When the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., went into the wholesale raising of silver foxes for a world market, its two partners brought to the enterprise a comfortable working capital and an uncomfortable ignorance of the brain-reactions of a fox.

They had visited the National Exhibition of silver foxes. They had spent days at successful fox farms, studying every detail of management and memorising the rigid diet-charts. They had committed to memory every fact and hint in Bulletin No. 1151 of the United States Department of Agriculture—issued for the help of novice breeders of silver foxes.

They had mastered each and every available scrap of exact information concerning the physical welfare of captive silver foxes. But, for lack of half a lifetime’s close application to the theme, their knowledge of fox mentality and fox nature was nil.

2Now one may raise chickens or hogs or even cattle, without taking greatly into account the inner workings of such animals’ brains. But no man yet has made a success of raising foxes or their fifth cousin, the collie, without spending more time in studying out the mental than the physical beast.

On the kitchen wall of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., was the printed dietary of silver foxes. On the one library shelf of the kennel was all the available literature on silver fox breeding, from government pamphlets to a three-volume monograph. In the four-acre space within the kennel enclosure were thirty model runways, twenty by twenty feet; each equipped with a model shelter-house and ten of them further fitted out with model brood nests.

In twenty-four of these thirty model runways abode twenty-four model silver foxes, one to each yard at this autumn season—twenty-four silver foxes, pedigreed and registered—foxes whose lump value was something more than $7,400. Thanks to the balanced rations and meticulous care lavished on them, all twenty-four were in the pink of form.

All twenty-four seemed as nearly contented as can a wild thing which no longer has the zest of gambling with death for its daily food and which is stared at with indecent closeness and frequency by dread humans.

But the partners of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., failed to take note, among other things, of the uncanny genius certain foxes possess for sapping and mining; nor that some foxes are almost as deft at climbing as is a cinnamon bear. True, the average silver fox is neither a gifted burrower nor climber. But neither are such talents rare.

For example, King Whitefoot II, in Number 8 run, could have given a mole useful hints in underground burrowing. Lady Pitchdark, the temperamental young 3vixen in Number 17 run, might wellnigh have qualified as the vulpine fly. Because neither of these costly specimens spent their time in sporadic demonstration of their arts, in the view of humans, those same humans did not suspect the accomplishments.

Then came an ice-bright moonlit night in late November—a night to stir every quadruped’s blood to tingling life and to set humans to crouching over fireplaces. Ten minutes after Rance and Ethan Venner, the kennel partners, finished their perfunctory evening rounds of the yards, King Whitefoot II was blithely at work.

Foxes and other burrowing beasts seek instinctively the corners or the edges of yards, when striving to dig a way out. Any student of their ways will tell you that. Wherefore, as in most fox-kennels, the corners and inner edges of the Stippled Silver yards were fringed with a half-yard of mesh-wire, laid flat on the ground.

Whitefoot chose a spot six inches on the hither edge of a border-wire and began his tunnel. He did not waste strength by digging deep. He channelled a shallow tube, directly under the flat-laid wire. Indeed, the wire itself formed the top of his tunnel. The frost was not yet deep enough or hard enough to impede his work. Nor, luckily for him, did he have to circumnavigate any big underground rock.

In forty-two minutes from the time he began to dig, his pointed black nose and his wide-cheeked stippled black face was emerging into the open, a few inches outside his yard.

Wriggling out of his tunnel, he shook himself daintily to rid his shimmering silver-flecked black coat of such dirt as clung to it. Then he glanced about him. From the nearby wire runs, twenty-three pairs of slitted topaz eyes flamed avidly at him. Twenty-three ebony bodies 4crouched moveless; the moon glinting bright on their silver stipples and snowy tailtips.

The eyes of his world were on the fugitive. The nerves of his world were taut and vibrant with thrill at his escapade. But they were sportsmen in their own way, these twenty-three prisoners who looked on while their more skilled fellow won his way to liberty. Not a whine, not so much as a deep-drawn breath gave token of the excitement that was theirs. No yelping bark brought the partners out to investigate. These captives could help their comrade only by silence. And they gave him silence to a suffocating degree.

