Creatures of the Night: A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain

by Alfred Wellesley Rees

One starlit night, when in early winter the snow lay thick on the ground, Vulp heard the hunting call of a vixen prowling through the pines. A similar call had often reached his ears. Not long after his dam deserted him, the cry had come from a furze-brake on a neighbouring hill-top, and, hastening thither, he had wandered long and wearily, recognising, though with misgiving, his mother's voice. But the exact meaning of the call, not being a matter for his mother's teaching, was unknown to him at the time. Now, however, he was a strong, well fed, fully developed fox, able to hold his own against all rivals, and the cry possessed for him a strange, new significance: “The night is white; man is asleep; I hunt alone!” Almost like a big brown leaf he seemed to drift across the moonlit snow, nearer and nearer to the pines. He paused for a moment to sniff the trail; then, with a joyous “yap” of greeting, he bounded over the hedge, reached the aisles of the wood, and gambolled—again like a big, wind-blown leaf—about the sleek, handsome creature whose call he had heard. The happy pair trotted off to hunt the thickets, till, just before dawn, Vulp, eager to show his skill and training, surprised two young rabbits sitting beneath a snow-laden tangle of briar and gorse, and gallantly shared the spoil with his woodland bride. They feasted long and heartily, afterwards journeying to the banks of a rill, that, like a black ribbon, flowed through the glen; and there, crouching together at the margin, they lapped the water with eager, thirsty tongues.

Presently, happening to glance behind along the line of the trail, Vulp caught sight of another fox, a rival for the vixen's affections, crouching in some bracken scarcely a dozen yards away. With a low grunt of rage, he dashed into the fern, but the watchful stranger simply moved aside, and frisked towards the vixen as she still crouched at the edge of the stream. In response to this insulting defiance, Vulp hurled himself on the intruder, and bowled him over into the snow. The fight was fast and furious; now one gained the advantage, then the other. The grass beneath them became gradually bared of snow by their frantic struggles, and marked here and there by a bunch of fur or a spot of blood. At last the rival fox, his cheek torn badly beneath the eye, showed signs of exhaustion; his breath came in quick, loud gasps; and Vulp, pressing the attack, forced him to flee for life to a thicket on the brow of the slope. There he dwelt and nursed his wounds, till, when the snow melted, the huntsman's “In-hoick, in-hoick, loo-loo-in-hoick!” resounded in the coverts, and he was routed from his lair for a last, half-hearted chase, that ended as Melody pulled him down at a ford of the river below the woods.

During the period of their comradeship—a period of privation for most of Nature's wildlings—Vulp taught the vixen much of the lore he had learned from his mother, while the vixen imparted to him the knowledge she herself had gained when a cub. He taught her how to steal away from the covert along the rough, rarely trodden paths between the farm-labourers' cottages—where the scent lay so badly that the hounds were unable to follow—directly the first faint notes of a horn, or the dull thud of galloping hoofs, or the excited whimper of a “rioting” puppy, indicated the approach of enemies. She taught him to baffle his foes by chasing sheep across the stubbles, and then passing through a line of strong scent where his own trail could not readily be distinguished; also that to cross the river by leaping from stone to stone in the ford was as sure a means of eluding pursuit as to swim the pools and the shallows. He taught her, when hard pressed, to leap suddenly aside from her path, run along the top rail of a fence, return sharply on her line of scent, and follow, with a wide cast, a loop-shaped trail, which, with a tangent through a ploughed field or dry fallow, was usually sufficient to check pursuit till the scent became faint and cold. And gradually each of these woodland rovers grew acquainted with the peculiar whims and habits of the other. Vulp loved to follow stealthily the trail of the rabbit, and then to lie in wait till some imagined cause of alarm sent Bunny back through the “creep” and almost straight into her enemy's open jaws. The vixen preferred to hide in the brambles to leeward of a burrow till an unsuspecting rabbit crept out into the open. Vulp, since his adventure with the polecat, bristled with rage whenever he crossed the track of a weasel, but never dreamed of following; polecat and weasel were the same animal for aught he knew to the contrary. The vixen, however, was not daunted by the unpleasant memory of any such adventure; having chanced to see a weasel in the act of killing a vole, she had recognised a rival and acted accordingly. And so Vulp's repeated warnings to his mate on this matter produced no effect beyond making her slightly more careful than she had hitherto been to obtain a proper grip when she pounced on her savage little quarry. The vixen was exceedingly fond of snails, and would eagerly thrust a fore-paw into the crannies of any old wall or bank where they hibernated; but Vulp much preferred to scratch up the moss in a deserted gravel-pit, and grub in the loosened soil for the drowsy blow-flies and beetles that had chosen the spot for their winter abode. This was the reason for such different tastes: the vixen, when a cub, had often basked in the sun near a snails' favourite resort, and had there acquired a liking for the snails; while the fox, on the other hand, had times out of number amused himself, in the first summer of his life, by leaping and snapping at the flies as they buzzed among the leaves when the mid-day sun was hot, and at the beetles as they boomed along the narrow paths in the thicket near the “earth” when the moon rolled up above the hedge, and the dark, mysterious shadows of intersecting boughs foreshortened on the grass. But Vulp knew well, from an unpleasant experience, the difference between a fly and a wasp.

