The Fox and the Hound (11 page)

There was, of course, always the outside chance that something might go wrong and he would be caught, but for Tod this only gave the sport a zest. Very rarely was he ever in any danger. One of his favorite tricks was to run under a gate into the apple orchard, dodge around among the trees, and then escape by means of a hole under the woven-wire fence that surrounded the orchard to keep out rabbits. Naturally the rabbits knew all about this hole, and Tod had caught a number there, lying in wait beside it like a cat by a mousehole. He had played this trick so often that an Adirondack hound had caught on to it. While Tod was busy making his tangles in the orchard, with the pack trying to follow his twists, this long-legged son of a bitch had ceased giving tongue and run silently to the hole. He had waited there in the darkness for Tod just as Tod had waited for the rabbits. All unsuspecting, Tod had trotted over to the hole, enjoying the futile cries of the pack behind him. He would have been a dead fox then and there if the hole had not been upwind. At the last instant he smelled the waiting hound and, spinning around, had run for his life with the Adirondack after him screaming for blood. To his horror, Tod now found himself trapped in the orchard, for there were only two exits - through the hole and under the gate, and the pack was between. Actually, Tod could have gone over the wire like a cat, using his long dewclaws to help him; but in his panic he never thought of that, for he was a creature of habit and had always used the holes. Instead he ran hysterically around while the pack tried to follow him through the maze of cross trails. At last he collapsed exhausted in some tall grass and lay there panting while the hunt raged around him. He was saved by the farmer’s coming out with a shotgun. At the same time, the hounds’ masters drove up a road outside the fence. A noisy interchange followed between farmer and the hound men that ended in the men coming through the gate and taking away their hounds. Tod made sure they were well away before he rose and limped to the hole. He never tried the orchard trick again.

Tod soon got to know each hound, not only by his voice and smell but also by his personal traits. There was a Hudspeth who never followed Tod into a covert. Instead, while the other hounds were drawing, the Hudspeth would run around outside. After confusing the pack, Tod would lope out of the cover confident that his enemies were all questing about among the trees, and twice he nearly ran straight into the waiting jaws of the Hudspeth, who, unpleasantly enough, could put on a surprising burst of speed for a short distance. Then there was a Birdsong who when the pack came to a check would always run to the top of the nearest hill and wait until one of the strike-dogs got the line. Then he would race down the hill and with the momentum it gave him pass the strike-dog and take off on the line ahead of the others. Once, after a neat backtrack and jump-off, Tod had sat down to enjoy the discomfiture of the pack and also to get his breath. The Travis finally hit the line, and Tod was preparing to lope away when down a hill came charging the Birdsong, coming at such an unexpected angle and going so fast Tod was hard put to avoid the rush. On the other hand, the hounds’ individual eccentricities were often a help to the fox. The Spaulding and the Travis disliked briers because their ears were especially tender, and when Tod got into a brier patch they would stick to well-marked trails or stay outside. As these two hounds had the best noses, by staying in the thickest part of the patch Tod could throw the rest off. Best of all, the hounds were all fiercely jealous of one another and never willingly cooperated. If one hound found the line, he frequently would not give tongue, but follow it a quarter of a mile or more before throwing his voice, to get a head start on the rest. But then when he came to a check, he had to work it out alone while the rest toiled to catch up. This naturally gave Tod a tremendous advantage.

The men did not stay in one place. When the hunt passed outside their hearing range, they would get in the cars, drive to a new spot, start another fire, and bring out the inevitable jug. Often they went to a dozen spots in one night as Tod widened his range and took the pack into new country. As they had no guns and took no part in the chase, Tod ignored them; but once he was nearly run over on a road by one of their cars. He had been running the hardtop to throw off the hounds, and the headlights struck him so suddenly he was blinded and confused. He fled unseeingly in front of the car and could have easily been run down had not the driver slammed on the brakes. As Tod ducked into the underbrush, he heard the call of a horn from the car, bringing up the pack.

Tod got to know these horns well, and their wailing calls generally came as a relief to him. When the men had had enough of their sport, they would get out their horns and call in the hounds.Each hound knew the sound of his master’s horn, and could distinguish it from the others, and after a few hours so did Tod, although naturally he could have cared less. All he cared about was that the horns recalled the pack and left him in peace. Of course, all he had to do when chased by hounds was go down a hole to escape, but Tod did so only as a last resort. He was always afraid of being bottled up in a hole even if there was an escape hatch, and he much preferred to lose the hounds in a straightaway run. And perhaps there was even a certain feeling of pride in shaking off the pack fair and square. The grays had no such pride and when hunted nearly always climbed the first tree, leaving the pack raging futilely and hopelessly below. Once Tod had even seen a gray go up a telephone pole. Those grays weren’t really foxes at all; they were cats.

        Owing to the jug hunters, Tod acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of hounds; in fact, after a few months he knew far more about hounds than did their masters. He knew exactly what a hound could do and what he could not do. As, except when there was a black frost, scenting conditions were much better at night than in the daytime - this was largely the reason Tod did most of his hunting at night - tricks that only temporarily puzzled a hound at night usually completely baffled the same animal during the day when sun tended to kill scent. Even a cold-nosed, highy experienced hound like Copper could not stay on Tod’s trail during the day if the fox was determined to lose him. Both Copper and his Master soon discovered this fact, so Tod was no longer bothered by attempts to shoot him at crossings.

