. Also it
required the aid of a well-trained foxhound;—not the type of foxhound
the pink coats trail after, in conventional hunting fields—not the
spruce foxhound on exhibition at dogshows—but rangy and stringy and wise
and tireless dogs of dubious pedigree but vast fox-sense.
A veteran hunter with a good hound, in that part of the country and in
those days, could readily pay the year’s taxes and improvements on his
farm by the fox-pelts he was able to secure in a single month’s roaming
of the hills. Wherefore, now that the year’s farmwork was done, these
few experts began their season of lucrative and sportless sport.
Time and again some gaunt and sad-faced hound, that fall, hit
Pitchdark’s confused trail; only to veer from it presently when his
nostrils caught the unmistakable dog-scent along with it. Still oftener
did a hound cling tenaciously to that trail; only to be outwitted by the
vixen’s cleverer manœuvres.
Pitchdark had as much genius for eluding pursuit as for climbing
unclimbable fences. There are such foxes.
In these retreats from pursuing hounds it was she who took up afresh the
leadership she had laid down. Ruff followed her, implicitly, in her many
mazelike twists and doublings. At first he followed, blindly. But
gradually he began to get the hang of it, and to devise collie
improvements on the hide-and-seek game.
He and she were alone in their wanderings; especially since the hunting
season forced them higher among the almost inaccessible peaks of the
range. Foxes that crossed their path or happened to sight or scent them
fled as ever in terror at the dog-smell.
In midwinter, the day after a “tracking snow” had fallen, one Jeffreys
Holt, an aged fox-hunter, tramping home with his tired hound at his
heels, chanced upon an incredible sight.
An animal rounded a bend of rock on a hillside perhaps a hundred yards
in front of him; and stood there, stockstill, for a few seconds, sharply
outlined against the snow. Then, as Holt stared slackjawed, the creature
oozed from sight into a crevice. Holt plunged ahead, urging his weary
hound to the chase. But by the time he reached the crevice there was no
sign of the quarry.
The cleft led through to an opening on the far side of a rocky outcrop.
Thence a hundred-yard rib of rock jutted above the snow. Along this,
presumably, had the prey fled; for there were no further marks of him in
the whiteness. Holt cast his dog futilely upon the trail. He studied the
footprints in the snow at the point where first the beast had been
standing. Then he plodded home.
Whitefoot, from the safety of another double-entry rock-lair, a furlong
away, watched him depart. Long immunity had made the big dog-fox
overbold. Yet this was the first time human eyes had focused on him for
two years.
At the store, that night, Rance Venner glanced up from his task of
ordering supplies for the Stippled Silver Kennels and listened with
sudden interest to the harangue of an oldster among the group around the
stove.
“I’m telling you,” Holt was insisting, in reply to a doubter, “I’m
telling you I saw him as plain as I see you. Jet black he was, only his
tailtip was white, and one of his hindfeet; and there was shiny grey
hairs sticking out from his shoulders and over his eyebrows. He—”
“Somebody’s black dog, most likely,” suggested the doubter.
“Dog nothing!” snorted Holt. “I’ve killed too many foxes not to know ’em
from dogs. This was a fox. A reg’lar ol’ he-one. A corker. And I’m
telling you he was coal-black; all but the tip of his tail and them
hairs sprinkled all over his mask and—”
“Well,” soothed the doubter, seeking to calm Holt’s vexed vehemence,
“I’m not saying there mayn’t be black foxes with white tails and white
hindfeet and grey masks. For all I know, there’s maybe foxes that’s
bright green and foxes that’s red-white-and-blue, or speckled with pink.
There may be. Only nobody’s ever seen ’em. Any more’n anybody’s ever
seen a black-and-white-and-grey one, till you seen that one to-day,
Jeff. I—”
Rance Venner came into the circle of disputants. He did not mingle with
the folk of this village, six miles from his fox-farm. This was his
first visit to the store. The emporium nearest his home had burned down,
that week. Hence his need to go farther afield for supplies.
“You say you saw a silver fox?” he asked excitedly, confronting Holt.
Holt stared truculently at him; suspecting further banter and not
relishing it from a stranger.
