Part 4

As the sun rose, and more hungry birds appeared for the breakfast I always spread for them, the Baron would change his methods. Finding the hungry ones too many or too lively to be managed, he would proceed hurriedly to remove as much food as possible to a cache which he had somewhere back in the woods. In this individual whim of hiding food, as well as in his peculiar challenge, he was different from any other nuthatch I ever met. Returning from one of these hurried flights, he would perch a moment on a branch over the table, eye the feeding guests angrily, pick out one who was busy at a big morsel, and launch himself straight at the offender’s head. Deep in his throat sounded a terrifying chur-churr as he made his swoop.

The odd thing is that he always got the morsel he wanted. Though he often charged a jay or a squirrel much bigger than himself, I never saw one that had the nerve to stand against his headlong rush. Being peaceable and a little timid, as all wild things naturally are, they dropped whatever they were eating and dodged aside; whereupon the nuthatch swept over the table like a fury, whirring his wings and crying, “Churr! Away with you! Vamoose!” which sent most of the little birds with startled peeps into the trees. Then, with the board cleared, he would drag off his morsel, hide it, and come back as quickly as he could to repeat his extraordinary performance.

How the other birds regarded him would be hard to tell. At times they seemed to get a bit of fun or excitement out of the game by slipping in to steal a mouthful while the Baron was chasing some luckless fellow who had claimed too big a crumb. At other times they would wait patiently in the trees, basking in the sunshine, till the trouble-maker was gone away to hide things, when they would come down and feed alertly. In this way they would soon get all they wanted for the time, and flit away to their own affairs. Another odd thing is that the Baron, after storing things without opposition for a few minutes, would tire of it and disappear, leaving plenty still on the table.

Occasionally in the woods one meets a bird that by some freak of heredity seems to have been born without his proper instincts: a young wild goose sees his companions depart from the North, but feels no impulse to follow them, and remains to die in the winter snow; or a cow-bunting has no instinct to build a nest of her own, and makes a farce of life by leaving an egg here or there in some other bird’s household. Among the beasts it is the same story: a rare beaver has no instinct to build a house with his fellows, but lives by himself in a den in the bank; or some timid creature that has fled from you unnumbered times on a sudden upsets all your generalizations by showing the boldness of lunacy.

I remember one occasion when darkness and rain overtook me on the trail, and sent me to sleep in a deserted lumber camp; which is the most sleepless place on earth, I think, being full of creaks, groans, rustling porcupines, wild-eyed cats, spooks, mice, evil smells, and other distractions. Except in a downpour, any tree or bush offers more cheerful shelter. About the middle of the night I was awakened, or rather galvanized, by the impression that some creature was trying to get at me. In the black darkness of the place the very presence of the thing seemed to fill the whole shanty. I foolishly jumped up, charged with a yell, and ran bang into a huge, hairy object. There was a grunt, and a hasty, flaring match showed the grotesque head of a cow-moose sticking into the open window. Having been scared stiff, I belted her away roughly; but hardly had I straightened my poor nerves in sleep when she came again, head, neck, shoulders, all she could crowd into the low doorway. I shooed her off, hastening her flight with clubs, ax heads, old moccasins, everything throwable that I could lay hands on; yet she lingered about the yard for an hour or two, and once more came snuffling with her camel’s nose at the window. How do I account for her? I don’t. You can say that she mistook me for her lost calf, and I shall not contradict you.

So this nuthatch, at odds with all his kind, may possibly have been born without the common instinct of sociability and decency. The other birds were sometimes seen watching him curiously, as they watch any other strange thing. Now and then one of them would resent some personal indignity by giving the greedy one tit for tat; but for the most part they seemed well content to keep aloof from the nuisance. They had enough to eat, with a little sauce of excitement, and I think they accepted the nuthatch as a harmless kind of lunatic.