With their round phosphorous eyes they followed his every move. But twenty-two of the twenty-three forbore so much as a single motion whose sound might attract human ears. Couchant, aquiver, turning their heads ever so little and in unison to watch his progress, the twenty-two watched Whitefoot make for the high wire boundary fence which encircled the four-acre kennel enclosure—the fence beyond whose southern meshes lay the frost-spangled meadow.

Beyond the meadow reared the naked black woods, sloping stiffly upward to the mountain whose sides they draped;—the mountain which was the outpost of the wilderness hinterland to southward of this farm-valley.

But, as Whitefoot set to work at the absurdly simple exploit of digging under this outer fence—a fence not extending underground and with no flat width of wire before it—the twenty-third prisoner could stand the emotional strain no longer. Young and with nerves less steady than her companions’, little Lady Pitchdark marred the perfect symphony of noiselessness.

She did not bark or even yelp. But she went into action.

5By natural genius she was a climber. Up the side of her ten-foot run-wire she whizzed; her long-clawed feet scarce seeming to seek toe-hold in the ladder of meshes they touched. Like a cat, she sped upward.

To provide against such an unlikely effort at jail-breaking, the four wire walls of the run sloped slightly inward. At their summit, all around, was a flat breadth of wire that hung out for eight inches over the run; projecting inside the walls. As a rule such deterrents were quite enough to bar an ordinary fox from escape. But nature had taught Lady Pitchdark more than she teaches the ordinary fox. She was one of the rare vulpines born with climbing-genius.

Up she scrambled her fierce momentum carrying her to the very top of the fence; to the spot where it merged with the eight-inch overhang. Here, by every rule, the vixen should have yielded to the immutable law of gravity and should have tumbled back to the ground with a breath-expelling flop.

This is precisely what she did not do. Still helped by her momentum, she clawed frantically with both forefeet at the edge of the overhang. Her claws hooked in its end-meshes. Her hindfeet released their hold on the in-slanting fence and she swung for an instant between moon and earth—a glowing black swirl of fur, shot with a myriad silver threads.

Then lithely she drew herself up, on the overhang. A pause for breath and she was skidding down the steep slope of the fence’s outer side. A dart across the yard and she reached the kennel’s boundary fence just as Whitefoot was squirming to freedom through the second and shorter tunnel he had made that night.

Diving through, so close behind him that her outthrust muzzle brushed his sensitive tailtip, Pitchdark reached 6the safety of the outer world at almost the same instant as did he. Whitefoot felt the light touch at his tail. He spun around, snarling murderously, his razor-keen teeth bared. He had won his way to liberty by no slight exercise of brain and of muscle. He was not minded to surrender tamely to any possible pursuer.

But as he confronted the slender young vixen in her royal splendour of pelt and with her unafraid excited eyes fixed so mischievously upon him, the dog-fox’s lips slipped down from their snarling curl; sheathing the fearsome array of teeth and tushes. For a fraction of a second Whitefoot and Pitchdark faced each other there under the dazzling white moon; twin ebon blotches on the frost-strewn grass. Twenty-two pairs of yellow-fire eyes were upon them.

Then on impulse the two refugees touched noses. As though by this act they established common understanding, they wheeled about as one; and galloped silently, shoulder to shoulder, across the frosted meadow to the safety of the black mountainside forest.

Sportsmanship can go only just so far; even in cool-nerved foxes. As the couple vanished through the night, a shrilly hideous multiple clamour of barking went up from twenty-two furry black throats. The tense hush was broken by a bedlam of raucous noise. The prisoners dashed themselves against the springy sides of their wire runs. One and another of them made desperate scrambling attempts to climb the inslanting walls that encircled them—only to fall back to the frozen ground and add their quota once more to the universal din.

Rance and Ethan Venner came tumbling out of the nearby house, grasping their flashlights and shouting confusedly to each other. Instantly blank silence overspread 7the yards. The foxes crouched low, eyes aflame, staring mutely at the belated humans.

