Part 5

Then the door was unbarred and opened.

"All dead, are 'ee?"

"Aye, all dead."

After a pause the newcomer added:

"You're as putty a lot ever I reared; in another month you'd have been ready for market, and I looked to 'ee to pay part of the rent."

Then in a voice like thunder he bawled out:

"Where art thee, Master Reynard? Ah, thee scoundrel, thee needn't try to get out by the chimbley! thee'rt wastin' thy precious time. I'll help thy lordship through the front door in a minute. An'rew, bring the sack here."

Presently I heard two men below, and the door closed behind them.

"He's up the chimbley and safe enuf. You hold the sack whilst I stir him up with this eer pole."

Two awful thumps I endured without flinching, but the third knocked my hind-legs from under me, and I fell all of a heap into the bag.

"So far, so good. Now we'll tie a stone to the sack and drop the lot into the deep corner of the goslin' pool. The varmint must die. I'll go and fetch a bit of rope."

Whilst the farmer was gone the man opened the mouth of the sack and looked down on me. Not satisfied, apparently, with the half light of the outhouse, he took me into the open and peered at me again. I thought I recognized him the first time he inspected me; but now, with the morning sun on his ruddy cheeks I was quite sure. He was the first man I had seen, the man who was on the cairn the morning my mother was killed by the pack; he was the man who, I felt certain, had stopped the earths. I was calm now. I had gone through the agony of death, but still I did not want to die. Life was sweet, very sweet. I was not like a mangy old fox; I was in the pride of my cub-hood.

"What a beauty!" said the earth-stopper, as he continued to gaze at me. "What a grand fox, to be sure! If An'rew can save 'ee, then thee shan't die, now there." Saying this he let go his hold on the sack and turned away. You can depend upon it I made a quick exit and sped off. I hope no serious harm came to Andrew.

I sought a new home, looking therefor on the great moors. For a time I had a life comparatively free from care, but though few of the changes in the autumn life of the wild escaped me, I was slow to interpret those signs that foretold the severe weather that was to suddenly set in. It is, however, hardly matter for wonder that I was blind to the warnings they conveyed, for the frosts of our peninsula are, as a rule, so slight as to relax their feeble grip by noon-day; even the smallest birds suffer little discomfort. Indeed, I have sometimes thought that migratory birds flock to our shores because of the mildness of the climate and the hospitality its feeding grounds offer; but this is only the view of a fox, who welcomes these aliens, and takes heavy toll of their number. Whatever the cause may be, there is no doubt about the fact. This year, however, the flocks of fieldfares, always the first to arrive, were earlier than was their wont. I noted, too, that despite the normal mildness of the weather, our few hibernating creatures suddenly withdrew into their winter quarters; the hedge-hogs to the drifts of leaves and hollow holes of dead trees, and the dormice to their nests in the low bushes. These incidents did not seem to concern me; though I was surprised at the abandonment of the fen by the otters, till presently I learnt that the late salmon had already passed up the river. That seemed to explain it; for the otters always follow the salmon, as every fox knows who has had the luck to find a half-eaten fish on the bank.

I am convinced that all these creatures were conscious of approaching hard weather; and when I discovered that the squirrels with which the wood abounded, had sought their nests in the top-most branches of the red pines, a sense of the evil times before us came to me, too.

I noticed while I lay from dawn to sunset amongst the undergrowth that a strange calm, presaging sudden change of weather, brooded over the solemn wood. The silence was unbroken until twilight, when the starlings settled in and mingled their vespers with the soughing of the rising wind. Then when I left my lair, threaded the boles of the pines and came to the beeches, the leaves crackled under foot, a sign of cold, dry weather; but I did not feel the keen wind until I gained the shoulder of the ridge to the north, which is crowned by the tor. At midnight on the moors the cold became intense; when, near dawn, I crossed the upland road which since some heavy rains had been a quagmire, I found it hard as rock, and the backwater of the pool above the ford was frozen to the edge of the current. On the marshy ground below, the cracking of the ice under my tread disturbed several snipe; and between the alders and my own lair two woodcock got up, which, from their weary flight, I should say had only just arrived.

My snug kennel under the furze looked doubly snug that cold, hard dawn; and whatever privations the future might have in store, there was at least every token of present abundance.

"The long-bills are pretty plentiful," thought I, as I curled up on my dry couch. "Hungry times are over; there will be food galore now."

I slept through the day and sought the fen at nightfall, to find the pool and the mere, or rather those parts of them that remained unfrozen, crowded with wild-fowl. Strangers though we were to one another, they proved very wary and difficult of approach, despite the curiosity my appearance aroused in them.