FOX COMEDY

Though my early impressions of wild life were mostly heart-warming, one thing always troubled me, and that was the clamor of a pack of hounds running a fox to death. There were fox hunters in the neighborhood; I had shivered at stories of men who had been chased by wolves, and whenever I heard the winter woods ringing to dog voices I pictured the poor fox as running desperately for his life, with terror lifting his heels or tugging at his heart. I could see no comedy in that picture, probably because, never having witnessed a fox chase, I was viewing it with my imagination rather than with my eyes.

There came a day when the hounds were out in full cry, and I was in the snowy woods alone. For some time I had heard dogs in the distance, and when a louder clamor came on the breath of the wind I hid beside a hemlock fronting a stream, all eyes and ears for whatever might befall. Presently came the fox, the hunted beast, and my first glimpse of him was reassuring. He was moving easily, confidently, his beautiful fur fluffed out as if each individual hair were alive, his great brush floating like a plume behind him. There was no sign of terror, no evidence of haste in his graceful action. Though he could run like a red streak, as I well knew, having watched fox cubs playing outside their den, he was now trotting leisurely on his way, stopping often to listen or to sniff the air, while far behind him the heavy-footed hounds were wailing their hearts out over a tangled trail.

So Eleemos came to the water and ran lightly beside it, heading downstream, taking in the possibilities of the situation with cunning glances of his bright eyes. The water was low; above it showed the heads of many rocks, from which the sun had melted all the snow, leaving dry spots that would hold no scent. Suddenly a beautiful jump landed Eleemos on a flat rock well out from shore; without losing momentum he turned and went flying upstream, leaping from rock to rock, till he was twenty yards above where he had first approached the water, and a broad stretch called halt to his rush. Again without losing speed, he whirled in to my side, leaped ashore, flashed up through the woods, and scrambled to the top of a ledge, where he could overlook his trail. When I saw him stretch himself comfortably in the sunshine, as if for a nap, and when, as the hounds came pounding into sight, he lifted his head to cock his ears and wrinkle his eyebrows at the lunatic beasts that were yelling up and down a peaceful world, trying to find out where or how he had crossed the stream--well, then and there I put imagination aside, and concluded that perhaps the fox was getting more fun out of the chase than any of the dogs. He had this advantage, moreover, that whenever he wearied of the play he had only to slip into the nearest ledge or den to make a safe end of it.

Another day when I was roaming the woods I heard in the distance the melodious voice of Old Roby, best of all possible foxhounds. It was a springlike morning, with melting snow; and Roby, thinking it an excellent time for smelling things, had pulled the collar over his head and gone off for a solitary hunt, as he often did. When his voice rose triumphant over a ridge and headed in my direction, I hurried to the edge of a wild meadow and stood against a big chestnut tree, waiting for the fox and growing more expectant that I should have a glimpse of him.

A short distance in front of me a cart-path came winding down through the leafless woods. Where this path entered the meadow was a dry ditch; over the ditch was a bridge of slabwood, and some loaded wagon had recently broken through it, crushing the slabs on one side down into the earth. On that side, therefore, the ditch was closed; but on the other side it appeared as a dark tunnel, hardly a foot high and three or four times as long,--an excellent refuge for any beastie that cared to shelter therein, since it was too low for a hound to enter bodily, and if he thrust his head in too far, the beastie would have a fine chance to teach him manners by nipping his nose.

I had waited but a few minutes when down the cart-path came the fox, running fast but not easily. One could see that at a glance. The soft snow made hard going; as he plunged into it, moisture got into his great brush, making it heavy, so that it no longer floated like a gallant plume. A gray fox would have taken to earth within a few minutes of the start, and now even this fleet red fox had run as far as he cared to go under such circumstances. At sight of the open meadow he put on speed, flying gloriously down the hill. One jump landed him fair in the middle of the bridge; a marvelous side spring carried him into the ditch, and with a final wave of his brush he disappeared into the tunnel.