The briefest of inspections told the brothers what had happened. First they found the tunnel leading forth from Whitefoot’s run. Then they discovered that Pitchdark’s run was empty; though they could find no clue to its occupant’s mysterious vanishing until next morning’s sunrise showed them a tuft of finespun black fur stuck to a point of wire on the overhang, ten feet above ground. Last of all the partners came upon the hole under the fence which divided the kennel from the meadow.

“Whitefoot was worth an easy $600 as he stood,” grunted Rance Venner, miserably; as his flashlight’s ray explored the hole under the fence. “Nearer $700, in the coat he’s carrying this fall. And Pitchdark isn’t more’n a couple of hundred dollars behind him. Two of the best we had. A hundred per cent loss; just as we’re getting started.”

“Nope,” contradicted Ethan. “Not a hundred per cent loss. Only about fifty. The pelt of either one of ’em will bring $300, dressed. Any of a dozen dealers will pay us that for it.”

“If they was to pay us three million, we wouldn’t be any richer,” complained Rance. “We haven’t got the pelts to sell. You’re talking plumb foolish, Ethan.”

“We’ll have ’em both by noon to-morrow,” declared Ethan. “Those two foxes were born in a kennel. They don’t know anything else. They’re as tame as pet squirrels. We’ll start out gunning for ’em at sunrise. We’ll take Ruby along. She’ll scent ’em, double quick. Then all we’ll have to do is plant the shots where they won’t muss the pelt too much.”

“We’ll do better’n that,” supplemented Rance, his 8spirits rising at his brother’s tone of confidence. “We won’t shoot ’em. We’ll get out the traps, instead. They’re both tame and neither of ’em ever had to hustle for a meal. They’ll walk right into the traps, as quick as they get the sniff of cooked food. C’mon in and help me put the traps in shape. We ought to be setting ’em before sunrise. The two foxes will be scouting for breakfast by that time.”

The newly optimistic Rance was mistaken in all his forecasts. The two fugitives were not scouting for breakfast at sunrise. Hours earlier they twisted their way in through the narrow little opening of an unguarded chicken-house belonging to a farm six miles from the kennel. Thither they were drawn by the delicious odour of living prey.

There, like a million foxes since the birth of time, they slew without noise or turmoil. There they glutted themselves; carrying away each a heavy fowl for future feasting; bearing off their plunder in true vulpine fashion with the weight of the bird slung scientifically over the bearer’s withers.

Daybreak found them lying snugly asleep in a hollow windfall tree that was open at either end and which lay lengthwise of a nick in the hillside, with briars forming an effective hedge all about it.

Nor did the best casting efforts of Ruby, the partners’ foxhound, succeed in following their cleverly confused trail across a pool and two brooks. In the latter brook, they had waded for nearly a furlong before emerging on dry ground at the same side.

Thus set in a winter of bare sustenance for the runaways. They kept to no settled abiding place, but drifted across country; feasting at such few farmsteads as had penetrable hencoops; doing wondrous teamwork in the 9catching of rabbits and partridges; holing in under windfalls or in rock-clefts when blizzards made the going bad.

It was the season when foxes as a rule run solitary. Seldom in early winter do they hunt in pairs and never at any season in packs. But these two black and silver waifs were bound together not only by early association but by mutual inexperience of the wild. And while this inexperience did not blur nor flaw their marvellous instinct, they found it more profitable to hunt together than alone.

Only once or twice in their winter’s foraging did they chance upon any of the high-country’s native red foxes. A heavy hunting season had shifted most of the reds to a distant part of the county; as is the way with foxes that are overpressed by the attentions of trappers and hounds. In that region, pink coats and hunting horses and foxhound packs were unknown. But many a mountain farmer eked out his lean income by faring afield with a brace of disreputable but reliable mongrel hounds and a fowling piece as disreputably reliable; eager for the flat price of $10 to $12 per skin offered by the nearest wholesale dealer. This sum of course was for the common red fox; silver foxes being as unknown to the region at large as were dinosaurs.

