before he reached the end of the meadow he had regained all his cool
audacity and was busily planning a visit to the cottage at the foot of
the dingle. Hardly had his thoughts turned once more to hunting when
fortune favoured him. A hen from the farmyard had laid her eggs in the
hedgerow bordering the wood, and was brooding over them in proud
anticipation of one day leading home a healthy family, thus causing an
agreeable surprise to the farmer's wife. The fox almost brushed against
her as he sprang over the hedge, and she paid to the utmost the penalty
of indiscretion.
After feasting royally on the eggs, the fox took up the dead bird, and
moved slowly away through the trees towards his home. Re-entering the
covert, he was met by a prowling vixen that, in company with her four
young cubs, inhabited an "earth" not many yards away. Reckless through
hunger and maddened by the scent of blood, she attacked him savagely,
bullied him out of the possession of the dead fowl, and bore her prize
away in triumph to her den. The fox endured his ill-treatment with the
submission of a Stoic--he happened to be the pugnacious vixen's mate,
and the sire of her family. Soon recovering from the chastisement, he
set off, and skirted the covert as far as the cottage garden. Finding
the gate of the hen-coop closed, he sprang on the water-butt, climbed to
the roof of the shed, and tried to enter the coop from above; but there,
as at the farm, he feared a trap, and dared not creep beneath the loose
wire netting overhanging the shed. As he jumped from the coop to the
wall of the stye, he caught sight of several rats scampering to their
holes. Lying flat on the wall, he awaited patiently their re-appearance.
At last one of them ventured out beneath the door of the cot, and was
instantly killed. But, much to his chagrin, Reynard found the carcass a
decidedly doubtful tit-bit, and so, having conveyed it gingerly to the
margin of the covert, he scratched a shallow hole among the rotting
leaves, and buried his prey, that, perhaps, its flavour might improve
with keeping. Afterwards, till the sky lightened almost imperceptibly,
and a steel-blue bar, low down beneath the clouds, first signalled the
coming of day, he lay motionless among the undergrowth near a warren in
the dingle. Then an unsuspecting rabbit hopped out into the grass, and
Reynard, his watch rewarded, disappeared with his spoil into the
wilderness of the gorse.
Dawn was breaking over the hills. Blue smoke curled up into the sky from
the lodge cottage at the foot of the tree-clad slope. The door of the
cottage stood wide open, and the scent of the wood-fire hung on the
chill, damp air filling the narrow lane. A blackbird flew into the
apple-tree overlooking the thatch, shook the moisture from his wings,
and cleaned his bright orange bill on a bough. Then his full, reed-like
music floated over the fields. The skylarks soared above the upland
pastures, and a shower of song descended to the valley out of the
pearl-blue haze just lifting in a cloud from the hill-top. Presently the
blackbird flew from the apple-tree to feed beside the hedge, and the
larks dropped from the mist into the grass. But for the crackle of the
cottage fire as the keeper busied himself with the preparation of his
morning meal, and the rustle of a withered leaf as the blackbird moved
to and fro in the ditch, not a sound disturbed the silence of the dawn.
Soon the haze lifted, leaving the dew thick on the grass by the ditch,
and on the moss and the ivy in the hedgerow bank. The larks soared once
more into the sky; a robin sang wistfully in the ash; a brown wren, with
many a flick of her tiny wings and many a merry curtsy, hopped in and
out among the trees, trilling loudly a gleeful carol. The tits flew
hither and thither, twittering to each other as they flew. The
hedge-sparrows' metallic notes sounded clear amid all the varied music,
as the birds, moving among the hazels and gently flirting their wings,
pursued their coy mates from bough to bough. Through the raised curtain
of the mist the sun--a white globe hardly too brilliant to be boldly
looked at--illumined the dewy fields with its faint beams, till the
cloud-streaked sky became a clear expanse, and the blue and brown
countryside glowed with the splendour of a perfect morning. The wind
changed and freshened, so that the call of a farm labourer to his team
and the constant voice of the river were distinctly heard in the level
valley below the wood.
