GAME was hard to find that year. Rabbits were rare. Pheasants were scarce. Woodcock and partridges and even squirrels seemed to have migrated suddenly to some unknown destination. A dog or a man or a vixen fox with pups to feed could go a long way through the mountain woodland without finding any game more promising than butterflies and swallows. And the woods were dusty and dry, so that grass rustled sibilantly at the least movement, and silence was nearly impossible. Because of their scarcity, too, the few creatures that remained were more than usually alert. They were more than doubly hunted.
To the dog, the lack of good hunting was bad. At first she ranged far and wide with her master, scurrying anxiously here and there, sniffing this place and that. When she returned to the cabin at nightfall she was footsore and draggled and dusty, and her throat was dry and parched. Worse, though, was the feeling of failure. She moped and fretted. It was not until her puppies arrived that she ceased to seem to beg him to let her try again to find the game that had so mysteriously vanished. Then, of course, she was very busy, with no time even for hunting.
To the man, the scarcity of game was annoying. Hunting was his only pleasure, and he had heard but vaguely of closed and open seasons. He was whiskery and red-faced, and the breeze down-wind from him always carried the scent of chewed tobacco. Sometimes other scents also. He lived alone in his small cabin and did various unimportant things and exchanged the products at a village store for things he did not raise and could not bring back from the woods.
Ordinarily he spent much time on the mountain flanks with his dog and gun. The bagging of a rabbit pleased him greatly. Pheasants were delicacies, superior to the beans and bacon he bartered for at the store, and better than the chickens that scratched and squawked about his cabin. Hunting was not necessary for his livelihood, but he waited almost impatiently for the puppies to be old enough to be disposed of. They should be good hunting dogs. Their mother was. With the money they would bring, he expected to buy a new gun. Meanwhile he was merely annoyed by the scarcity of game.
BUT the vixen was made desperate by it. She had her little fox pups to feed. They were small, furry bundles with tiny sharp noses and insatiable appetites. They came tumbling toward her with little whimpering sounds when she returned to her den. They were avid for the nourishment that would feed their growth. The vixen, herself, was always ravenous. With game mysteriously almost nonexistent, it would have been a narrow thing to feed herself alone. Her mate had drifted away long since, and she was better off for it. One less hunter in her hunting ground made a vast difference, but still there was not enough food for herself and for her pups. She grew leaner and more desperate day by day, and day by day the fox pups grew and with them their appetites.
They tumbled and scuffled together in the den. Later, they played games in the sunlit space before it. They were marvelous games; thrilling games; and they strengthened growing muscles, and trained uncertain small eyes, and prepared baby foxes for adulthood. But very hungry small animals greeted the vixen when she came home after hours of hopeless hunting where no game was. Often and often her own hunger had been made but the more acute by a scanty meal of wood mice, and sometimes she found nothing more nourishing than locusts and grubs, which the fox tribe normally despises. Maternity, to the vixen, was a time of sheer desperation.
But to the dog, maternity was a time of comfortable fussiness. The man had prepared a box for her and her family. It was lined with rags and there was a pan of water near by and there was never any lack of food.
BECAUSE of the puppies, and also because of the scarcity of anything to hunt, the man stayed about the cabin more than usual. He read comfortably in a gun catalogue while the puppies sprawled clumsily over the porch of his cabin, or slept in utterly abandoned attitudes with their small round bellies distended.
Only the vixen found the matter of parenthood neither comfortable nor amusing nor profitable. Her pups grew fast. The time came when they should taste of meat. The vixen knew that she should bring home game to them, that their sharp little puppy teeth might learn the task that was to be theirs through life. The vixen might have been driven to untold depths of desperation but for a windfall of a pheasant’s nest with all its eggs. The vixen ate the eggs, saving the hen pheasant for her young. Then the fates were more generous still and she captured the cock pheasant, too. He was larger than the hen. When she trotted joyously back to her den with this windfall, tiny figures came running and tumbling out to meet her.
Those two meals—not overfull ones, heartened the vixen. They strengthened her. But they did not put back flesh upon her already distinct ribs, nor lessen the plain signs of long-continued hunger that marked her. They were merely two gifts from the gods.
Game grew steadily harder to find. The woods grew ever dryer and more parched. The fox pups grew larger, needing more food. As babies, they had consumed a large part of the substance of the vixen’s body. Now that they needed meat and it was essential that she provide meat for them as they were yet too young to hunt for themselves, the vixen grew more than half-starved, but remained utterly unresting. It is the custom of the fox tribe to hunt mostly by night. This the vixen did. But it did not produce enough food.
She hunted in the daytime also. Her feet were worn and sore. Her ribs showed with a stark clarity beneath her skin. She was hollow-flanked. Her eyes burned. Her muscles ached. Her body was one vast hunger. But she was a vixen, and her pups had to be fed, and she drove herself more desperately than ever over an ever-widening hunting ground.
