“We must make a nice cage for you, and tame you a bit, so you will eat well and be happy,” said the hunter, when he got Sharp Eyes safely to his cabin. “I think I can soon make you so tame you will not fret, and always want to get out.”
So the hunter made, near his cabin in the woods, a nice large cage for Sharp Eyes, the silver fox. There were two parts to the cage, one a dark one, with cool earth for the floor, but with tin underneath the earth, so Sharp Eyes could not dig his way out, for foxes are almost as good diggers as are dogs, when dogs bury bones.
In this dark part of his cage Sharp Eyes could sleep and rest at night, away from all danger. The other part of his cage was made of strong wire, and was open on all sides and the top, so plenty of fresh air and sunshine and even rain could come in.
Foxes and other animals must have fresh air and sunshine, and they do not mind being wet in the rain, for it all helps them to grow big and strong. And the hunter wanted Sharp Eyes to become a big fox, with a fine, shiny coat of fur.
“I’ll make his cage as near like the woods as I can,” the hunter said, so he put bits of stumps, rocks and branches of trees in the open part, so that it looked a little like the woods. There was also clean, cool water to drink.
“But it isn’t the woods at all,” thought the unhappy Sharp Eyes, as he roved about in the wire part of his new cage. “In the woods I can run as far as I like, but here, when I go a little way, I bump my nose against the wooden or the wire walls. I can not get out. I am as much in a trap as ever, even if it is a larger one. Oh dear! I wish I could get loose!”
Sharp Eyes tried all the ways he knew of getting out of his cage near the cabin in the woods, but the cage was made too strong for him. The hunter well knew how to do such things.
For a time Sharp Eyes felt so bad about being caught that he would not eat. Even when the hunter put bits of wild turkey in the cage, Sharp Eyes would not look at them.
But wild animals can not very long stand being hungry, any more than can boys and girls. Sharp Eyes sniffed the good things the hunter put in to make him eat, and at last, after he had taken a drink of cool water, he felt that he must chew something with his sharp teeth. He went over, nibbled at a bit of partridge the hunter had tossed in, and it tasted so good, that Sharp Eyes said to himself: