The Heart of a Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

Nor was the season propitious for food-finding. The migratory birds, for the most part, had not shifted north. The rabbits for some silly reason of their own had changed their feeding grounds to the opposite valley. Farmers had suffered too many depredations from Whitefoot and Pitchdark during the past month to leave their henroosts as hospitably open as of yore.

The first day’s hunting netted only a sick crow that had tumbled from a tree. Whitefoot turned with disgust from this find. For, though he would have been delighted to dine on the rankest of carrion, yet in common with all foxes, he could not be induced to touch any bird of prey.

That night he foraged again; in spite of having outraged his regular custom by hunting in daylight. There was no fun in hunting, this night. For a wild torrent of rain had burst out of the black clouds which all day had been butting their way across the windy sky.

Foxes detest rain, and this rain was a veritable deluge; a flood that started the spring freshets and turned miles of bottomland into soggy lakes. Yet Whitefoot kept on. Grey dawn found him midway between his lair and the farmstead at the foot of the hill.

This farm he and Pitchdark had avoided. It was too near their den for safe plundering. Its human occupants might well be expected to seek the despoilers. And just then those despoilers were in no condition to elude the chase. Wherefore, fox-fashion, the two had ranged far afield and had reserved the nearby farm for later emergencies.

Now the emergency appeared to call for such a visit from Whitefoot. A moment or so he hesitated, irresolute whether to return empty-mouthed to his mate or to go first to the farm for possible food. He decided on the farm.

Had he gone to the burrow he would have known there was no further need to forage for those five beautiful baby silvers, so different in aspect from the slaty-gray infants of the red fox. A swelling rivulet of rain had been deflected from its downhill course by a wrinkle in the soil; and had poured swishingly down the opening of the woodchuck warren and thence down into the ill-constructed brood nest at its bottom.

For the safeguarding of newborn fox-babies, as of the babies of every race, dry warmth is all-essential. Chilled and soaked, despite their young mother’s frantic efforts to protect them, the five ill-nourished and perilously inbred cubs ceased to nurse and began to squeak right dolefully. Then, one by one they died. The last of them stiffened out, just before daybreak.

Rance and Ethan Venner would have cursed luridly at loss of so many hundred dollars in potential peltry. But the bereft little mother only cuddled her ice-cold babies the closer; crooning piteously to them. They were her first litter. She could not realise what had befallen them, nor why one and all of them had ceased to nurse.

Meantime, her mate was drifting like an unobtrusive black shadow through the rain toward the clutter of farm buildings at the base of the hill-pasture. His scent told him there was a dog somewhere in that welter of sheds and barns and houses. But his scent told him also that there were fowls aplenty. Preparing to match his speed and his wit against any dog’s, he crept close and closer, taking due advantage of every patch of cover; unchecked even by the somewhat more distant man-scent; and urged on by that ever stronger odour of live chickens.