The Heart of a Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

To provide against such an unlikely effort at jail-breaking, the four wire walls of the run sloped slightly inward. At their summit, all around, was a flat breadth of wire that hung out for eight inches over the run; projecting inside the walls. As a rule such deterrents were quite enough to bar an ordinary fox from escape. But nature had taught Lady Pitchdark more than she teaches the ordinary fox. She was one of the rare vulpines born with climbing-genius.

Up she scrambled her fierce momentum carrying her to the very top of the fence; to the spot where it merged with the eight-inch overhang. Here, by every rule, the vixen should have yielded to the immutable law of gravity and should have tumbled back to the ground with a breath-expelling flop.

This is precisely what she did not do. Still helped by her momentum, she clawed frantically with both forefeet at the edge of the overhang. Her claws hooked in its end-meshes. Her hindfeet released their hold on the in-slanting fence and she swung for an instant between moon and earth—a glowing black swirl of fur, shot with a myriad silver threads.

Then lithely she drew herself up, on the overhang. A pause for breath and she was skidding down the steep slope of the fence’s outer side. A dart across the yard and she reached the kennel’s boundary fence just as Whitefoot was squirming to freedom through the second and shorter tunnel he had made that night.

Diving through, so close behind him that her outthrust muzzle brushed his sensitive tailtip, Pitchdark reached the safety of the outer world at almost the same instant as did he. Whitefoot felt the light touch at his tail. He spun around, snarling murderously, his razor-keen teeth bared. He had won his way to liberty by no slight exercise of brain and of muscle. He was not minded to surrender tamely to any possible pursuer.

But as he confronted the slender young vixen in her royal splendour of pelt and with her unafraid excited eyes fixed so mischievously upon him, the dog-fox’s lips slipped down from their snarling curl; sheathing the fearsome array of teeth and tushes. For a fraction of a second Whitefoot and Pitchdark faced each other there under the dazzling white moon; twin ebon blotches on the frost-strewn grass. Twenty-two pairs of yellow-fire eyes were upon them.

Then on impulse the two refugees touched noses. As though by this act they established common understanding, they wheeled about as one; and galloped silently, shoulder to shoulder, across the frosted meadow to the safety of the black mountainside forest.

Sportsmanship can go only just so far; even in cool-nerved foxes. As the couple vanished through the night, a shrilly hideous multiple clamour of barking went up from twenty-two furry black throats. The tense hush was broken by a bedlam of raucous noise. The prisoners dashed themselves against the springy sides of their wire runs. One and another of them made desperate scrambling attempts to climb the inslanting walls that encircled them—only to fall back to the frozen ground and add their quota once more to the universal din.

Rance and Ethan Venner came tumbling out of the nearby house, grasping their flashlights and shouting confusedly to each other. Instantly blank silence overspread the yards. The foxes crouched low, eyes aflame, staring mutely at the belated humans.

The briefest of inspections told the brothers what had happened. First they found the tunnel leading forth from Whitefoot’s run. Then they discovered that Pitchdark’s run was empty; though they could find no clue to its occupant’s mysterious vanishing until next morning’s sunrise showed them a tuft of finespun black fur stuck to a point of wire on the overhang, ten feet above ground. Last of all the partners came upon the hole under the fence which divided the kennel from the meadow.