One day in August, as he lay in his outdoor lair, the brightness and heat of the sunshine were such that his eyes, blinking in the drowsiness of half-awakened slumber, appeared like mere slits of black across streaked orbs of yellow, and gave no indication of the fiery glow that lit the round, distended pupils when he peered at nightfall through the tangled undergrowth. His tongue lolled out, and he panted like a tired hound, but from thirst rather than weariness. The flies annoyed him greatly, now settling on his brush, till with a flick of his paw he drove them away, then, nothing daunted, alighting on his back, his ears, his haunches, till his fur wrinkled and straightened in numberless uneasy movements from the tormenting tickling of the little pests. Presently, with a shrill bizz of rapid wings, a large, yellow-striped fly passed close to his ears. He struck down the tormenting insect with a random flip of his paws, snapped at it to complete the work of destruction, and proceeded leisurely to eat his victim. To his utter surprise, he seemed to have captured a living, angry thorn, which, despite his most violent efforts to tear it away with his paws, stuck in his lip, and produced a smarting, burning sensation that was intolerable. He rolled on the ground and rubbed his muzzle in the grass, but to no purpose. No wonder, then, that subsequently his manner towards an occasional hibernating wasp among the moss-roots in the gravel-pit was deferential in the extreme!

Vulp and his mate soon learned that in rabbit-hunting it was exceedingly profitable to co-operate. Thus, while the vixen “lay up” near a warren, Vulp skirted the copse and chased the conies home towards his waiting spouse. After considerable practice, the trick paid handsomely, and food was seldom lacking. The vixen possessed, perhaps, a slightly more delicate sense of smell than the fox. Frequently she scented a rabbit in a clump of fern or gorse after Vulp had passed it by; suddenly stopping, she would tell her lord of her discovery by signs he readily understood, and then, while he kept outside the tangle, would pounce on the coney in its retreat, or start it helter-skelter into his very jaws. But of all the tricks and the devices she taught him, the chief, undoubtedly, were those concerned with the capture of hens and ducks from a neighbouring farmstead. An adult fox, as a rule, does not pay frequent visits to a farmstead; but Vulp, like his sire, was passionately fond of poultry, and so, in after years, the vixen's instructions caused him to become the dread of every henwife in the district. Undoubtedly he would have been shot had he not been the prize most sought for by the Master of the Hounds, who cared little for the frequent demands made on his purse by the cottagers, so long as the fox that slaughtered the poultry gave abundant sport when running fast and straight before the pack.

The months drifted by, and signs of spring became more and more abundant in the valley. About the beginning of March, Vulp deserted the “earth” prepared by himself and the vixen for their prospective family, and took up his abode among the hazels and the hawthorns in a thick-set hedge bounding the woods.

In preparing the “breeding earth,” Vulp and the vixen observed the utmost care in order that its whereabouts should not be discovered. The chosen site was a shallow depression, scratched in the soil by a fickle-minded rabbit that had ultimately fixed on another spot for her abiding place. This depression was enlarged; a long tunnel was excavated as far as the roots of an oak, and there broadened. Then another long tunnel was hollowed out towards the surface, where it opened in the middle of a briar-brake. The foxes worked systematically, digging away the soil with their fore-paws, loosening an occasional stubborn stone or root with their teeth, and thrusting the rubbish behind them with their powerful hind-legs. As it accumulated, they turned and pushed it towards the mouth of the den, where at last a fair-sized mound was formed. When the burrow had been opened into the thicket, the crafty creatures securely “stopped” the original entrance, so that, when the grass sprouted and the briar sprays lengthened in the woodlands, the “earth” would escape all notice, unless a prying visitor penetrated the thicket and discovered the second opening—then, of course, the only one—leading to the den.

