THE FOX

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?