Red Ben stood at the entrance of the pen and waited, but she would not move. He wandered out to the spruce trees and called, but she did not come. Out in the woods he called again. Mournfully the woods echoed it. “Yap, Yarrrrrr,—Yap, Yarrrrrr.”
There was no answer.
Into the woods he wandered, scarcely knowing where. On and on in the steady lope he always used when getting away from his enemies. The rancher could come now and fuss and fume all he wanted to. He would find a fox in his trap all right, but not the Red Fox of Oak Ridge.
And Blackie? Long after Red Ben had vanished, she became uneasy. Perhaps he would not return. She once more stood on the threshold of the pen, looking out at the woods where she had last seen him. Poor, silly Blackie! For once in her life she too felt lonely. Raising her head she barked, and then barked again, until her lonesomeness affected the other foxes in the nearby pens and they too barked. It was a wonderful chorus, a goodby to the big, wild fox.
Many miles from the ranch, Red Ben lay down to rest and lick his wire torn feet. He was in a small swamp, where a stream of brownish water flowed between soft masses of sphagnum moss. The first signs of dawn were in the sky. Hardly had he made himself comfortable when a swishing of wings made him look up in time to see a flock of black ducks going over. They swerved, threw out their feet, and with a lot of splashing settled in a shallow pool nearby.
New strength seemed to shoot into Red Ben’s tired limbs. He was almost famished, and here was meat. Stealthily he slipped along the ground towards the water, guided by the soft quacks of the drakes, which were steering the flock carefully nearer to the bank. There, more water weeds and snails could be found.
Soon Red Ben could see the dark forms and hear the water being filtered through the fringes of their bills as they sifted out all that was eatable. The feeding was good; they were having a fine time.
Nearer to shore they came, the wary drakes examining its edges and seeing nothing to alarm them. One climbed up on the bare mud near some bushes. He flapped his wings and then began to oil his feathers. First he rubbed his bill on the oil that every duck has at the point on his back where the tail feathers begin; then he rubbed his oily bill over his feathers. This kept water from soaking them and made him able to swim or dive a long time without getting his feathers wet. Another duck joined him and began to arrange its feathers in like manner.
Suddenly a red streak shot out of the bushes. The first duck saw it and, with a startled quack, leaped into the air; but the second duck, being behind the other, did not see it in time. It leaped, but the streak leaped too and brought it down. Amid wild quacking and splashing as the flock flew up, Red Ben proudly carried off the first real meal he had tasted for two days.
After that he scraped away the snow from the leaves in a clump of laurel and, with nose buried in his fur and covered by his warm, bushy tail, slept through the long day. Downy woodpeckers hammered the old limbs overhead, hawks screeched, and quail, running past to get a drink at the stream, rustled the leaves where the snow was thin; but still Red Ben slept on.