(The dealer paid the farmer-huntsman perhaps $11 per skin. The pelt was then cured and dressed and mounted and equipped with snappers; at a total price in labour and material of perhaps $6 at most. After which, in marketable form, it sold at retail from $60 to $75 or even higher. Thus, there was money for every one concerned—except possibly for the ultimate buyer.)

The two silver foxes had the forest and farmland largely to themselves. The few reds they met did not attack them or affiliate with them at that hungry time of year.

10The winter winds and the ice-storms made Whitefoot’s coat shine and thicken as never had it done on scientifically balanced rations. The life of the wild put new depth to Pitchdark’s narrow chest and gave her muscular power and sinew to spare. Quizzical Dame Nature had lifted them from man’s wisest care; as though in object lesson of her own infinitely more efficient methods for conditioning her children.

Late January brought a sore-throat thaw and with it a melting of drift and ice-pack. Incidentally it ushered in the yearly vulpine mating season.

Spring was early that year. But before the frost was out of the ground, Pitchdark had chosen her nursery. It was by no means so elaborate nor sanitary as had been the costly brood-nests at the kennel. Indeed it would have struck horror to the heart of any scientific breeder.

For it was merely a woodchuck hole in an upland meadow, at the forest edge, a short mile from a straggling farmstead. Even here Whitefoot’s inspired prowess as a digger was not called into play. His sole share toward securing the home was to thrash the asthmatically indignant old woodchuck that had dug the burrow. Then Pitchdark made her way cautiously down the hole and proceeded to enlarge it a little at the shallow bottom. That was all the home-making done by the pair.

Then, of a windy night, just before the first of April, the vixen did not join her mate in his expedition for loot. And as he panted homeward before dawn with a broken-winged quail between his jaws, he found her lying in the burrow’s hollow, with five indeterminate-looking babies nuzzling close to her soft side.

Then began days, or rather nights, of double foraging for Whitefoot. For it is no light thing to provide food 11for a den-ridden mate and, indirectly, for five hungry and husky cubs.

Nor was the season propitious for food-finding. The migratory birds, for the most part, had not shifted north. The rabbits for some silly reason of their own had changed their feeding grounds to the opposite valley. Farmers had suffered too many depredations from Whitefoot and Pitchdark during the past month to leave their henroosts as hospitably open as of yore.

The first day’s hunting netted only a sick crow that had tumbled from a tree. Whitefoot turned with disgust from this find. For, though he would have been delighted to dine on the rankest of carrion, yet in common with all foxes, he could not be induced to touch any bird of prey.

That night he foraged again; in spite of having outraged his regular custom by hunting in daylight. There was no fun in hunting, this night. For a wild torrent of rain had burst out of the black clouds which all day had been butting their way across the windy sky.

Foxes detest rain, and this rain was a veritable deluge; a flood that started the spring freshets and turned miles of bottomland into soggy lakes. Yet Whitefoot kept on. Grey dawn found him midway between his lair and the farmstead at the foot of the hill.

This farm he and Pitchdark had avoided. It was too near their den for safe plundering. Its human occupants might well be expected to seek the despoilers. And just then those despoilers were in no condition to elude the chase. Wherefore, fox-fashion, the two had ranged far afield and had reserved the nearby farm for later emergencies.

Now the emergency appeared to call for such a visit from Whitefoot. A moment or so he hesitated, irresolute 12whether to return empty-mouthed to his mate or to go first to the farm for possible food. He decided on the farm.

Had he gone to the burrow he would have known there was no further need to forage for those five beautiful baby silvers, so different in aspect from the slaty-gray infants of the red fox. A swelling rivulet of rain had been deflected from its downhill course by a wrinkle in the soil; and had poured swishingly down the opening of the woodchuck warren and thence down into the ill-constructed brood nest at its bottom.

For the safeguarding of newborn fox-babies, as of the babies of every race, dry warmth is all-essential. Chilled and soaked, despite their young mother’s frantic efforts to protect them, the five ill-nourished and perilously inbred cubs ceased to nurse and began to squeak right dolefully. Then, one by one they died. The last of them stiffened out, just before daybreak.