When summer came, and the undergrowth renewed its foliage, and the grass and the corn grew so tall and thick that Vulp could roam unseen through the fields, he left his haunts amid the woodlands at the first peep of dawn, and as long as daylight lasted lay quiet in a snug retreat amid the gorse. There all was silent; no patter of summer rain from leaves far overhead, no rustle of summer wind through laden boughs, prevented him hearing the approach of a soft-footed enemy; no harsh, mocking cry of jay or magpie, bent on betraying his whereabouts, gave him cause for uneasiness and fear. Of all wild creatures in the fields and woods, he detested most the meddlesome jay and magpie. If he but ventured by day to cross an open spot, one of these birds would surely detect and follow him, hopping from branch to branch, or swooping with ungainly flight almost on his head, meanwhile hurling at him a thousand abuses. Unless he quickly regained his refuge in the gorse, the blackbirds and the thrushes would join in the tantalising mockery, till it seemed that the whole countryside was aroused by the cry of “Fox! fox!” After such an adventure, it needed the quiet and solitude of night to restore his peace of mind; and even when he had escaped the din, and lay in his couch among the bleached grass and withered leaves, his ears were continually strained in every direction to catch the least sound of dog or man. When in the winter he ran for life before the hounds, and tried by every artifice to baffle his pursuers, these “clap-cats” of the woods would jeer him on his way. Once, when he ventured into the river, and headed down-stream, thinking that the current would bear his scent below the point where he would land on the opposite bank, the magpie's clatter caused him the utmost fear that his ruse might not succeed. But luckily the hounds and the huntsman were far away. The birds, however, were not the only advertisers of his presence; the squirrel, directly she caught sight of him, would hurry from her seat aloft in fir or beach, to the lowest bough, and thence—though more wary of Vulp than of Brighteye, the water-vole—fling at him the choicest assortment of names her varied vocabulary could supply. Still, for all this irritating abuse Vulp had only himself and his ancestry to blame. The fox loved—as an article of diet—a plump young fledgling that had fallen from its nest, or a tasty squirrel, with flesh daintily flavoured by many a feast of nuts, or beech-mast, or eggs. It was but natural that his sins, and those of his forefathers, should be accounted to him for punishment, and that it should become the custom, in season and out of season, when he was known to be about, for all the woodland folk to hiss and scream, and expostulate and threaten, and to compel his return to hiding with the least possible delay. Thus it happened that he scarcely ventured, during the day, to attack even a young rabbit that frisked near his lair, lest, screaming to its dam for help, it should bring a very bedlam about his ears.

While roaming abroad in the summer night, Vulp gradually became acquainted with all sorts of vermin-traps used by the keepers. Once, treading on a soft spot near a rabbit “creep,” he suddenly felt a slight movement beneath his feet. Springing back, he almost managed to clear the trap; but the sharp steel teeth caught him by a single claw and for a moment held him fast. He wrenched himself loose, and retired for a while to examine his damaged toe-nail. Then, reassured, he again approached the trap, so that he might store up in memory the circumstances of his near escape. He learned his lesson thoroughly, and never afterwards did the smell of iron, or the slightest taint of the trapper's hand, escape him. He even walked around molehills; they reminded him too much of the soft soil about the trap. And, for the same reason, he avoided treading on freshly excavated earth before the holes of a rabbit warren.

The succeeding years of Vulp's eventful life were in many respects similar to the year that began with his courtship of the sleek young vixen in the white wilderness of the winter fields. His fear of men and hounds increased, while his cunning became greater with every passing day. He never slept on a straight trail, but cast about, returned on the line of his scent, and leaped aside, before retiring to sleep in his retreat amid the bracken. Often he heard the wild, ominous cry of the huntsman, “Eloa-in-hoick, hoick—hoick, cover—hoick!” as the hounds dashed into the furze; and the loud “Tally-ho!” as he himself, or, perchance, a less fortunate neighbour, broke into sight before the loud-tongued pack. And more than once, from a safe distance, he heard the awful “Whoop!” that proclaimed the death of one of his kindred.