As the morning advanced, signs of unusual stir and bustle were apparent
in the neighbourhood of the lodge. Messengers came and went between the
cottage and the mansion at the bend of the river, or between the mansion
and the distant village. The keeper appeared at his door, and, after
satisfying himself that the lane seemed clean and well-kept, walked off
briskly in the direction of the "big house." Scarlet-coated horsemen,
and high-born maids and matrons, with all the medley of the Hunt in
their train, cantered along the winding road--a mirthful,
laughter-loving company. There were the General, stout and inelegant,
wont to take his fences carefully, who changed his weight-carrying
mount thrice during the day, and liked a gateway better than a thorny
hedge, and for the last fifteen years had never been in at the death;
and his wife, the leader of fashion, but not yet the leader of the Hunt;
the Major, an old shekarry from India, who still could ride as straight
and fast as any man in the west; and his niece, the belle of the
countryside, whose mettlesome hunter occasionally showed a sudden
fondness for taking the bit between his teeth, and carrying his
mistress, with reckless abandon, over furrow and five-barred gate and
through the thickest hedgerow--anywhere, so long as he had breath and
the music of the hounds allured him onward in his impetuous career. The
sun glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came
the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and
glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too
suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an
aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired,
with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good
cigar. Following were the members of the medley--the big butcher on his
sturdy pony, the "dealer" on his black, raw-boned half-bred, the
publican on his stolid old mare, farmers, drovers, after-riders, on
cropped and uncropped mounts more accustomed to the slow drudgery of
labour than to the rollicking, hard-going hunt; and after them the crowd
on foot--village children, farm labourers, and apprentices from forge
and counter. Riding side by side, and earnestly conversing, were the
"vet," whose horse at the last hunt bolted and left him clinging to a
bough, and the shopkeeper, whose grave attire and sober mien seemed
strangely out of keeping with the bright, hilarious throng. These were
soon met by the main party from the meet, and hounds and hunters sped
away in the direction of the hillside covert, while the onlookers
adjourned to the uplands, whence an almost uninterrupted view of the
valleys for miles around might be enjoyed, and the movements of the fox
and his enemies followed more closely than from the hollows beneath the
woods.
Reynard, abundantly satisfied with his supper of eggs and early
breakfast of rabbit, was lying asleep in a tuft of grass at the top of
the thicket when the huntsman passed down the dingle after the meet.
Awakened by the noise that reached him from below, he arose, stretched
his limbs, and listened anxiously--the clatter of hoofs seemed to fill
the valley. Suddenly, from the outskirts of the wood, came the deep,
sonorous note of a hound, followed by the sharp rebuke of the
whipper-in; Jollity, the keen-nosed puppy, was "rioting" on the cold
scent near the stream. Peering between the bushes, the fox could as yet
see nothing moving in the covert, but a few minutes afterwards his sharp
eye caught a glimpse of a hound leaping over the bank above the gorse,
followed by another, and another, and yet another, till the place seemed
alive with his foes.
Whither should he flee? The dingle was occupied; men and horses were
everywhere in the lane; and the hounds were closing in above the gorse.
The far side of the covert offered the only chance of escape, and
thither he must hie, else the hounds, now pouring down the slope, would
cut off his retreat. Quickly he threaded his way through the gorse, by
paths familiar only to himself and the rabbits, till he reached the
bank by the willows; but, even while he ran, the full chorus of the
hounds echoed from hillside to hillside, as, having "struck the line,"
they tore madly in pursuit. He reached the edge of the covert at a point
furthest from his foes--then, as he crossed the meadow, a single
red-coated horseman, standing sentinel far up the hillside, gave the
"view-halloo," and over the brow of the slope streamed the main body of
the Hunt.
It was at once evident to Reynard that by skirting the margin of the
covert he could not for the present escape, so he headed down-wind
towards the opposite hill, hoping to find refuge in a well-known "earth"
amid the thickets. To his surprise he found the entrance "stopped" with
clods and prickly branches of gorse, and had perforce to continue his
flight. Having well out-distanced his pursuers, he stayed to rest for a
while near the stream that trickled by the hedgerow; then, with the
horrid music of the hounds again in his ears, he turned, by a long
backward cast, in the direction of his home.