Rance and Ethan Venner would have cursed luridly at loss of so many hundred dollars in potential peltry. But the bereft little mother only cuddled her ice-cold babies the closer; crooning piteously to them. They were her first litter. She could not realise what had befallen them, nor why one and all of them had ceased to nurse.

Meantime, her mate was drifting like an unobtrusive black shadow through the rain toward the clutter of farm buildings at the base of the hill-pasture. His scent told him there was a dog somewhere in that welter of sheds and barns and houses. But his scent told him also that there were fowls aplenty. Preparing to match his speed and his wit against any dog’s, he crept close and closer, taking due advantage of every patch of cover; unchecked even by the somewhat more distant man-scent; and urged on by that ever stronger odour of live chickens.

13Presently he was skirting the chicken-yard. It and its coop were too fast-locked for him to hope to enter with less than a half-hour’s clever digging. He had not a half-hour. He had not a half-minute to spare.

Slinking from the coop, he rounded a tool-house. There he halted. For to his nostrils came again the smell of living food, though of a sort vaguely unpleasant to him. Hunger and the need to feed his brood formed too strong a combination for this faint distaste to combat.

He peered around the corner of the half-open door of the tool-house. From the interior arose the hated dog-smell, ten times stronger than before. But he knew by nose and by hearing that the dog was no longer in there.

He was correct in this, as in most of his surmises. Not five minutes earlier, the early-rising Dick Logan had opened the tool-house door and convoyed thence his pedigreed collie, Jean, to the kitchen for her breakfast.

In the corner of the tool-house was a box half filled with rags. Down among the rags nestled and squirmed and muttered a litter of seven pure-bred collie pups, scarce a fortnight old.

Man-scent and dog-scent filled the air; scaring and disgusting the hesitant Whitefoot. Stark hunger spurred him on. A fleeting black shadow slipped noiselessly swift into the tool-house and then out again.

Through the welter of rain, Whitefoot was making for his mile-distant lair; at top speed; pausing not to glance over his shoulder; straining every muscle to get away from that place of double peril and to his waiting family. No need to waste time in confusing the trail. The sluicing rain was doing that.

Between his teeth the fox carried a squealing and struggling fat collie puppy.

Keen as was his own need for food, he did not pause to 14devour or even to kill the plump morsel he had snatched up. Nor did his pinpoint teeth so much as prick through the fuzzy fat sides of his prey. Holding the puppy as daintily as a bird dog might retrieve a wounded partridge, he sped on.

At the mouth of the warren, Pitchdark was waiting for him. She had brought her babies out of the death hole; though too late. They lay strewn on the rain-sick ground in front of her. She herself was crouched for shelter in the lee of a rock that stood beside the hole.

Whitefoot dropped the collie pup in front of his mate; and prepared to join her in the banquet. Pitchdark nosed the blind, helpless atom of babyhood; as though trying to make out what it might be.

The puppy, finding himself close to something warm and soft and furry, crept instinctively toward this barrier from the cold and wet which were striking through to the very heart of him. At his forward motion, Pitchdark snarled down at him. But as his poking nose chanced to touch her, the snarl merged suddenly into a croon. With her own sharp nose, she pushed him closer to her and interposed her body between him and the rain.

Whitefoot, the water cascading from his splendid coat, stood dripping and staring. Failing to make any sense of his mate’s delay in beginning to devour the breakfast he had brought along at such danger to himself, he took a step forward, his jaws parting for the first mouthful of the feast. Pitchdark growled hideously at him and slashed at his advancing face.

Piqued and amazed at her ungrateful treatment, he hesitated a moment longer; then trotted glumly off into the rain; leaving Pitchdark crooningly nursing the queer substitute for her five dead infants. As he ran, he all but 15collided with a rain-dazed rabbit that hopped out of a briar clump to avoid him.

Five minutes later he and Pitchdark were lying side by side in the lee of the rock, crunching unctuously the bones of the luckless bunny; while the collie pup feasted as happily in his own fashion as did they, nuzzling deep into the soft hair of his foster-mother’s warm underbody.