So matters stood for some time, during which I cared to remain out only part of the night; but when my coat got thick enough to resist the piercing cold I hunted far and late, seldom reaching my kennel before the sun showed red above the sea.

During the period of dry frost I fared well enough; but a snow-storm which occurred at the time of the new moon and lasted for two days and two nights, rendered foraging difficult, and made me feel a stranger in my own country. Except in rudest outline, it was no longer like itself. The fen was a great white plain, broken by a big and a small pool and the winding stream that fed them. In place of the sombre array of pines under the tor, usually as marked a feature in our landscape as were the great reed-beds themselves, a vast slope of snow met the eye; and the tor might have been a fleecy cloud in the leaden sky. Strangest of all was the aspect of the dunes, which looked like great waves of pure foam arrested in their roll.

Many a time I scanned this white undulating waste for the hare that frequented the sand-hills, hoping to mark him in a position where it would be possible to stalk him. I say, "possible" because of the great powdery drifts that rose like new dunes across my hidden trails and barred my progress in every direction. Moreover, each fall of snow caused me fresh trouble; for it stultified the knowledge I had gained, and compelled me to find new ways to my hunting grounds.

To add to my difficulties, soon only a few landmarks were left, and these hard to recognize--horseshoe of thatch about the short chimney was all there was to show the position of the cottage, and it was hard to believe that the snow-laden elms were the same trees whose golden leafage but a month before had cast so deep a shadow on the farmyard where the cock pheasant had been feeding with the fowls. On the edge of the ploughed field next the mowhay were the tracks made by the two wary rabbits whose home was under the big rick, and the few partridges which had escaped our jaws kept near the rubbing post in the middle of the field.

But I recall that fallow best by the course I had across it after the little jack-hare, who led me such a round as I have seldom gone. I lost sight of him in the field beyond the orchard, where the turnips lay in heaps, but followed his line up and down the hill to the head of the fen, across which he went almost in the teeth of a raging blizzard. He had ringed the bulrushes in the heart of the bog before making one of his baffling sidelong leaps, and then set his face for the foot-hills under my lair. The scent was hot amongst the scattered furze-bushes through which he led me, and so heavily clogged were his feet with snow that I felt sure I should overtake him before he reached the tamarisks on the other side of the hill; but I underrated his endurance. I followed him to the waste of sand-hills, only to find that he had disappeared in a drift at the foot of the highest dune. In his desperation--for I was all but on him--he must have plunged into this and worked his way far in, as I could not find him, though I dug and dug into the smothering mass in every direction. Nothing remained but to make my weary way home through the blinding, driving storm. There are more blanks than prizes in the life of even a clever fox.

The scent lay wonderfully that night, and I followed it as easily as I had shortly before followed the scent of a bittern across the snow between the reed-bed and the bulrushes. It was in this isolated clump that the otters so often laid up before the frost hardened the trembling mass environing it; but now I noticed that some of these wily creatures had beaten a deep track across the narrow neck of the big bend of the river, though I did not once get a glimpse of them.

I must pass over much detail of the varying fortunes of that eventful time to speak of the mis-adventures that befell me on an expedition when I unwittingly exposed myself to a great danger, and was lucky to escape with my life. I had risen from my kennel, stretched myself, sniffed the biting wind, listened, shaken my thick coat, and then, as was my wont since giving up my journeys to the hills, first visited the few remaining bits of boggy ground in sheltered places of the brake, with the hope of picking up one of the woodcock that resorted there to feed. I approached one spot after another against the wind and with the utmost stealth; but, despite my extreme caution, I succeeded only in flushing the birds, so wary had they become through being harassed--chiefly, I believe, by young cubs.

After lapping some water below a cascade hung with icicles, I left the soft margin of the rapid runnel which had been riddled by the bills of the woodcock and, emerging from the furze, stole down to the thicket of blackthorns. But my nose told me a fox had been there already; so I at once made for my favorite pool, whence the cries of various wild-fowl reached my ears. I knew that they consisted of duck, widgeon, and teal; but from the noise they made, I judged them to be more numerous than usual, and so they proved.

Through a gap in the reeds I gazed once and again at the tantalizing sight. What more maddening spectacle for a hungry fox than that of game beyond reach? I ransacked my brain to discover a way to get at them. It was beyond my powers. The edge of the acre of water that remained open was a score of yards from the reeds and scarcely less from the island. There was only one course practicable, to disturb the birds and to take up a hidden position from which I should be within striking distance of the pool. The snowy surface which ringed them in denied concealment save at one point, and that was much too far from the water to suit my methods, for the scanty bit of cover was too long springs from the brink of the ice. Any attempt to rush the birds from there seemed vain. Many a time since the frost set in I had stood and weighed the chances it offered, only to scorn the idea of using it for an ambuscade. To-night, somehow--was it because of my ravenous hunger?--the clump of sags, though weighed down by the snow, did not look quite so hopeless as before the last fall; and I decided to accept its hard conditions and give it a trial. It was an exasperating thing to be obliged to scare the birds; but there was no help for it, and so forward I went.