But he was wholly unable to shake off his pursuers. For four long hours
he was hustled from covert to covert, and hillside to hillside, finding
no respite, no mercy, no sanctuary. Breathless, mud-stained, footsore,
and sick with fright, his draggling "brush" and lolling tongue betraying
his distress, he sought at last the place he had long avoided, and,
entering the mouth of the den where the vixen and her cubs were hiding,
lay there, almost utterly exhausted. Some minutes elapsed, during which
no sound but that of his laboured breathing, and of the tiny sucklings
busy by the side of the dam, disturbed the stillness.
Suddenly, a deep-voiced hound broke through the bushes and bayed loudly
before the entrance. His fellow joined him, and their foreboding clamour
reverberated in the chamber. Terrified, the fox crawled slowly into the
recess of the den. Presently a shaggy terrier came down the tunnel, and
bit him sorely on the flank. He scarcely had the courage to turn on the
aggressor; but the enraged vixen, thrusting her mate aside, quickly
routed the daring intruder, and followed his retreat to the very mouth
of the "earth," where she turned back, threatened by the great hounds
that stood without. But even the reckless courage of maternity was
unavailing. Soon the noise of blows and of falling earth was heard, as
the passage was gradually opened by brawny farm labourers, working with
spade and pick, and assisted in their task by the eager huntsman, who
ever and anon thrust a long bramble-spray into the tunnel and thus
ascertained the direction of its devious course.
At last the tip of the fox's "brush" was seen amid the soil and pebbles
that had fallen into the chamber. The huntsman had cut two stout hazel
rods; these he now thrust into the hollow, one along either flank of the
fox; then, grasping their ends firmly about the exposed tail, he drew
poor Reynard from his hiding place, and thrust him, defiant to the last,
and with his teeth close-locked on one of the hazel rods, into an old
sack requisitioned at the nearest farm. The vixen met a similar fate,
while the sleek, furry little cubs, treated with the utmost gentleness,
were wrapped together in the Master's handkerchief and given to the care
of an attendant.
Reynard's life was nearing its close. In the meadow behind the keeper's
cottage the hounds were summoned by the huntsman's horn, and the bag was
opened. The scene that followed marred, for some of us at least, the
beauty of the bright March morning. The vixen and her cubs were carried
away, and found a new home in an artificial "earth" prepared for their
reception near a distant mansion.
II.
A NEW HOME.
When the vixen recovered from the excitement and distress consequent on
her capture, she found herself in a commodious, well ventilated chamber,
circular in shape and slightly above the level of two low and narrow
passages leading into the covert. The sack had been opened at the
entrance of one of these passages, and the vixen had crawled through the
darkness till, finding further retreat impossible, she had lain down,
with wildly beating heart, on the floor of her hiding place.
Her senses seemed to have forsaken her. Had she dreamed? Often, during
the warm, quiet days of a bygone summer, while lying curled in a cosy
litter of dry grass-bents--which she had neatly arranged by turning
round and round, and with her sensitive black muzzle pressing or lifting
into shape each refractory twig--she had dreamed of mouse-hunting and
rabbit-catching; her body had moved, her limbs twitched, her ears
pricked forward, and her nostrils quivered as the delightful incidents
of past expeditions were recalled. And when, with a start, she had
awakened, as some venturesome rabbit frisked by her lair, or a nervous
blackbird, startled by her movements, made the woodlands ring with news
of his discovery, she had retained for a moment the impressions of her
vivid dreams. But never in her sleep had she been haunted by such a
bewildering sense of mingled dread and anger, such an awful apprehension
of the presence of men and hounds, as that which had recently possessed
her. Now, however, all was mysteriously tranquil; the full-toned clamour
of the hounds and the sharp, snarling bark of the terriers had ceased;
no longer was she confined and jostled in the stuffy, evil-smelling sack
that yielded to, and yet restrained, her every frantic effort to regain
liberty. Her heart still beat violently, as though at any moment it
might break; and she crept back towards the entrance, where she might
breathe the free, fresh air.