Why the exposure to rain and cold did not kill the puppy is as much a mystery as why Pitchdark did not kill him. Nevertheless—as is the odd way of one collie pup in twenty—he took no harm from the mile of rainy gallop to which Whitefoot had treated him. More—he throve amain on the milk which had been destined for five fox cubs.

The downpour was followed by weeks of unseasonably dry and warm weather. The porous earth of the warren was dry within a few hours. The lair bed proved as comfortable for the new baby as it was to have been to his luckless predecessors.

By the time May brought the warm nights and the long bright days, the puppy weighed more than twice as much as any fox cub of his age. He had ceased to look like a sleek dun-coloured rat and resembled rather a golden-and-white Teddy Bear.

On the moonlit May nights and in the red dawning and in the soft afterglow, he and his pretty mother would frisk and gambol in the lush young meadow grass around the lair. It was sweet to see the lithe black beauty’s complete devotion for her clumsy baby and the jealous care wherewith she guarded him. From the first she was teaching him the cunning caution which is a fox’s world-old birthright and which is foreign to a man-owned collie. With his foster-mother’s milk and from his foster-mother’s 16example he drank in the secrets of the wild and the fact that man is the dread foe of the beast.

Gaily as the two might play in the moonlit grass, the first distant whiff of man-scent was enough to send Pitchdark scuttling silently into the burrow; driving the shambling pup ahead of her. There the two would lie, noiseless, almost without breathing; while man or dog or both passed by.

This was not the season for hunting foxes. Their pelts were “off-prime”—in no condition for the market. Thus, the pair in the burrow were not sought out nor harried.

Back at the Logan farm there was bewilderment at the puppy’s mysterious vanishing. His dam, returning from the kitchen after breakfast, had broken into a growl of sudden wrath and had changed her trot for a handgallop as she neared the tool-shed. Into the shed she had dashed, abristle and growling, then out again, sniffing the earth, casting in ever widening circles, and setting off presently on a trail which the deluging rain wiped out before she could follow it for a hundred yards.

The stolen pup was the only one in the litter which had not been sold or else bespoken. For the Logan collies had a just fame in the region. But that one pup had been set aside by Dick Logan as a future housedog. This because he was the largest and strongest and liveliest of the seven; and because of the unusually wide white ruff which encircled his broad shoulders like a shawl.

Dick had named the youngster “Ruff,” because of this adornment. And now he was liked to have no use for the name.

Ruff, meantime, was gaining his education, such as it was, far more quickly than his super-domesticated collie mother and Dick together could have imparted it to him.

By example and by swift punishment in event of disobedience, 17Pitchdark was teaching him to crouch, flattened and noiseless, at sound or scent of man or of alien beast. She was teaching him to worm his pudgy little body snakelike through grass and undergrowth and to make wise use of every bit of cover. She was teaching him—as foxes have taught their young for a million years—the incredible cunning of her race and the fear of man.

By the time his legs could fairly support him on the briefest of journeys, she was teaching him to stalk game;—to creep up on foolish fieldmice, to confuse and head off young rabbits; and the like. Before he was fairly weaned she made him try his awkward prowess at finishing a rabbit-kill she had begun. With Ruff it was a case of kill or starve. For Pitchdark cut off natural supplies from him a full week earlier than his own gentle mother would have done.

Pitchdark was a born schoolmistress in Nature’s grim woodland course of “eat or be eaten.” To her stern teachings the puppy brought a brain such as no fox could hope to possess. Ruff was a collie—member of a breed which can assimilate practically any mental or physical teachings, if taught rightly and at an early enough age. Pitchdark was teaching him rightly, if rigidly. Assuredly, too, she was beginning early enough.

To the imparted cunning of the fox, Ruff added the brain of a highly sensitised collie. The combination was a triumph. He learned well-nigh as fast as Pitchdark could teach. If nine-tenths of the things she taught him were as reprehensible as they were needful, he deserved no less credit for his speed in mastering them and for his native ability to add to them.

