THE WISEST ONE
Almost the first thing that the smallest baby fox remembered was being carried in his mother’s mouth from one den to another. His woolly little red body hung limp between her long white teeth. That was the safest way; for if he had held stiff or wriggled she might have closed her jaws tighter and pinched him.
It was very early in the morning, and the rising sun was just lighting up the tops of the trees. The birds were singing their gayest May songs. Here and there dewdrops sparkled, where the level sunbeams glinted across the leaves. Under a bush a rabbit sat up very still, and stared with round, frightened eyes at the mother fox.
The mother fox did not see the rabbit. She stepped along swiftly. Her slender paws hardly rustled a leaf or snapped a twig. She looked like a graceful red dog, with pointed ears and yellow eyes and beautiful plumy tail. This plumy tail seemed to float out in the air behind her, as if she were blowing lightly before the wind.
When she reached the new den she did not stop an instant at the front door. The freshly dug earth was scattered around there in plain sight. In digging this new burrow she and the father fox had left the dirt there on purpose, to make their enemies think that this hole was the real entrance to the den. A few feet underground they had closed the tunnel with a heap of earth. At the other end they had made a new opening hidden behind gray rocks in a thicket.
To this secret door the mother fox carried the baby, and set him down on his four thick legs. He looked like a little red lamb with yellow eyes. Into the hole he scrambled, and crept through the tunnel to the dark den at the end. On the nest of leaves inside he found his four brothers and sisters snuggling together. The old mother had carried them there one by one.
The day before, when a big dog came nosing about the old den, the father fox led him away through the woods. He could run the faster, and so he kept on, with the dog chasing him, till the dog was tired out. Then he and the mother hurried to dig this new den and move the babies before the dog came back to the old place again.