Suddenly she realised, to the full, that the day's bitter experiences
were not a dream--the scent of the human hand remained on her brush, her
fur was damp and matted with meal-dust, and, alas! her little ones were
missing from her side. She was furious now; at all risks she would
venture forth on the long, straight journey back towards home; her
helpless cubs might still be somewhere under the bushes--perchance in
sore need of warmth and food, and whining for their dam.
With every mothering instinct quickened, the vixen crept down the
slanting passages in the direction of a faint moonlight glimmer beyond.
Reaching the end of the tunnel, she, in her impetuosity, thrust her
muzzle into a mass of prickles--the "earth" had been stopped with a
branch of gorse. Baffled for the time, she returned to the central
chamber; then cautiously, for her eyes and nostrils were smarting with
pain, she tried the other outlet, but here, too, a gorse-bush baulked
her exit. Now, however, a faint, familiar scent seemed to fill the
passage, some tiny creatures moved and whimpered, and, with almost
savage joy, the vixen discovered her cubs, alive and unharmed, huddled
together near the furze. Quickly she carried them, one by one, into the
chamber; then, lying beside the little creatures, which, though blind
and helpless, eagerly recognised the presence of their mother, she
gathered them between her limbs, covered them with her soft, warm brush,
and, in a language used only amid the woodlands, soothed and comforted
them, while they nestled once more beneath her sheltering care. When she
had fed them and licked them clean from every taint of human touch, and
when she had shaken herself free from dust and removed from her brush
the man-scent left by the huntsman's right hand while "drawing" her, she
became more collected in her mind and more contented with her strange,
new situation.
Leaving her cubs asleep, she moved along the passage, determined, if
possible, to explore the thickets in hope of finding a young rabbit or a
few field-voles wherewith to satisfy her increasing hunger. The
entrance was still blocked with furze, but just in the spot where she
had found her cubs a couple of dead rabbits lay, and from one of these,
though after much misgiving, she made a hearty meal. She endeavoured,
but vainly, to dig a shallow trench in which to hide the rest of her
provisions; the floor of the artificial "earth" was tiled, and only
lightly covered with soil. Her efforts to scratch out a tunnel around
the furze-bush proved alike unavailing, so she returned to her cubs, lay
down between them and the narrow opening from the chamber, and slept.
That night and the following day were spent in drowsy imprisonment,
till, towards the afternoon, the vixen began to feel the pangs of thirst
and made fresh efforts to escape. As she was endeavouring to dislodge
the tile nearest the furze, she heard the tramp of heavy feet and the
sound of human voices.
"They be nice cubs," said the "whip" to the huntsman; "as nice a little
lot as ever I clapped eyes on. If only they can give us such a doing as
the old vixen gave us twice last December, they'll pass muster. Them
Gwyddyl Valley foxes be always reg'lar fliers. Their meat ain't got too
easy-like; that's why, maybe, they're always in working order. Any road,
their flags o' distress (tongues) don't flop over their grinders without
the hounds trim 'em hard on a straight, burning scent." "Well, we'll
give 'em a good start, whatever happens," replied the huntsman; "here's
two more bunnies for the larder. If the old girl shifts her quarters,
find out her new "earth," and feed her well. I shouldn't like to be near
the guv'nor if the young uns turn out mangy when we hustle 'em about a
bit in the autumn."
The voices ceased, the furze-bushes were removed from the tunnel
entrances, a cold, steady current of air filled the chamber and the
passages, and the vixen knew that a way had been made for her escape.
She was not, however, so foolhardy as to venture forth while the scent
of her foes remained strong in the thicket; she lingered, in spite of
extreme thirst, till the shadows of evening deepened perceptibly in her
underground abode.
When the vixen stole out into the grass, the pale moon was brightening
in the southern sky, and a solitary star glimmered faintly above the
tree-tops. A thrush sang his vesper from the bare branch of an oak near
by, and a blackbird, startled by the sight of a strange form squatting
beside the brambles, sounded his shrill alarm and dipped across the
clearing towards a clump of blackthorn bushes. As soon as she heard the
blackbird's warning, the vixen vanished; but, presently reappearing, she
trotted across the open space and sat beneath the thorns. For some
minutes she remained motionless in the dark patch of shadow, listening
intently; then, passing slowly down a narrow path, she reached a
trickling streamlet that fell with constant music from stone to stone
between luxuriant masses of moss and lichen; and there, at a gravelly
pool among the boulders, she cautiously stooped to drink. With exceeding
care, she now proceeded to make a thorough inspection of the covert. The
night was so calm and bright that the rabbits were feeding everywhere on
the margin of the thickets, but the vixen passed them by with nothing
but a casual glance; her mind, for the present, was not concerned with
hunting. After skirting the covert, she turned homewards by a pathway
through the trees.