My forefoot was hardly through the fringe of reeds when a mallard saw me and gave the alarm. In an instant a hundred pairs of eyes were turned on me; and, as if fascinated by the sight of so fine a fox, their owners did not take wing until I was nearly half-way across the snow. Then, with a loud "quar, quar, quar" from the ducks, all the birds rose in a confused company, the noise of their wing-beats drowning for a moment the loud rustling of the swaying reeds. I watched them divide into their several skeins, which then wheeled above my head and flew seawards, the widgeon in the van.

Before seeking my ambush, I crossed the ice to the other side of the pool, in the hope of finding a disabled bird in the thick cover, but saw nothing save a few dead starlings that had fallen from their roosting perches on the reeds. The flesh of starlings is nearly as loathsome to me as the flesh of carrion-feeding birds; so I left their stark bodies lying there, and trotted over the wide stretch of snow to the island. When crossing, I noticed a small hole in the ice. It had been made and kept open by otters that they might come there to breathe whilst fishing; but I did not know this at the time. The island, though it reeked with the smell of duck, was blank; so I made for the sags again, and crawled under them carefully in order not to disturb their white coating. Gently as I pushed my pointed muzzle between the stems the frozen snow rattled down in a shower, and this caused me much misgiving, for I feared that the exposed blades, black with decay, would be sure to excite the suspicion of the quick-eyed fowl, and warn them off the water.

When ensconced, I found that my ambush barely screened me, and, what was more serious, it seemed much farther from the pool than in the bloodthirsty moment when I had decided to use it. However, being in, I meant to stay, and so, the tip of my muzzle between two bent blades that grew a few inches in front of the clump, and nothing but the tag of my brush projecting at the rear, I began my vigil. It was bitter work watching with the gale in your teeth, but I might have noticed it less had the ambush been a little nearer the water. Nevertheless, being of a sanguine temperament, I threw sense and sinew into my work as if success were assured. My ears were spread their widest, to catch any sound that reached them above the lapping of the water and the swish of the encompassing reeds; my eyes, if not fixed on the pool, scanned the snowy space between; and my legs were gathered under me ready to spring. One by one some feathers the ducks had left, drifted to the nearer side and were lost to sight; once I caught the faint wing-beats of passing wild-fowl and, raising my eyes, saw the long wedge of them black against the bright stars; but not a bird settled on the water.

Hour after hour passed in this manner, and my patience was just giving out when an incident occurred that dispelled all thought of trying my luck elsewhere. It was not the fish that jumped clear of the surface, which induced me to stay, but the great boil in the water near where it fell. I believed this had been caused by an otter, and quite expected to see the creature land on a small jagged point of ice hard by, where the snow had been much trampled. Nor did mere curiosity keep me an interested spectator: I was expecting to get fish for supper after my wasteful friend had taken one or two bites of his prey. Whilst I watched for his appearance, and watched in vain, a rather larger fish leapt out--once--twice; and the third time it was hardly above the surface when the open jaws of a huge pike showed close behind it, and I could see the bristling array of teeth before a tremendous swirl hid them again. In all my experiences I have only once witnessed anything that took me more by surprise; and from that night I have never swum across to the island without fear of being seized by the grim monster which I now knew tenanted the pool.

The pike had scarcely disappeared before three teal, whose flight I had not heard, settled in the middle of the water and set my brush waving with excitement. Totally unsuspicious of my presence they swam towards me, and approached so close to the ice as to be completely hidden by the bank of snow near its edge. Judging their position as well as I could by the delicious scent that reached me, I made two tremendous leaps, which landed me amongst them before they could take wing. But on account of the spray and the shock of the icy-cold water I missed all three; though my jaws snapped close over the spot where one of them dived. He came up yards away from where I was awaiting him, rose as only a teal can rise, and flew off in company with his mates, who were wheeling about overhead.

With a rankling sense of failure I scrambled with some difficulty on to the ice, shook my coat and, turning my back on my ambush, trotted off as briskly as I could in the direction of the mere. Through the long wait on the snow and the coldness of the water into which I had plunged, my feet were so benumbed that I could scarcely feel them under me when crossing the bog. Nevertheless, I stumbled on until warmth came back to them, and then hunted the waste beyond, working across the wind on the margin of the laid reed-beds in the hope of scenting moorhens or water-rail to break my long fast. Most carefully did I try the patches of sedgy cover in the loops of the stream where I had seldom failed; but even there I met with disappointment, the few birds I winded evading me by diving under the ice which in places covered the strong current.

