Presently he was skirting the chicken-yard. It and its coop were too fast-locked for him to hope to enter with less than a half-hour’s clever digging. He had not a half-hour. He had not a half-minute to spare.
Slinking from the coop, he rounded a tool-house. There he halted. For to his nostrils came again the smell of living food, though of a sort vaguely unpleasant to him. Hunger and the need to feed his brood formed too strong a combination for this faint distaste to combat.
He peered around the corner of the half-open door of the tool-house. From the interior arose the hated dog-smell, ten times stronger than before. But he knew by nose and by hearing that the dog was no longer in there.
He was correct in this, as in most of his surmises. Not five minutes earlier, the early-rising Dick Logan had opened the tool-house door and convoyed thence his pedigreed collie, Jean, to the kitchen for her breakfast.
In the corner of the tool-house was a box half filled with rags. Down among the rags nestled and squirmed and muttered a litter of seven pure-bred collie pups, scarce a fortnight old.
Man-scent and dog-scent filled the air; scaring and disgusting the hesitant Whitefoot. Stark hunger spurred him on. A fleeting black shadow slipped noiselessly swift into the tool-house and then out again.
Through the welter of rain, Whitefoot was making for his mile-distant lair; at top speed; pausing not to glance over his shoulder; straining every muscle to get away from that place of double peril and to his waiting family. No need to waste time in confusing the trail. The sluicing rain was doing that.
Between his teeth the fox carried a squealing and struggling fat collie puppy.
Keen as was his own need for food, he did not pause to devour or even to kill the plump morsel he had snatched up. Nor did his pinpoint teeth so much as prick through the fuzzy fat sides of his prey. Holding the puppy as daintily as a bird dog might retrieve a wounded partridge, he sped on.
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.