He and she were alone in their wanderings; especially since the hunting season forced them higher among the almost inaccessible peaks of the range. Foxes that crossed their path or happened to sight or scent them fled as ever in terror at the dog-smell.
In midwinter, the day after a “tracking snow” had fallen, one Jeffreys Holt, an aged fox-hunter, tramping home with his tired hound at his heels, chanced upon an incredible sight.
An animal rounded a bend of rock on a hillside perhaps a hundred yards in front of him; and stood there, stockstill, for a few seconds, sharply outlined against the snow. Then, as Holt stared slackjawed, the creature oozed from sight into a crevice. Holt plunged ahead, urging his weary hound to the chase. But by the time he reached the crevice there was no sign of the quarry.
The cleft led through to an opening on the far side of a rocky outcrop. Thence a hundred-yard rib of rock jutted above the snow. Along this, presumably, had the prey fled; for there were no further marks of him in the whiteness. Holt cast his dog futilely upon the trail. He studied the footprints in the snow at the point where first the beast had been standing. Then he plodded home.
Whitefoot, from the safety of another double-entry rock-lair, a furlong away, watched him depart. Long immunity had made the big dog-fox overbold. Yet this was the first time human eyes had focused on him for two years.
At the store, that night, Rance Venner glanced up from his task of ordering supplies for the Stippled Silver Kennels and listened with sudden interest to the harangue of an oldster among the group around the stove.
“I’m telling you,” Holt was insisting, in reply to a doubter, “I’m telling you I saw him as plain as I see you. Jet black he was, only his tailtip was white, and one of his hindfeet; and there was shiny grey hairs sticking out from his shoulders and over his eyebrows. He—”
“Somebody’s black dog, most likely,” suggested the doubter.
“Dog nothing!” snorted Holt. “I’ve killed too many foxes not to know ’em from dogs. This was a fox. A reg’lar ol’ he-one. A corker. And I’m telling you he was coal-black; all but the tip of his tail and them hairs sprinkled all over his mask and—”
“Well,” soothed the doubter, seeking to calm Holt’s vexed vehemence, “I’m not saying there mayn’t be black foxes with white tails and white hindfeet and grey masks. For all I know, there’s maybe foxes that’s bright green and foxes that’s red-white-and-blue, or speckled with pink. There may be. Only nobody’s ever seen ’em. Any more’n anybody’s ever seen a black-and-white-and-grey one, till you seen that one to-day, Jeff. I—”