At the end of the path she paused, with head bent low and hackles
ruffled along the spine--the scent of another vixen lay fresh on the
ground. The peculiar taint told her a complete story. The strange vixen
was soon to become a mother, and probably, in anticipation of the event,
inhabited an "earth" close by. Casting about like an experienced hound,
she picked up the trail, and followed it into a great tangle of heather,
brambles, and fern, where the scent led, by many a devious turn, to the
spreading roots of a beech, beneath which a disused rabbit warren had
been prepared for the little strangers presently to be brought into the
world. The dwelling place was empty.
Retracing her steps as far as the spot where first she had struck the
trail, then turning sharply towards the clearing, the crafty creature
hastened back to the "earth," determined to remove her cubs without
delay to the newly discovered abode. One by one she bore her offspring
thither, holding them gently by the loose skin about their necks, and
housed them all before the dispossessed tenant returned from a slow and
wearisome night's hunting. The evicted vixen, seeking to enter her home,
speedily recognised that in her distressed condition she was no match
for her savage, active enemy, and so, reluctantly retiring, took up her
quarters in the artificial "earth."
Henceforth, through all the careless hours of infancy, till summer ended
and the nights gradually lengthened towards the time of the Hunter's
Moon, the stillness of the woodlands was never broken by the ominous
note of the horn, or by the dread, fascinating music of the hounds in
full cry. Three of the cubs grew stout and strong, but the fourth was a
weakling--whether from injury at the hands of the huntsman or from some
natural ailment was not to be determined. He died, and mysteriously
disappeared, on the very day when the rest of the cubs first opened
their eyes in the dim chamber among the roots of the beech.
Vulp was the only male member of the happy woodland family. His
indulgent sisters tolerated his bouncing, familiar manners as if they
were born to be his playthings--he was so serious and yet so droll, so
stupidly self-assertive and yet so irresistibly affectionate! He seemed
to take his pleasures sadly, wearing, if such be possible to a fox, an
air of melancholy disdain; and yet his beady eyes were ever on the
lookout for mischief, and for the chance of a helter-skelter romp with
his sisters round and round the chamber, or to the entrance of the
"earth," where the sprouts of the green grass and the flowers of the
golden celandine sparkled as the sunlight of the fresh spring morning
flickered between the trees.
As yet, Vulp was unacquainted with the wide, free world. It seemed very
wonderful and awe-inspiring, as he sat by the mouth of the tunnel in the
shadow of an arching spray of polypody and, for sheer lack of something
better to do, half lifted himself on his hind-legs to rub his lips
against the edge of a fern, or to peep, with a feeling that his
whereabouts were a secret, between the drooping fronds. His mother
restrained his rashness; once, when he actually thrust his head beyond
the ferns, she with a stern admonition warned him of his mistake; and
he promptly withdrew to her side, frightened at his own boldness, but
grunting in well assumed defiance of the imagined danger from which he
had fled.
This, in fact, was the first lesson learned--that a certain sign from
the vixen meant "No," and that disobedience was afterwards punishable
according to the unwritten laws of woodland life. Another sign that he
learned to obey meant "Come." It was a low, deep note, gentle and
persuasive; and directly Vulp heard it he would hasten to his mother to
be not only fed but also cleansed from every particle of dirt. Such
toilet operations were not always welcome to the youngsters, and were
sometimes vigorously resented. But the vixen had a convincing method of
dealing with any refractory member of her family; she would hold the cub
firmly between her fore-feet while she continued her treatment, or
administered slight, well-judged chastisement by nipping her wayward
offspring in some tender spot, where, however, little harm could be the
result.