A little later Old Roby hove into sight, singing ough! ough! oooooooh! in jubilation of the melancholy joy he followed. Clean over the bridge he went, head up, picking the rich scent from the air rather than from the ground, and took three or four jumps into the meadow before he discovered that the fox was no longer ahead of him. Then he came out of his trance, circled over the bridge, poked his nose into the tunnel. There before his bulging eyes was the fox, and in his nostrils was a reek to drive any foxhound crazy. “Ow-wow! here’s the villain at last! And, woooo! what won’t I do to him!” yelled Roby, pulling out his head and lifting it over the edge of the bridge for a mighty howl of exultation. Again he thrust his nose into the tunnel and began to dig furiously; but the sight of the fox, so near, so reeky, so surely caught at last, set the old dog’s heart leaping and his tongue a-clamoring. Every other minute he would stop digging, back out of the tunnel for room, for air, and lifting his head over the bridge send up to heaven another jubilation.

Now Roby was bow-legged, as many foxhounds are that run too young; also he was apt to spread his feet as he howled, so that there was plenty of room to pass under him, and when his head was lifted up for joy he could see nothing but the sky. He had been alternately digging and celebrating for some time, working his way farther under the bridge, when as he raised his head for another bowl of relief a flash of yellow passed between his bowlegs, out under his belly and up over the hill. The thing was done so boldly that it made one gasp, so quickly that a living streak seemed to be drawn through the woods; but the entranced old dog saw nothing of it. When he thrust his head confidently into the tunnel once more, there was no fox and no pungent odor of fox where landscape and smellscape had just been filled with foxiness.

Roby looked a second time and sniffed with a loud sniffing to be sure he was not dreaming. He looked all over the bridge, and sat down upon it. He examined the ditch on the other or closed side, and took a final squint into the tunnel; while every line and hair of him from furrowed face to ratty tail proclaimed that he considered himself the foolishest of all fool dogs that ever thought they could catch a fox. Then he shook his ears violently, as if ridding himself of hallucinations, and began to cast about methodically in circles. A fresh reek of fox poured into his nostrils, filling him with the old ecstasy; he threw up his head for a glad hoot, and went pounding up the hill after his nose, singing ough! ough! oooooh! as an epitome of all fox hunting.

Whenever I heard the hounds after that, I pictured comedy afoot and followed it eagerly, still roaming alone in hope of meeting the fox, and making myself a nuisance to many a proper fox hunter who, waiting expectantly for a shot, heard the chase draw away and fell to cursing the luck or the mischief that had turned the fox from his runway. So it befell, one winter, that I saw Old Roby and a pack of hounds completely fooled by a fox that lay quietly watching them while they hunted and howled for his lost trail.

The place was a deep gully in some big woods. Its sides were covered with a mat of vines and bushes; at the bottom ran a stream, too broad to jump and too swift to freeze even in severe weather. Several times an old fox had been “lost” here, his trail leading straight to the gully, and vanishing as completely as if the river had swallowed him up. He was frequently started in some rugged hills to the westward, and would commonly play back and forth from one ridge to another till he wearied of the game, or till he met a hunter and felt the sting of shot on a runway, when he would break away eastward at top speed. For a mile or more his course could be traced by the hounds giving tongue on a hot scent until they reached the gully, where their steady trail-cry changed to howls of vexation. And that was the end of the chase for that day, unless the weary dogs had ambition enough to hunt up another fox.

At first it was assumed that the game had run into a ledge, as red foxes do when they are fagged or wounded; but when hunters followed their baffled dogs time and again, they always found them running wildly up and down both banks of the stream, looking for a trail which they never found. Then some said that the fox had a secret den, which he approached by running over a tangle of vines where the hounds could not follow; but one old hunter, who had chased foxes for half a century, settled the matter briefly. “My dogs,” he said, “can follow anything that runs above ground. They can’t follow this fox. Therefore he takes to water, like a buck, and swims so far downstream that we never find where he comes out.” Though nobody had ever seen a fox take to water, a man who has followed foxes half a century is ready to believe almost anything within reason.

