So Sharp Eyes, Twinkle and Winkle lived with their father and mother in the hollow log in the big woods. The little foxes, at first, stayed very close to the log. In fact, they did not go outside it until they were pretty well grown, and about the size of puppy dogs. Each day their father and mother would crawl out of the log, look carefully around to make sure there were no dogs, hunters, or other dangers near, sniff the air to see if they could smell anything that might harm them or their little ones, and then one or the other would slink slyly away through the woods, to look for something to eat, not only for themselves, but to bring home to the little foxes.
One day when Mr. Fox had come home with a plump partridge and the little foxes were having a good dinner, Sharp Eyes asked:
“Mother, where did my father get this fine meat for us to eat?”
“He caught it in the woods.”
Of course the Fox family did not speak the same kind of language that you boys and girls use. They talked in their own language, which they could understand as well as you can understand one another. But so that you may know what the foxes said among themselves, and what they thought, I have put their sayings into your kind of words.
Foxes, like other animals, talk with whispers, sniffles, snuffles, whines, barks and howls, and it is very hard to understand them unless you know their language, as I do. But, once you do, it is as easy to know what they say as if you heard the boy on your next street call:
“Come on, spin tops!”
So now you’ll understand what I mean when I say a fox “says” this, that, or the other.
“Where did my father get this fine meat?” asked Sharp Eyes, and when his mother told him Mr. Fox caught it in the woods, the little fox, as he gnawed a bone, smacked his lips and asked:
“But how did he get it?”