But until the very end, she kept away from the man’s cabin. She knew about the dog, and she knew about guns, and she knew that for a fox to have anything to do with man’s possessions is death. But there came a day when she found no food at all save grubs and beetles. She could not take that to her pups, and there was not enough to keep her from starvation. The day after, in fourteen hours of desperate endeavor she found only two wood mice. Two mouthfuls. The day after that she found literally nothing. And all the time the woods grew dryer and even more dry, and half-starved creatures’ tempers grew brittle to deadliness. On this last day the vixen went back to her pups with her body one vast ache of weariness and hunger. It was not possible to imagine her as growing more emaciated. If she did, she would be too weak to hunt.
HER pups were skinny, too. Their little bones had lengthened even at the cost of their own tissue. And on this third day, when she came back with her feet sore and bleeding, her eyes sunk deep in her head and sheer despair in her heart, she found her four pups backed into four corners of the den, snarling at one another with a deadly, purposeful intentness. They were still small. They were still pups. But puppy teeth are sharp and puppy skin is tender and they were almost hungry enough.
The vixen growled at them with terrifying ferocity. But she was terrified, herself. She went off into the dark night once more. She had thought herself unable to hunt again. There was one place where she knew she must not hunt. But the ultimate necessity had come upon her.
She returned to her pups with a fat chicken, still warm. Blood drops oozed from its neck when she put it down in the den.
The man did not miss the chicken for days. He kept no such exact account of his flock as a woman would have done.
Men came to inspect the dog’s litter. As each went away a gangling puppy went with him, later to be trained as a hunting dog and to share all weal and woe with the man.
The man took the money for the puppies and sent for his new gun, the gun his heart longed for. It fired an absurdly small bullet at an incredibly high velocity and the man did not pay much attention to the number of his chickens while he was waiting. He did not notice what the vixen had done.
But she knew. She brought the first chicken to her young ones because she had to. But it was desperately dangerous to meddle with man. After that first foray she went farther afield than ever, searching fiercely for game among the more distant hills where even she had never been before. But it became necessary to capture another chicken. Later, still another.
She made those captures with infinite caution and with infinite reluctance. But her pups simply had to be fed.
One morning the man counted his flock when he fed it. It was short. Not many fowls, but enough to notice. The man’s new gun had just come. He wanted to try it. He shot at a mark, and marveled. He was as pleased as a child with a new toy. But the matter of the chickens annoyed him almost as much as the scarcity of game.
He rummaged inside his cabin. He sat on the porch, presently, with a trap in his hand. It was a small trap. Not big enough. The man squirted tobacco juice meditatively. A fox could drag this trap, and if it were anchored firmly might even tear free by a sufficient mangling of its paw. The man debated vexedly. Presently he went to the woodpile behind the house. He chose a stick of oak wood. Not too large. He considered again and deliberately stapled the chain of the trap to the firewood. The fox could move this drag, but not get enough purchase to pull itself loose.
He rummaged in the house again and found a bottle full of oily stuff. He carried everything to the place where the vixen had been killing chickens. He set the trap, using a new-killed chicken as bait.
The man did various unimportant things during the rest of the day. The dog slept most of it. That night the man kept the dog inside the cabin.
And that night the vixen stole out again. A mere furry skeleton, she came to the vicinity of the man’s cabin. She listened with straining ears to the small noises of the night. She smelled the chickens. Saliva welled up in her mouth at the heavy smell of the chicken house. But she had pups to think of. She could not think of anything but her pups.
She crawled forward with infinite caution. A new smell reached her nostrils. It was the fox-lure from the greasy bottle the man kept for his winter trapping. The moon was bright. In its clear light the vixen found the baited trap. She saw the rumpled feathers of the chicken. But she was suspicious. She was more than suspicious. She hesitated for a space of seconds in soul-wrenching indecision. But she was also desperate. Her pups. She made a swift, darting snatch, as if by the flashing speed of her attempt to defeat all possible danger.
But the trap bit viciously—and held!
There was no noise to waken the man. Even the dog, grown fat and lazy and very respectable, did not hear the sound of the trap’s snapping. The vixen did not cry out. She knew agony, and when she tried to free herself she knew despair. But even at this time she thought still of her pups.
The man slept on in his cabin.
And the vixen struggled frenziedly to free herself. She could not. She found only that the trap was not made completely fast. She could drag it away. And there were the pups.
