She sat near me for some time, contemplating me gravely. She could not speak my language and I did not know hers, nevertheless a perfect understanding was soon in operation between us. A Fox looks beyond your eyes to your inner thought, which is not especially difficult, for the thought-tank, as students of physiology all know, is the padding around the optic nerve. She had not brought her fancy work—I suppose she did not feel that she knew me well enough, or else, like many human ladies, she did not fancy work.
At all events, it was a very formal call. At the close of it, she bowed and went away with great dignity. Had I followed her I would have seen capers, tail-chasing, quick turns, high kicks, and flying jumps, then a mad gallop home, but I did not know this until I got back to the city and read it in a book. Some of the Little Brothers of the Woods have seen a great deal that I have unaccountably missed, but because they have been more fortunate than I have, it does not necessarily follow that they have lied about it.
I never saw Hoop-La’s husband, and concluded, therefore, that she was a widow. Her ways were sufficiently winning to justify my hypothesis, and she was as clever as any of them.
One time, she was unjustly suspected of stealing some Chickens, and the Hounds were set upon her trail. I had gone to the hill I have spoken of before, to add up my accounts on the summit, and I saw them, far in the distance, headed straight for the open field just below me, where Hoop-La was fixing up their day’s work for them.
First, she ran all around the field three times, then took a long jump toward the centre, and wove herself in and out in a circle. Then she took another jump and wove more circles, and so on, for the better part of an hour. All the time, the deep bellowing of the Hounds came nearer, but Hoop-La did not seem to be at all alarmed. It was not until the leader of the pack struck the field and caught the scent that she took any notice of them at all.
By a series of swift and wonderfully clever sorties, which included high jumps and frequent wetting of her feet in the brook, she gained the hill. Then she came up beside me, taking care, however, to keep on a small patch of orange-coloured grass which exactly matched her coat. The wonder of it was not that the grass should match Hoop-La, but that she should know that it did.
Down below, in the field, the hunt went on. There must have been five hundred Dogs there, or else they ran so fast that they looked like more. The pasture seemed to be one solid Dog, circling in and out, jumping, leaping, and weaving strange designs upon the green sod below.
Suddenly the significance burst upon me. With her own clever body, sentient and alive from nose to tip of tail, Hoop-La had made a quilt pattern, and the Dogs were following it. It was like a game of living chess, such as the barbarian kings used to play before the Republican party got into power.
Have any of my readers ever seen a Fox laugh? Hoop-La sat beside me, with her hands on her sides, rocking and swaying in a spasm of merriment. Salt tears of joy rolled down her cheeks and made little rivulets through her fur. By looking at these narrow lines, I perceived, for the first time, the wonderful pinky fairness of her complexion.
Meanwhile the Dogs wound in and out on the trail, the pattern becoming more and more distinct every minute. When there was a space in the swiftly moving mass, I could see deep scars upon the surface of the field, and this seemed to amuse Hoop-La all the more. She laughed until I was afraid her hysterics would bring the Dogs upon us. I was sure she could take care of herself, but I was not anxious to have my own footsteps dogged by that pastureful of howling fiends.