Among the few survivals of the old untamed world there are left us two
that retain all the raciness of their ancestral wildness.
Their wits have been sharpened by the attrition of civilization, but it
has not smoothed their characteristics down to the level of the
commonplace, nor contaminated them with acquired vices as it has their
ancient contemporary, the Indian. But they are held in widely different
esteem, for while the partridge is in a manner encouraged in
continuance, the fox is an outlaw, with a price set upon his head to
tempt all but his few contemned friends to compass his extermination.
For these and for him there is an unwritten code that, stealthily
enforced, gives him some exemption from universal persecution. They,
having knowledge of the underground house of many portals where the
vixen rears her cubs, guard the secret as jealously as she and her lord,
from the unfriendly farmer, poultry-wife, and bounty-hunting vagabond,
confiding it only to sworn brethren of woodcraft, as silent concerning
it to the unfriendly as the trees that shadow its booty-strewn precincts
or the lichened rocks that fortify it against pick and spade. They never
tell even their leashed hounds till autumn makes the woods gayer with
painted leaves than summer could with blossoms, how they have seen the
master and mistress of this woodland home stealing to it with a fare of
field mice fringing their jaws or bearing a stolen lamb or pullet.
They watch from some unseen vantage, with amused kindliness, the gambols
of the yellow cubs about their mother, alert for danger, even in her
drowsy weariness, and proud of her impish brood, even now practicing
tricks of theft and cunning on each other. They become abetters of this
family's sins, apologists for its crimes, magnifiers of its unmeant
well-doing.
When in palliation of the slaughter of a turkey that has robbed a field
of his weight in corn they offset the destruction of hordes of field
mice, they are reviled by those who are righteously exalted above the
idleness of hunting and the foolishness of sentiment.
At such hands one fares no better who covets the fox, not for the sport
he may give, but for the tang of wild flavor that he imparts to woods
that have almost lost it and to fields that lose nothing of thrift by
its touch.
You may not see him, but it is good to know that anything so untamed has
been so recently where your plodding footsteps go. You see in last
night's snowfall the sharp imprint of his pads, where he has deviously
quested mice under the mat of aftermath, or trotted slowly, pondering,
to other more promising fields, or there gone airily coursing away over
the moonlit pastures. In imagination you see all his agile gaits and
graceful poses. Now listening with pricked ears to the muffled squeak of
a mouse, now pouncing upon his captured but yet unseen prize, or where
on sudden impulse he has coursed to fresh fields, you see him, a dusky
phantom, gliding with graceful undulations of lithe body and brush over
the snowy stretches; or, halting to wistfully sniff, as a wolf a
sheepfold, the distant henroost; or, where a curious labyrinth of tracks
imprint the snow, you have a vision of him dallying with his tawny
sweetheart under the stars of February skies; or, by this soft mould of
his furry form on a snow-capped stump or boulder, you picture him
sleeping off the fatigue of hunting and love-making, with all senses but
sight still alert, unharmed by the nipping air that silvers his whiskers
with his own breath.
All these realities of his actual life you may not see except in such
pictures as your fancy makes; but when the woods are many-hued or brown
in autumn, or gray and white in winter, and stirred with the wild music
of the hounds, your blood may be set tingling by the sight of him, his
coming announced by the rustle of leaves under his light footfalls.
Perhaps unheralded by sound, he suddenly blooms ruddily out of the dead
whiteness of the snow.
Whether he flies past or carefully picks his way along a fallen tree or
bare ledge, you remark his facial expression of incessant intentness on
cunning devices, while ears, eyes, and nose are alert for danger. If he
discovers you, with what ready self-possession he instantly gets and
keeps a tree between himself and you and vanishes while your gun vainly
searches for its opportunity. If your shot brings him down, and you
stand over him exultant, yet pitying the end of his wild life, even in
his death throes fearing you no more, he yet strains his dulled ears to
catch the voices of the relentless hounds.
Bravely the wild freebooter holds his own against the encroachments of
civilization and the persecution of mankind, levying on the flocks and
broods of his enemy, rearing his yellow cubs in the very border of his
field, insulting him with nightly passage by his threshold.
Long ago his fathers bade farewell to their grim cousin the wolf, and
saw the beaver and the timid deer pass away, and he sees the eagle
almost banished from its double realm of earth and sky, yet he hardily
endures. For what he preserves for us of the almost extinct wildness,
shall we begrudge him the meagre compensation of an occasional turkey?