Through a gap in the reeds I gazed once and again at the tantalizing sight. What more maddening spectacle for a hungry fox than that of game beyond reach? I ransacked my brain to discover a way to get at them. It was beyond my powers. The edge of the acre of water that remained open was a score of yards from the reeds and scarcely less from the island. There was only one course practicable, to disturb the birds and to take up a hidden position from which I should be within striking distance of the pool. The snowy surface which ringed them in denied concealment save at one point, and that was much too far from the water to suit my methods, for the scanty bit of cover was too long springs from the brink of the ice. Any attempt to rush the birds from there seemed vain. Many a time since the frost set in I had stood and weighed the chances it offered, only to scorn the idea of using it for an ambuscade. To-night, somehow—was it because of my ravenous hunger?—the clump of sags, though weighed down by the snow, did not look quite so hopeless as before the last fall; and I decided to accept its hard conditions and give it a trial. It was an exasperating thing to be obliged to scare the birds; but there was no help for it, and so forward I went.
My forefoot was hardly through the fringe of reeds when a mallard saw me and gave the alarm. In an instant a hundred pairs of eyes were turned on me; and, as if fascinated by the sight of so fine a fox, their owners did not take wing until I was nearly half-way across the snow. Then, with a loud "quar, quar, quar" from the ducks, all the birds rose in a confused company, the noise of their wing-beats drowning for a moment the loud rustling of the swaying reeds. I watched them divide into their several skeins, which then wheeled above my head and flew seawards, the widgeon in the van.
Before seeking my ambush, I crossed the ice to the other side of the pool, in the hope of finding a disabled bird in the thick cover, but saw nothing save a few dead starlings that had fallen from their roosting perches on the reeds. The flesh of starlings is nearly as loathsome to me as the flesh of carrion-feeding birds; so I left their stark bodies lying there, and trotted over the wide stretch of snow to the island. When crossing, I noticed a small hole in the ice. It had been made and kept open by otters that they might come there to breathe whilst fishing; but I did not know this at the time. The island, though it reeked with the smell of duck, was blank; so I made for the sags again, and crawled under them carefully in order not to disturb their white coating. Gently as I pushed my pointed muzzle between the stems the frozen snow rattled down in a shower, and this caused me much misgiving, for I feared that the exposed blades, black with decay, would be sure to excite the suspicion of the quick-eyed fowl, and warn them off the water.
When ensconced, I found that my ambush barely screened me, and, what was more serious, it seemed much farther from the pool than in the bloodthirsty moment when I had decided to use it. However, being in, I meant to stay, and so, the tip of my muzzle between two bent blades that grew a few inches in front of the clump, and nothing but the tag of my brush projecting at the rear, I began my vigil. It was bitter work watching with the gale in your teeth, but I might have noticed it less had the ambush been a little nearer the water. Nevertheless, being of a sanguine temperament, I threw sense and sinew into my work as if success were assured. My ears were spread their widest, to catch any sound that reached them above the lapping of the water and the swish of the encompassing reeds; my eyes, if not fixed on the pool, scanned the snowy space between; and my legs were gathered under me ready to spring. One by one some feathers the ducks had left, drifted to the nearer side and were lost to sight; once I caught the faint wing-beats of passing wild-fowl and, raising my eyes, saw the long wedge of them black against the bright stars; but not a bird settled on the water.
Hour after hour passed in this manner, and my patience was just giving out when an incident occurred that dispelled all thought of trying my luck elsewhere. It was not the fish that jumped clear of the surface, which induced me to stay, but the great boil in the water near where it fell. I believed this had been caused by an otter, and quite expected to see the creature land on a small jagged point of ice hard by, where the snow had been much trampled. Nor did mere curiosity keep me an interested spectator: I was expecting to get fish for supper after my wasteful friend had taken one or two bites of his prey. Whilst I watched for his appearance, and watched in vain, a rather larger fish leapt out—once—twice; and the third time it was hardly above the surface when the open jaws of a huge pike showed close behind it, and I could see the bristling array of teeth before a tremendous swirl hid them again. In all my experiences I have only once witnessed anything that took me more by surprise; and from that night I have never swum across to the island without fear of being seized by the grim monster which I now knew tenanted the pool.
The pike had scarcely disappeared before three teal, whose flight I had not heard, settled in the middle of the water and set my brush waving with excitement. Totally unsuspicious of my presence they swam towards me, and approached so close to the ice as to be completely hidden by the bank of snow near its edge. Judging their position as well as I could by the delicious scent that reached me, I made two tremendous leaps, which landed me amongst them before they could take wing. But on account of the spray and the shock of the icy-cold water I missed all three; though my jaws snapped close over the spot where one of them dived. He came up yards away from where I was awaiting him, rose as only a teal can rise, and flew off in company with his mates, who were wheeling about overhead.
With a rankling sense of failure I scrambled with some difficulty on to the ice, shook my coat and, turning my back on my ambush, trotted off as briskly as I could in the direction of the mere. Through the long wait on the snow and the coldness of the water into which I had plunged, my feet were so benumbed that I could scarcely feel them under me when crossing the bog. Nevertheless, I stumbled on until warmth came back to them, and then hunted the waste beyond, working across the wind on the margin of the laid reed-beds in the hope of scenting moorhens or water-rail to break my long fast. Most carefully did I try the patches of sedgy cover in the loops of the stream where I had seldom failed; but even there I met with disappointment, the few birds I winded evading me by diving under the ice which in places covered the strong current.
I must have trotted miles along the zigzag course I took, before I reached the expanse of windswept snow under which lay the frozen mere. From inside the fringe of reeds I could hear the honking of the geese on the open water, and at times a sound that was new to me, a wild trumpeting which seemed to come from where the sea was thundering on the bar. For a fox naturally prompt in decision, I stood there long, considering whether to make a journey that offered but poor prospect of success. In the wild-fowl's feeding-ground I had come from there was at least makeshift for an ambush; on the level ice-field before me there was not cover enough to hide a mouse, and the chance of a kill was very, very small. Choice of supper, however, lay between cold starling, bitter and dry, and hot goose, sweet and juicy—if I could get it—and goose or nothing was my resolve. I set my face for the spot where the scarcely discernible specks on the snow showed the game to be thickest; and if my coat turned white in winter like that of a stoat I had seen a few nights before, I might have stolen at least part of the way unobserved. As it was, my reddish-brown fur, though lighter than in the summer, made me as conspicuous as a crow on a stubble to the noisy sentinels overhead, which at once spread the cry of "Fox afoot!" far and wide over the great mere. The only method possible, then, in this wild-goose chase, was to keep going with the most nonchalant air at my command, as if my sole object in approaching the pool was to wash down a heavy supper; and it was lucky for my plan that my thick coat hid my prominent ribs and concealed my half-starved condition.
Presently I could see that the wild-fowl lining the margin of the ice were nearly all geese; but what riveted my gaze was a small group of big white birds beyond, whose heads towered high above the mass of insignificant-looking duck that crowded the water.
"Halloo! something new in the feather line," thought I. "What monsters are these?"