Master Reynard: The History of a Fox

by Jane Fielding; J. C. Tregarthen

"The long-bills are pretty plentiful," thought I, as I curled up on my dry couch. "Hungry times are over; there will be food galore now."

I slept through the day and sought the fen at nightfall, to find the pool and the mere, or rather those parts of them that remained unfrozen, crowded with wild-fowl. Strangers though we were to one another, they proved very wary and difficult of approach, despite the curiosity my appearance aroused in them.

So matters stood for some time, during which I cared to remain out only part of the night; but when my coat got thick enough to resist the piercing cold I hunted far and late, seldom reaching my kennel before the sun showed red above the sea.

During the period of dry frost I fared well enough; but a snow-storm which occurred at the time of the new moon and lasted for two days and two nights, rendered foraging difficult, and made me feel a stranger in my own country. Except in rudest outline, it was no longer like itself. The fen was a great white plain, broken by a big and a small pool and the winding stream that fed them. In place of the sombre array of pines under the tor, usually as marked a feature in our landscape as were the great reed-beds themselves, a vast slope of snow met the eye; and the tor might have been a fleecy cloud in the leaden sky. Strangest of all was the aspect of the dunes, which looked like great waves of pure foam arrested in their roll.

Many a time I scanned this white undulating waste for the hare that frequented the sand-hills, hoping to mark him in a position where it would be possible to stalk him. I say, "possible" because of the great powdery drifts that rose like new dunes across my hidden trails and barred my progress in every direction. Moreover, each fall of snow caused me fresh trouble; for it stultified the knowledge I had gained, and compelled me to find new ways to my hunting grounds.

To add to my difficulties, soon only a few landmarks were left, and these hard to recognize—horseshoe of thatch about the short chimney was all there was to show the position of the cottage, and it was hard to believe that the snow-laden elms were the same trees whose golden leafage but a month before had cast so deep a shadow on the farmyard where the cock pheasant had been feeding with the fowls. On the edge of the ploughed field next the mowhay were the tracks made by the two wary rabbits whose home was under the big rick, and the few partridges which had escaped our jaws kept near the rubbing post in the middle of the field.

But I recall that fallow best by the course I had across it after the little jack-hare, who led me such a round as I have seldom gone. I lost sight of him in the field beyond the orchard, where the turnips lay in heaps, but followed his line up and down the hill to the head of the fen, across which he went almost in the teeth of a raging blizzard. He had ringed the bulrushes in the heart of the bog before making one of his baffling sidelong leaps, and then set his face for the foot-hills under my lair. The scent was hot amongst the scattered furze-bushes through which he led me, and so heavily clogged were his feet with snow that I felt sure I should overtake him before he reached the tamarisks on the other side of the hill; but I underrated his endurance. I followed him to the waste of sand-hills, only to find that he had disappeared in a drift at the foot of the highest dune. In his desperation—for I was all but on him—he must have plunged into this and worked his way far in, as I could not find him, though I dug and dug into the smothering mass in every direction. Nothing remained but to make my weary way home through the blinding, driving storm. There are more blanks than prizes in the life of even a clever fox.

The scent lay wonderfully that night, and I followed it as easily as I had shortly before followed the scent of a bittern across the snow between the reed-bed and the bulrushes. It was in this isolated clump that the otters so often laid up before the frost hardened the trembling mass environing it; but now I noticed that some of these wily creatures had beaten a deep track across the narrow neck of the big bend of the river, though I did not once get a glimpse of them.

I must pass over much detail of the varying fortunes of that eventful time to speak of the mis-adventures that befell me on an expedition when I unwittingly exposed myself to a great danger, and was lucky to escape with my life. I had risen from my kennel, stretched myself, sniffed the biting wind, listened, shaken my thick coat, and then, as was my wont since giving up my journeys to the hills, first visited the few remaining bits of boggy ground in sheltered places of the brake, with the hope of picking up one of the woodcock that resorted there to feed. I approached one spot after another against the wind and with the utmost stealth; but, despite my extreme caution, I succeeded only in flushing the birds, so wary had they become through being harassed—chiefly, I believe, by young cubs.

After lapping some water below a cascade hung with icicles, I left the soft margin of the rapid runnel which had been riddled by the bills of the woodcock and, emerging from the furze, stole down to the thicket of blackthorns. But my nose told me a fox had been there already; so I at once made for my favorite pool, whence the cries of various wild-fowl reached my ears. I knew that they consisted of duck, widgeon, and teal; but from the noise they made, I judged them to be more numerous than usual, and so they proved.