The moon moved past the zenith. A dry night wind moved over the mountains and rustled the parched leaves of the trees. The rare small creatures of the night went fearfully about their nocturnal affairs. Bats flitted here and there…
The vixen started home. She moved a yard and was sick with pain and hunger. At every movement the trap ground into the flesh—what flesh was left—of her forepaw. The drag trailing behind made it worse. When she had moved two yards the agony drove her to sheer frenzy and she tried to pull her paw away from her body that the agony might cease. But it only increased. Presently, with little whimpering noises in her throat, she dragged the trap another yard. Toward her pups.
The night was very long.
The man woke soon after sunrise and lay in bed, yawning. The dog got up and stretched. When the man spoke to her, she wagged her tail in greeting and went into the kitchen and lapped at the pan of water that always stood ready for her.
The man got up. He cooked his breakfast. He ate it, tossing occasional morsels to the dog. She caught them in mid-air and wagged her tail briefly for each one. The man got out a pan and dumped corn into it and went out to feed his chickens. The dog accompanied him as a matter of course.
He remembered the trap and went to see what had happened. He found the ground scuffed up by the frantic struggles of the vixen to escape. There were a few feathers scattered here and there. A plain, dragged trail moved away from the spot where the trap had been set. The stick of firewood left clear signs of its movement.
THE man grunted and sternly ordered the dog to heel at her first sign of excitement. Her nose was not keen because she had just been fed, but she could tell what had happened. The man hastily scattered the corn in his pan and went back to the house. He put the restless dog upon a leash. He took his gun—the new gun—and started to follow the trail left by the vixen and the trap and the stick of firewood.
The dog grew vastly excited. She had not hunted since before her puppies came, and her manner was not professionally keen and intent, now. Instead, she was vastly indignant and tremendously important. She made noises. She barked and yelped and tugged insistently at the leash. The man grunted and held her fast. He held his new gun easily. He had loose cartridges in his pocket.
A hundred yards. Two hundred yards. The man spat surprisedly. He saw a feather on the ground beside the trail. Three hundred yards. Four. There was the gouged track of the drag. By its plain indications, the man could see that it had not been pulled smoothly, but in little jerks. A forepaw had been caught in the trap, which made its dragging vastly more difficult and vastly more painful.
There was another feather on the trail.
The man’s expression grew more and more surprised as he followed ever farther while the she-dog yelped and barked menacingly at the trail ahead. Half a mile. Three-quarters. The man looked amazed. He saw another feather and an expression of curiosity became more firmly fixed upon his face. When the she-dog’s yelpings suddenly became frantic and triumphant, the man stood still and stared almost respectfully at the vixen.
She had dragged the trap and a good-sized chunk of oakwood more than a mile during the dark hours! At first the man saw only the flash of her hide among brushwood, and then he was admiring. But he tied the she-dog fast to a stout sapling. The dog went into hysterics of indignant barking. He slipped a cartridge into the breech of his new gun. He moved to one side where he could see the small tumult of the vixen’s struggle clearly.
WHEN he came into plain view, the struggle stopped. The vixen faced him despairingly. She looked at death and she knew it. She stared at the man with burning, desperate eyes, her paw—it was almost bloody pulp by now—still held fast by the toothed jaws of the trap. She was emaciated; starving. Her ribs stuck out gauntly. Her shriveled dugs showed that she was no longer able to nurse her pups. But in her mouth, at the instant when she looked for death, she still held the dead chicken that had been the bait in the trap. She had not eaten one morsel of it.
She had been taking it to her young.
The man stared at her. The she-dog screamed and howled and barked and yelped in a frenzy of frustration because she was tied fast. The vixen snarled savagely—still holding the chicken.
The man said harshly to the dog: “Shut up!”
The dog continued to raise a din of frustrated ferocity. The man raised his gun. The vixen snarled again. She knew. The man said disgustedly: “Hell!”
He steadied the gun more carefully. He sighted with infinite pains, while the vixen snarled at him and the she-dog pranced and barked and yelped hysterically.
He fired.
The report was sharp and crackling. But through it there was an odd metallic sound, as of a bullet striking metal instead of flesh and bone. It did strike metal. It struck the trap. It shattered the trap. The metal jaws suddenly gave way. The vixen’s paw was loose.
Like a flash she darted off into the brushwood. Once she trusted to her injured foot and toppled. But she scrambled to her remaining three feet again and vanished.
She still carried the dead chicken in her mouth. To her pups.
The dog fairly screamed. She flung herself crazily about, trying to break her leash, barking and yelping and howling.
The man went over to her, scowling. Slowly he unknotted the leash about the sapling. He jerked at it. The man spat scornfully.
“You damn’ women,” he said scornfully. “You damn’ women! Come on home!”
He dragged the dog toward the cabin.
There was a rain two days later. Then another. The woods ceased to be parched and dry almost as if by magic. And it was like magic, too, to see how the game came back. Almost as if it had migrated from some unknown place. It was amazing how soon game ceased to be hard to find that year.