A Fox's Feat
Who would believe that a full-grown fox could pass through the mesh of ordinary sheep-netting?—four-inch mesh, if memory serves. We know of one case where a vixen was actually seen to accomplish this wonderful feat. With her cubs, she had been dug out from her earth, carried to a distant part of the country, and imprisoned. The four-inch mesh must have been a tight fit for her body; but perhaps she had worried and fretted at her imprisonment, until she had worn herself to a shadow. Her cubs, which were unweaned, may have helped to weaken her strength, and reduce her waist until it could squeeze through the netting.
The story has a sequel. A town doctor saw the vixen a few moments after her escape; and happened to find himself sitting next to a M.F.H. at dinner. The doctor remarked, with a well-meant attempt at affability, "Foxes seem to be plentiful in your neighbourhood this year." "What makes you think so?" asked the M.F.H., with encouraging eagerness. "Why, only the other day, passing your place about noon, I saw a vixen with cubs trotting across your lawn." The doctor swiftly perceived that he had let the fox out of the bag, so black was the look that came over the Master's face. But it was months before he solved the full riddle of the black look, when he learned that the fox he had seen on the lawn in broad daylight had only just escaped from her wire-net prison, so saving herself from the ignominy of being turned down with her cubs.
The keeper finds his game-nests with his eyes, the fox with his nose. The keeper who must preserve game and preserves foxes takes steps to overcome the scent of his birds. He sprinkles the neighbourhood of all the nests he can find with some strong-smelling fluid. But the foulest or strongest scent will not save a bird when a fox has once seen her. Fortunately he is not clever enough to know a new trap from an old one, nor a sound from a broken one, and the keeper finds at nesting-time a good use for his disused traps, placing them about birds sitting in dangerous spots. Anything in the shape of scrap-iron the fox suspects; anything unusual about a nest, such as a piece of newspaper on a bush near by, will arouse his fears, and possibly save a bird's life. But as rooks learn to treat scarecrows with contempt, so foxes learn to have no fear for harmless terrors, and the keeper rings the changes on all the fox-alarming devices which experience and ingenuity can suggest.
