Soon after Christmas the gamekeeper hears the barking of foxes at night, and he well knows the reason. The foxes are searching for mates. And here is one of many reasons why hounds in these days fail to find foxes in woods never hitherto drawn blank. Hunting and shooting have disturbed the quiet of the coverts, the underwood harvest is going forward, the supply of fox-food is shorter than at any other time, and is most hard to catch; so foxes generally have forsaken their haunts, finding lodging in out-of-the-way places which offer some chance of peace and quietness. Followers of hounds have much to learn about the ways of the fox in January. They go from one blank covert to another, cheerfully riding an intervening couple of miles, while all the time the fox is lurking in a dell or a hedgerow only two hundred yards from the first covert drawn. Yet a suggestion that the dell or the hedgerow should be tried meets with silent scorn. This might be expected from people who hunt to ride, or people new to the hunting-field; but it does not become the experienced to pin all their faith to the well-known coverts. In a southern county hounds have disturbed no fewer than twelve foxes together—probably a collection of suitors for the pad of one or two eligible vixens.
A Keeper's Dreams
On a Sunday after Christmas we paid a visit to an old keeper, who, on his own confession, had not dined wisely on the good fare provided by his wife on Christmas Day. Into our sympathetic ears he poured the strangest tale of the dreams that he had dreamed. The first began pleasantly enough, but ended in a nightmare. He was one of a party shooting in his best wood, and he was ever in the hottest part of the hottest corner, but each time he threw up his gun to shoot the crowds of pheasants, the gun fell all in pieces. Never, he said, had he known such a nightmare; though some of the other dreams that succeeded were bad enough.
One was to the effect that on an important occasion all the birds of his coverts utterly refused to rise and rocket, and when he pressed them with beaters he found that one and all had turned into foxes. This dream merged into one in which the foxes in his preserves were so numerous that they outnumbered and overpowered the hounds, and then attacked the Master, who was eaten. And there was a dream in which the old keeper found that he had changed places with his employer, whom he roundly abused for the mistakes he made in placing stops and managing the beaters. The climax of this was the unkindest cut of all. The gamekeeper dreamt that his employer, far from bearing him any ill-will for the abuse, sent to his cottage on Christmas Eve a large tin of tobacco, beneath the lid of which was a ten-pound note. This worthy old man has had many queer dreams in his time—if we are to believe him. He is ready to confess, for the sake of the story following the confession, that he has never really mastered the art of shooting driven partridges. But one night he dreamt that he had brought off the most masterly right and left, and from far and near congratulations on his brace poured upon him. Then he awoke to find himself in his own familiar chair by the fireside, in the chill dawn of a winter morning, and the local doctor, who was also a sportsman, was telling him how there had arrived safely in the room upstairs a brace of fine young keepers.
A Death-bed Vision
We can vouch for the truth of this fox story: An old keeper—the keeper of a shoot where partridges were preferred to foxes—lay dying. It was late in May, when the partridges were beginning to sit. Suddenly he called for his two sons and told them of a dream. In a certain burrow in a certain wood adjoining his partridge fields he had dreamt of a litter of cubs. And he refused to be comforted until his sons had gone forth to verify his dream. In due time they came home with enough evidence that the dream was of true things to allow the old man to give up the ghost with an untroubled mind.