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Red Fox — Part 2
Images coming soon.
I have known a fox to kill three or four full-grown fowls in an orchard close to a farm-house where the family were at breakfast, and get away without being seen, carrying one of his victims with him.
On another occasion, quite recently, one of my neighbours had thirty pullets taken in a single night. Eighteen of them were found next morning in a heap at the foot of an oak tree. Another farmer tells me that he has lost one hundred and fifty in one season, all presumably going to the foxes.
Yet, although the farmer and the fox are such inveterate enemies, they manage to benefit each other in a great many ways quite unintentionally.
The fox destroys numberless field mice and woodchucks for the farmer, and in return the farmer supplys him with poultry, and builds convenient bridges over streams and wet places, which the fox crosses oftener than the farmer, for he is as sensitive as a cat about getting his feet wet.
On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the fox gets the best part of the exchange, for, while the farmer shoots at him on every occasion, and hunts him with dogs in the winter, he has cleared the land of wolves and panthers, so that foxes are probably safer than before any land was ploughed.
When the snow is deep the farmer's sled makes the best of paths for the fox, who appropriates them for his own use just as unconcernedly as he does the regular highway. But to see a fox get round the farmer's dogs, in order to make friends with them, is one of the most astonishing revelations of character. Usually the dogs seem hardly to know at first what to make of his advances, but the fox is pretty certain to succeed in bringing them to his side in the end, and after that they may be seen playing together day after day.
If, as I am sometimes tempted to believe, the fox really works this scheme with the deliberate purpose of making it safer for him to get at the farmer's chickens, he is gifted with a degree of shrewdness beyond anything he has been credited with.
It is only recently that I have come to realize what persistent woodchuck hunters foxes really are. I find that the shrill alarm cry of the woodchuck, heard echoing back and forth across the pasture-land, is a pretty reliable foretelling of the approach of a fox.
The appearance of a man or dog causes no such general alarm among them.
Last April, on a windy afternoon of bright sunlight, I saw a big dog-fox hard at work digging out a woodchuck's hole on the slope of a sandy hillock at the edge of a meadow.
Every few minutes he would back out of the hole, and, shaking the loose earth from his yellow fur, look intently across to the other opening of the burrow, as if expecting at any moment to see the woodchuck try to make his escape by way of the back door. A little distance away a woodchuck was signalling the dangers to any others of his kind that might be within hearing; he was safe enough at all events; the hole beside which he was sitting was ringed in by corded beech roots with an entrance much too narrow to admit a fox.
In summer time foxes like best to hunt the woodchucks that are just learning to go about alone.
I have never seen an actual encounter between a fox and a full-grown woodchuck; the fight must frequently prove a sharp one, for the woodchuck, though clumsy as compared with a fox, is a stubborn fighter, and knows how to use his chisel-like teeth to good purpose.
In the autumn, when the hounds are out and the uplands sing with their baying, it is only natural to think of the fox with pity, and for the time being, at least, to forgive him a portion of his sins.
If he is being hunted in the English manner, with horses and hounds, your pity is certainly not misplaced. To be run down and overtaken and torn to pieces by overpowering numbers, when at last his strength fails him and all his wiles have proved in vain, is a cruel end for any animal to meet. Fox hunting as it is practiced in most of our northern states, however, though it may not be quite so good form, is yet perfectly sportsmanlike, and a great deal pleasanter for the fox.
To say that the foxes frequently get their share of the fun while being hunted sounds absurd enough, but is nevertheless true. Only two or three hounds are used, and the hunter, instead of following, endeavours to head off the fox and shoot him. About the only cruelty in this sort of hunting is when an occasional fox is wounded and escapes, and must heal his shot wounds and get along as best he may for the next few weeks.