        Autumn was Tod’s favorite time of year. He hated the heat of summer, disliked the wet spring, and in the dead of winter food was so difficult to obtain that hunting was no longer a sport but a grim need for survival. But in autumn food was, if anything, even more plentiful than in summer; it seldom rained and the weather was cool. Tod was no longer a pup, but a full-grown fox with all his physical powers and enough wilderness know-how never to have to worry where his next meal was coming from. He had reached his full weight of twelve pounds and was three and a half feet long, including his fifteen-inch brush. He had no natural enemies, for man had exterminated the wolves, coyotes, lynxes, and eagles in his district long ago. Only the foxes remained, and they actually benefited by man's presence. Red foxes disliked heavy timber, and man had cleared the fields, making ideal country for field mice, rabbits, woodchucks, and pheasants - all excellent fox food. Also, the pastures and hedgerows grew an abundance of vegetables such as succulent grasses, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, wild grapes, and other eatables on which the foxes largely depended. As a climax, the farmers had thoughtfully stocked their property with fat, helpless chickens, ducks, and geese just in case the foxes' hunting was unsuccessful. Tod and his brothers would have been hard put to survive without human aid, so they did not move to wilder country where there was a lack of good foraging. Although he seldom bothered the farmers' livestock, he was so dependent on cleared land for his style of living that Tod was virtually a parasite on man.

Tod usually slept during the day, generally selecting some knob or high hillside from whence he could look out over the surrounding country so he could see any enemy approaching. It never occurred to him that the enemies could also see him and that his russet coat showed vividly against the dry autumn grass. He liked to lie with his long, thin nose resting on his black, outstretched forepaws and with his brush straight out behind him. If it were a sunny day, he would turn occasionally to bask luxuriously from side to side in the warm light. Even when he was fast asleep, Tod's nose continued to function, and at the first hint of an alien scent he was instantly alert. His hearing was incredible - he could detect the squeak of a mouse at three hundred yards - and he could hear a car a mile away. He never slept long, dozing in a series of quick catnaps, and constantly awakened to open one eye and check the terrain around him on the remote chance that his ears and nose might have missed some possible danger. It was almost impossible for a man or dog to sneak up on him; yet one day after a rain, when the grass was soggy and gave off no sound, a farmer cutting across lots happened to approach Tod from downwind and got within six feet of the sleeping fox. Luckily for Tod, the man had no gun and thought the animal was dead. It was not until he leaned over to pick him up that Tod scented him and made a flying leap away that startled the man quite as much as he had startled the fox.

As the sun sank, scenting conditions steadily improved, as Tod's nose told him even when he was fast asleep. What had been a dead world with only a few odors now gradually became alive with scents. Tod's nose twitched as his sleeping mind unconsciously sorted and identified them as easily, and often far more accurately, than his eyes identified objects when awake. He automatically discarded scents that were meaningless just as when awake he took no interest in trees, clouds, or buildings unless they had a special significance for him. Anything alive whether it was eatable or not, had a special interest for him, although the odor of ripe apples, sarsaparilla, or pokeberries were almost equally interesting. Tod was quite as much a vegetarian as he was a meateater, although it would have been hard to convince the chicken farmers in his range that this was so.

By dusk, Tod was fully awake. His first act was to stretch, extending himself at full length, shooting out his claws almost like a cat, while his dewclaws stood out nearly at right angles to his slender forelegs; then he yawned until his pink tongue curled between his long white canines. He stood up, cocked his head on one side with a typical "foxy" look as he gazed out across the valley and the fields of winter wheat. Anything moving caught his eye immediately, but he could not readily distinguish between a motionless living being and an inanimate object. Unlike Copper, Tod had excellent vision, but he was not able to interpret the details of what he saw through reason. A human seeing a motionless cow could still immediately identify it as a cow, for he could not only recognize the horns, head, body, and legs but could also realize that these details made up a cow no matter whether the animal was moving or motionless. Tod could see the cow as well as the human, and knew what a cow looked like, but until the animal moved he could not connect the details he saw with the animal he knew. Furthermore, because he was color blind, he saw the world in varying shades of gray, so that a black cow standing in a field of green grass was black against black. On the other hand, Tod could distinguish between odors in a way impossible for a human. A skunk had been killed by a car on a nearby road, and the air was so full of the potent musk a human could have smelled nothing else. Tod could not only smell the musk but dozens of other scents also, and easily distinguished between them. So although he had good eyesight, he depended on his nose and keen ears more than on his eyes.

This evening Tod trotted down the hill to where he had cached a woodchuck the day before. He had not killed the chuck; a hunter had shot the animal and it had managed to crawl down its hole before dying. Tod had smelled it there and dug it out. Tod could kill a chuck if he had to, but an old groundhog is an experienced and determined fighter, and Tod had a great deal of respect for his own hide. Young chucks in spring were fine if he could catch them away from their hole, but a big boar chuck he left alone. He had eaten part of the animal and tried to bury the rest, but the task was too much for him and he had covered the body with loose dirt and dead leaves. To his disgust, Tod found that crows had located his cache and eaten most of it. Tod set to work to finish off the remainder. It was not gamy enough for him; he liked his meat so decayed it was soft and fell apart easily, yet he was hungry and went to work with a will. Although he liked tender meat, he felt a deep satisfaction in chewing through the tough hide and feeling the bones crunch under his rattrap jaws. He lay at full length, his eyes half closed with bliss as he chewed and chewed, indifferent to the meat in the ecstasy of crunching. When he was tired he played with the carcass, tossing it up, catching it, pretending it was alive so he could jump and worry it, and rolling it about with his long forepaws, which he used almost like hands. When he was tired of the game, he buried what was left, making sure this time the remains were completely covered. He excavated a large hole, his forefeet going like pistons as he dug, and then pushed in the dirty, stinking carcass with his long muzzle. He filled in the hole, using the side of his muzzle to sweep the loose dirt in place, and afterward tamped it in with repeated blows of his nose, delivered with such force it was amazing he did not hurt himself. Lastly, he urinated on the spot to mark it as his personal cache