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[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.