I must have trotted miles along the zigzag course I took, before I reached the expanse of windswept snow under which lay the frozen mere. From inside the fringe of reeds I could hear the honking of the geese on the open water, and at times a sound that was new to me, a wild trumpeting which seemed to come from where the sea was thundering on the bar. For a fox naturally prompt in decision, I stood there long, considering whether to make a journey that offered but poor prospect of success. In the wild-fowl's feeding-ground I had come from there was at least makeshift for an ambush; on the level ice-field before me there was not cover enough to hide a mouse, and the chance of a kill was very, very small. Choice of supper, however, lay between cold starling, bitter and dry, and hot goose, sweet and juicy--if I could get it--and goose or nothing was my resolve. I set my face for the spot where the scarcely discernible specks on the snow showed the game to be thickest; and if my coat turned white in winter like that of a stoat I had seen a few nights before, I might have stolen at least part of the way unobserved. As it was, my reddish-brown fur, though lighter than in the summer, made me as conspicuous as a crow on a stubble to the noisy sentinels overhead, which at once spread the cry of "Fox afoot!" far and wide over the great mere. The only method possible, then, in this wild-goose chase, was to keep going with the most nonchalant air at my command, as if my sole object in approaching the pool was to wash down a heavy supper; and it was lucky for my plan that my thick coat hid my prominent ribs and concealed my half-starved condition.

Presently I could see that the wild-fowl lining the margin of the ice were nearly all geese; but what riveted my gaze was a small group of big white birds beyond, whose heads towered high above the mass of insignificant-looking duck that crowded the water.

"Halloo! something new in the feather line," thought I. "What monsters are these?"

And then it occurred to me that, as I had never cast eyes on their kind before, it might be that these strangers had never set eyes on a fox, and would entertain no fear of such an innocent-looking creature come to quench his thirst. This line of reasoning seemed so plausible that I licked my dry chops at the prospect of a lordly feast, and for a moment felt inclined to despise such small birds as geese. These latter had for some time held their heads turned my way; so, to show that concealment was not dreamt of, I stood still, raised my mask to the moon, just risen above the headland, and, though it cost me a great effort, barked as joyously as only a full-fed fox can bark. Rarely in my chequered life have I given utterance to notes so expressive of content; and as the geese seemed greatly taken by the music, I continued to indulge them, at the same time lessening the distance that separated us.

We were getting on quite good terms with one another--at least, so I thought--until I was within--well, it is difficult to judge distance over snow--perhaps fifty yards of them. Then I saw unmistakable signs of restlessness. To lull suspicion I waved my brush in my most fascinating manner; I rolled on my back, hoping to prove to them that, murderer though I might be by repute, I was really a playful creature, even on that wild winter's night; and in order to reassure the more timorous, including a fine gander, who had retired from the front to the rear rank, I began to cut capers, running after my brush in small circles, or rather in a spiral which would bring me, as I could see out of the corner of my eye, within rushing distance of two of the most curious of my admirers.

It was all in vain; my back was to the cowardly crew when they rose; but even then I should have seized a laggard had I sprung a few hairs higher, for the tip of my muzzle actually touched his cold webbed foot. In my fall on the edge of the ice I all but lost my balance and toppled into the water. Was I enraged when I recovered myself? I need not enlarge on that.

The flight of the geese alarmed the duck, which rose in a big cloud from the mere, with a noise that would, I am sure, have bewildered any animal except a fox, or perhaps an otter. But I ignored it, and amidst their silly clamor and the loud whirr of their wings that momentarily drowned the gale, fixed my eyes on the three swans--for such they were--who did not take flight like the others, but swam up and down the rough water in a manner which, if not expressive of contempt, was at least aggressive and provocative. Their attitude was a revelation to me; no bird had ever dared challenge me before; and if they see as foxes do, these black-billed strangers who stared so hard must have read blank amazement on my innocent face as I read defiance on theirs. Nor was I free from irritation at the bravado conspicuous in their puffed-out breasts and beruffled plumage.

Suddenly my demeanor changed from amazement to rage. This certainly they must have known from my flaming eyes, bristling fur, and fluffed-out brush lashing from side to side; but up and down they swam, hissing out their summons to come and do battle, if I dared. A fox shrink from combat with feathered foes? Never! I jumped into the water, and swam across the strong current for the spot they had chosen for the contest. All three preserved their determined front until I was close enough to see the yellow on their bills and the snake-like look in their evil eyes, but at my next stroke two of them beat the water with their great wings, rose in the air, and with loud-creaking pinions flew over my head.

"Cowards!" said I. "Why did you not stand your ground?"