At an age when his brethren and sisters, back at the farm, were still playing aimlessly around the dooryard, Ruff was grasping the weird secrets of the wild. While 18they were still at the Teddy Bear stage of appealing helplessness, his fat body was turning lean and supple from raw food and from much exercise and from the nature of that exercise. While they were romping merrily with an old shoe, Ruff was creeping up on fieldmouse nests and on couchant quail, or he was heading off witlessly racing rabbits which his foster-mother drove toward the cul-de-sacs where she had stationed him.

For a pup situated like Ruff, there were two open courses—abnormal thriving or quick starvation. Ruff throve.

By the time he was three months old he weighed nearly eighteen pounds. He was more than a third heavier than Pitchdark, though the silvered black vixen had the appearance of being fully twice his size. A fox is the most deceptive creature on earth, in regard to bulk. Pitchdark, for instance, gave the impression of being as large as any thirty-pound terrier, if of far different build. Yet, stripped of her pelt, her slim carcass would not have weighed eleven pounds. Perhaps it would not have weighed more than ten pounds, for she was not large for her kind.

Before Ruff was six weeks old, Whitefoot had tired of domesticity—especially with so perplexing a canine slant to it—and had deserted his mate and foster-son.

The warm days were coming on. The woods at last were alive with catchable game. The chickens on many a farm were perching out of doors at night. Life was gloriously livable. There seemed no sense in fettering himself to a family, nor for helping to provide for a huge youngster in whom his own interest was purely gastronomical.

More than once Whitefoot had sought to slay and eat the changeling. But ever, at such times, Pitchdark was 19at him, ravening and raging in defence of her suckling.

Then crept the influx of spring food into the valley and mountain. There was dinner to be gotten more easily than by battling a ferocious mate for it, a mate who no longer felt even her oldtime lonely comradeship for the dog-fox, and whose every thought and care was for the sprawling puppy. Apart from this, the inherently hated dog-scent on Ruff was a continual irritation to Whitefoot; though maternal care had long since accustomed Pitchdark to it.

Thus on a morning in late April Whitefoot wandered away and neglected to return. His mate was forced to forage for herself and for Ruff. But the task was easy in this new time of food lushness. She did not seem to miss her recreant spouse.

She and Ruff shifted their abode from the burrow whose narrow sides the fast-growing pup could scarce squeeze through. They took up changeable quarters in the hinterland forest. There Ruff’s training began in grim earnest.

So the sweet spring and the long drowsy summer wore themselves away. Through the fat months Pitchdark and Ruff abode together; drawn toward each other by the queerly strong tie that so often knits foster-dam and child, in the fourfoot kingdom;—a tie that is prone to be far stronger than that of normal brute mother and offspring.

This chumship now was wholly a thing of choice. For no longer did Ruff depend on the vixen to teach him how to catch his daily bread. True, he profited still by her experience and her abnormal cunning, and he assimilated it and improved on it—as is the way with a collie when he is taught something that catches his bright fancy. But he was self-supporting.

He continued to live with Pitchdark and to travel with 20her and to hunt with her; not because he needed to, but because he loved her. To this temperamental black-and-silver vixen went out all the loyal devotion and hero-worship and innate protectiveness which a normal collie lavishes on the human who is his god.

Together they roved the mountain, where Pitchdark’s technique and craft bagged illimitable game for them. Together on dark nights they scouted the farm-valleys, where Ruff’s strength and odd audacity won them access to hencoop after hencoop whose rickety door would have resisted a fox’s onslaught.

Twice, Ruff forced his way through the rotting palings of a sheepfold and bore thence to his admiring foster-mother a lamb that was twice as heavy as Pitchdark. Once in open field he fought and outmanœuvred and thrashed a sheep-herding mongrel; dragging off in triumph a half-grown wether.

There were things about Pitchdark the young collie could not understand; just as there were traits of his which baffled her keen wits. To him a grape vineyard was a place whose sole interest centred about any possible field-mouse nests in its mould. An apple orchard had as little significance to him. He would pause and look in questioning surprise as Pitchdark stopped, during their p............