“Nope,” solemnly spoke up the doubter. “Not silver. Rainbow-colour, with
a streak of this here radium you’ve likely heard tell of. Jeff Holt
don’t see queer things, often. But when he does, he sure sees ’em plenty
vivid.”
“My name is Venner,” went on Rance, still addressing Holt. “My brother
and I run the Stippled Silver Fox Farm, up above Croziers. Two years ago
a couple of our silver foxes got loose on us. They—”
“Sure they wasn’t di’mond foxes?” asked the doubter, politely.
The audience snickered at this scintillant flash of native wit. But
Rance went on, unheeding. Briefly, he explained the appearance and
general nature and value of silver foxes; and expanded upon the loss of
the two that had escaped from his kennel.
His oration gained scant personal interest; until he made a cash offer
of $75 to any one who would bring him Whitefoot’s or Pitchdark’s pelt in
good condition. He made an offer of $125 for either fox if captured
alive and undamaged.
At this point incredulity reached its climax among his hearers. But when
Venner pulled twenty-five dollars from his hip pocket and deposited it
with the postmaster-storekeeper in evidence of good faith, the sight of
real money caused a wholesale conversion.
This conversion became rockbound conviction when, next night, Holt
returned from a call upon the wholesale pelt-buyer at Heckettville,
fifteen miles away.
“Say!” reported Holt, to the group of idling men at the stove-side.
“That Venner cuss ain’t loony, after all. Gannett told me all about them
silver foxes. They’re true, all right. Showed me a picture of one. The
spitting image of the one I seen. Gave me this circ’lar to prove it. It
was sent to him by the gov’ment or by some sort of association. Listen
here.”
Drawing out a folder, he began to read at random:
"Some silver foxes are cheap at $1,000.... If every silver fox in the
world should be pelted in November or December, when the fur is prime,
they could all be disposed of in a city the size of New York, in less
than a week, at a fab—at a fab’lous sum."
Impressively and for the most part taking the more unfamiliar words in
his stride, Jeffreys Holt continued to read. Nor did he cease until he
had made his eager audience acquainted with every line of the folder,
including the printer’s name and address in the lozenge at the foot of
the fourth page.
Next morning all available fox traps for some miles around were on duty
in the woods and among the hilltop rock-barrens. Every man who
understood the first thing about fox hunting was abroad with gun and
dog, as well as local wealth-seekers to whom the fine art of tracking
foxes was merely a thing of hearsay. In that meagre community and in
that meagre time of a meagre year, the lure of $75, to say nothing of
$125, was irresistible. The village went afield.
Rance Venner and his brother were among the hunters, they and their
little mixed-blood foxhound, Ruby.
Before dawn, Ruff and Pitchdark caught the distant signs of the chase,
and they denned in, far among the peak rocks, for the day. At that, the
chase might perhaps have neared their lofty eyrie before sunset, but for
Whitefoot.
The big dog-fox had enjoyed long immunity from harm. He lacked
Pitchdark’s super-caution. His adventure with man and dog, two days
earlier, had resulted in no harm to himself. With entire ease he had
blurred pursuit. Seeking rabbits again, in the clefts of the same
rockridge, at sunrise on this day of universal hunting, he heard hounds
baying futilely in far quarters of the valley and foothills below him.
Instead of denning in, as had his former mate and Ruff, he went on with
his own hunt. Lacking a confederate like the collie to help him find
food which was beyond his own vulpine powers to capture or slay,
Whitefoot had begun to feel the pinch of winter-hunger. Unappeasable
appetite made him take chances from which the vixen would have recoiled.
For example, the sound and smell of the distant hunt, this morning, did
not send him to cover. All autumn and early winter he had been hearing
such far-off sounds, had been catching the man-and-dog scent. Never had
he come to harm from any of it. He had been able to keep out of its way.
Until that afternoon when Holt chanced upon him, no human eye had seen
him. And even then there had been no trouble about getting away clean.
There were rabbits hiding in these clefts and crevices along the
ridge-side. Whitefoot could smell them. With luck he might be able to
stampede one of them into a cul-de-sac cranny big enough to admit his
own slim body.