Part 2

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.