There were rabbits hiding in these clefts and crevices along the ridge-side. Whitefoot could smell them. With luck he might be able to stampede one of them into a cul-de-sac cranny big enough to admit his own slim body.
An empty and gnawing stomach urged him on. It urged him on, even after he caught the scent of human footprints which had passed that way, not an hour agone. It urged him on, even when, in a cranny, he came upon a contrivance of wood and iron which fairly reeked of human touch. The thing reeked of something else—of an excessively dead chicken which lay just beyond it in the cleft.
Too crafty to go past such a man-made and man-scented contrivance, yet Whitefoot felt his mouth water at the ancient odour of the chicken. He craved it beyond anything. Detouring the top of the ridge, he entered the cleft from the other side. No visible object of man’s workmanship checked him here or stood between him and the tempting food. Of course the man-scent was as strong here as at the opposite end. But the morning wind was shifting through the cleft, bearing the reek with it.
Cautiously the half-starved fox padded forward through the drift of dead leaves toward the chicken which itself was half buried in leafage. His jaws closed on it.
As he backed out with his treasure-trove, steel jaws closed on his left forefoot.
An hour later, Rance Venner and Holt climbed the ridge to visit the former’s newfangled patent fox-trap. In the centre of a patch of bloody trampled snow lay a magnificent silver fox; moveless, his eyes rolled back; his teeth curled away from his upper jaw. Limp and pitifully still he lay.
Venner ran forward with a cry of joy and knelt to unfasten the trap jaws from the lifeless creature’s paw.
“It’s our King Whitefoot II!” he exulted, laying the supine body in his lap and smoothing the rumpled glory of pelt. “But I can’t figure why he’s dead. Maybe the shock killed him, or else he broke a blood-vessel in his brain trying to tear loose. He—”
The rambling conjecture ended in a hoot of pain. There was an indescribably swift whirl of the inert black body. Rance Venner’s thumb received a lightning bite from teeth which scraped sickeningly into its very bone. Whitefoot was flying like mad for the nearest available rock-cranny.
Venner once more was increasing his knowledge of fox-character. Apart from enacting prodigies at digging and at climbing, it appeared now that foxes, in emergency, understood to perfection the trick of playing dead.