‘It would be better to bury it here, where the leaves can talk funeral songs over its grave for ever, and the other foxes can come and cry if they want to.’ He dumped the fox down on the moss under a young oak tree as he spoke.
‘If Dicky fetched the spade and fork we could bury it here, and then he could tie up the dogs at the same time.’
‘You’re sick of carrying it,’ Dicky remarked, ‘that’s what it is.’ But he went on condition the rest of us boys went too.
While we were gone the girls dragged the fox to the edge of the wood; it was a different edge to the one we went in by—close to a lane—and while they waited for the digging or fatigue party to come back, they collected a lot of moss and green things to make the fox’s long home soft for it to lie in. There are no flowers in the woods in August, which is a pity.
When we got back with the spade and fork we dug a hole to bury the fox in. We did not bring the dogs back, because they were too interested in the funeral to behave with real, respectable calmness.
The ground was loose and soft and easy to dig when we had scraped away the broken bits of sticks and the dead leaves and the wild honeysuckle; Oswald used the fork and Dicky had the spade. Noel made faces and poetry—he was struck so that morning—and the girls sat stroking the clean parts of the fox’s fur till the grave was deep enough. At last it was; then Daisy threw in the leaves and grass, and Alice and Dora took the poor dead fox by his two ends and we helped to put him in the grave. We could not lower him slowly—he was dropped in, really. Then we covered the furry body with leaves, and Noel said the Burial Ode he had made up. He says this was it, but it sounds better now than it did then, so I think he must have done something to it since:
THE FOX’S BURIAL ODE
‘Dear Fox, sleep here, and do not wake,
We picked these leaves for your sake
You must not try to rise or move,
We give you this with our love.
Close by the wood where once you grew
Your mourning friends have buried you.
If you had lived you’d not have been
(Been proper friends with us, I mean),
But now you’re laid upon the shelf,
Poor fox, you cannot help yourself,
So, as I say, we are your loving friends—
And here your
Burial Ode, dear Foxy, ends.
P. S.—When in the moonlight bright
The foxes wander of a night,
They’ll pass your grave and fondly think of you,
Exactly like we mean to always do.
So now, dear fox, adieu!
Your friends are few
But true To you.
Adieu!’
When this had been said we filled in the grave and covered the top of it with dry leaves and sticks to make it look like the rest of the wood. People might think it was a treasure, and dig it up, if they thought there was anything buried there, and we wished the poor fox to sleep sound and not to be disturbed.
The interring was over. We folded up Dora’s bloodstained pink cotton petticoat, and turned to leave the sad spot.