The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

When I shall have been milking and huckleberrying and hen’s nesting and aimlessly wandering over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall have found, it may be, the very last of the woodchuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred years, for the families in the old holes keep multiplying, and the new holes keep multiplying too.

But woodchucks are not the only “things,” not the only crop that the farm yields, although it must certainly seem that there can be little room on these scant acres for anything more. My farming, however, is intensive,—from the tops of my tallest pines to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows,—so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chipmunks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits (few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many foxes).

Lately I found a den of young foxes within barking distance of the house, but along a stony ridge on the adjoining farm. No one would believe in the number of foxes (or the number of times I have counted the same fox) here on the farm, and this only sixteen miles by the roundabout road from Boston Common! But let him live here—and keep chickens!

One day, as we were sitting down to a noon dinner, I heard the hens squawk, and out I tore. The fox had a big black hen and was making off for the woods. I made after the fox. There is a sharp ridge back of the henyard, which was thickly covered with stump sprouts and slashings. The fox took to the ridge. From the house to the henyard it is all downhill, and I wanted that hen. She weighed a good eight pounds,—a load for any fox,—and what with her squawking and flopping, the tangle of brush and the steep hillside, it is small wonder that just short of the top I fell upon her, to the great sorrow of the fox, who held on until I was within reach of him.

But such an experience as this, while it would be quite impossible to a summer boarder, is yet a not uncommon experience for my unobserving, fox-hating neighbors. They seldom see more, however; whereas, a study of the lay of the land hereabout reveals a real fox community overlying our farm community like some faint tracing. We humans possess the land by day and the foxes keep to their dens; the foxes possess the land at night and we humans take to our dens.

One of the high roads of the foxes runs across the farm. Foxes, like men, are more or less mechanical in their coming and going. They will move within certain well-defined boundaries, running certain definite routes; crossing the stream at a particular ford every time, traveling this ridge and not that, leaving the road at this point, and swinging off in just such a circle through the swamp.

One autumn two foxes were shot at my lower bars as they were jumping the little river. Their road crosses the stream here, then leads through the bars, along the base of the ridge, and up my path to the pasture.

I stood in this path one night when a fox that the dogs were driving came up behind me, stopped, and sniffed at my boots. This last November, 1907, a young fox, leaving the hounds in the tangle of his trails, trotted up this same path, turned in the pasture, and came up to the house. He halted on the edge of the lawn just above the woodchuck hole that I mentioned a few pages back, and for full ten minutes sat there in the moonlight yapping back at the shepherd dog barking at him from my neighbor’s yard below.

This run up the ridge to the pasture is the highway from west to east. When the pack is baying off to the eastward, and coming nearer, I can stand by the fence between the yard and my neighbor’s pasture with the certainty of seeing the fox once in half a dozen times, and the dogs almost every time, for the fox breaks from the sprout land back of the henyard, crosses the neighboring pasture, jumps the wall, and runs my driveway to the public road and on to the woods beyond the river.

All of this sounds very wild, indeed, and so it is—at night; in the daylight it is all tame enough. Only the patient watcher knows what wild feet run these open roads; only he who knows the lay of every foot of this rocky, pastured land knows that these winding cow paths lead past the barnyards on into the ledges and into dens. And no one can find all of this out in a single June.