One by one, the Dogs dropped out. Some of them lay flat on their backs, utterly exhausted, and breathing like so many locomotives. Enough short pants were made in that field that afternoon to clothe the inmates of all the orphan asylums in North America, but Mother Nature is ever too generous with her material—in spots.
Hoop-La was still laughing and it got worse every minute. Remembering her sex and thinking to divert her, I took a handful of coins out of my pocket and laid them on the grass beside her. She pawed them over without interest for a moment or two, then her eye lit upon a penny which was evidently fresh from the mint.
She played with it for a time, enjoying the glint of the sun on the shining copper, then her face suddenly illumined with a bright idea. Before I realised what she was going to do, she took it in her mouth, walked over to the edge of the hill, sat down, and with a precision of aim which was unusual in her sex, threw it straight down into the pasture.
I was aghast. Hoop-La had deliberately given the Dogs a new scent!
Still, they received it without enthusiasm and she seemed very much disappointed. I knew one thing that she did not; namely, that Dogs are instinctively afraid of coppers.
“Hoop-La sat beside me, with her hands on her sides, rocking and swaying in a spasm of merriment.”
When the baffled animals went home, Hoop-La descended into the field and retrieved her financial losses. I suppose she took the coin home to her children, and after familiarising them with its outward appearance, she told them: “That is man-scent.”
A week or so after that, when I sat upon the summit of the hill, with my field-glass fixed upon the roomy piazzas of her home, it fell to my good-fortune to see her teaching her little ones. She was a tender mother, but a severe task-mistress, and plied the rod liberally when they made mistakes.
She taught them how to play dead, how to manage their trails so the Dogs could not step on them, how to pick a Squirrel’s teeth and bones, how to catch Field Mice without a trap, how to hunt Mares’ nests, how to play Leap Frog, and how to sing the woodland spring song. I have jotted down the words: