The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only my helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldom been due to other than natural causes—very rarely man-made. On the contrary, man-made conditions out of doors—the multiplicity of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or prairie—are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths and short cuts and chances for escape—all things that help preserve life.

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along the road, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woods all night, bearing down in my direction.

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges beaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight, but where I could see a long stretch of the road.

On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross—and there he stood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a race burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket that had clogged his long course.

On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bend in the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on the road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!—back into the very jaws of the hounds!—Instead he broke into the tangle of grapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke into the road from behind the mass of thick, ropy vines.

Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise and speed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, a whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on.

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyond the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail, on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.

If I had had a gun! Yes, but I did not. But if I had had a gun, it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun that makes the difference—all the difference between much or little wild life—life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, as once the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of the Lord.