On stormy nights the hunters would forgather at the village store, and whenever the talk turned to the old fox of the gully I was all ears. I knew the place well, and wondered why some Nimrod, instead of merely shooting foxes or theorizing about them, did not take the simplest means of solving the mystery; but it would have been foolhardy in that veteran company to venture a new opinion on the ancient sport of fox hunting. I remember once, when they were swapping yarns, of breaking rashly into the conversation to tell of a fox I had seen at a lucky moment when he did not see me. He was nosing along the edge of a wood, and I threw a chunk of wood after him as he moved away. It missed him by a foot, and he pounced upon it like a flash as it went bouncing among the dead leaves.

Now that was perhaps the most natural thing for any hungry fox to do, to catch a thing which ran away, instead of asking where it came from; but the veterans received the tale in grim silence. One told me that I had surely seen a “sidehill garger”; another wished he could have seen it, too; the rest pestered me unmercifully about the beast all winter. One of them is now in his dotage; but he never meets me without asking, “Son, did that ’ere fox really run arter that chunk of wood you hove at him?” And when I answer, “Yes, he did, and caught it,” he says, “Well, well, well!” in a way to indicate that he has been straining at that gnat for forty years. Heaven only knows how many fox-hunting camels he has swallowed in the interim.

One Saturday morning (a glorious day it was, with all signs pointing to a good fox run) I went early to the gully, crossed it, and hid where I had a view up or down the stream. Several times during the day I heard hounds in the offing, but the chase did not head in my direction. When the winter sunset came, and an owl began to hoot in the darkening woods, it was time for a hungry boy to go home.

The next time I had better luck. From some hills far away the hoot of hounds came clear and sweet through the still air; then the flat report of a gun, a brief silence, a renewed clamor, and my ears began to tingle as the hunt drew my way, louder and louder. Suddenly there was a flash of ruddy color, warm and brilliant on the snow; the fox appeared on the farther side of the gully, slipped over the edge at a slow trot, and disappeared among the vines.

I was watching the stream keenly when the same flash of color caught my eye, again on the other side, but some fifty yards above where the fox had vanished. He bounded lightly up the steep bank, sprang to the level above, listened a moment to the dogs, ran along the edge a short distance, dropped down into the vines, came up quickly, and scuttled back again in another place. There were fleeting glimpses of orange fur as he dodged here or there, now near the stream, now among the thickest vines; then he tiptoed up and stood alert in the open, at the precise spot, apparently, where he had first entered the gully. After cocking his ears once more at the increasing clamor of hounds, he headed back toward them into the woods; and I had the impression that he was carefully stepping in his own footprints, back-tracking, as many hunted creatures do. So he went, cat-footedly at first, then in swift jumps, till he came to a huge tree that had been twisted off by a gale, leaving a slanting stub some fifteen feet high. Here Eleemos took a flying leap at the stub, scrambled up it with almost the ease of a squirrel, and disappeared into the top.

The hounds were by this time close at hand. A wild burst of music preceded them as they rushed into sight, heads up, giving tongue at every jump, and followed the hot trail headlong over the gully’s edge into the vines. Evidently the fox had run about most liberally there; in a moment the bounds were tangled in a pretty crisscross, lost all sense of direction, and broke out in lamentation. Most of them went threshing about the gully till the delicate fox trail was covered by a maze of dog tracks; but one old fellow, who had been through the same mill before, lay down in an open spot and rolled about on his back, his feet in the air, as if to say, “Well, here’s the end of this chase.” Another veteran with furrowed face and a deep, sad voice (it was Roby again), managed to nose out half the puzzle, for he came creeping up over the edge of the gully at the point where the fox had first leaped out; but there he ran up and down, up and down, finding plenty of fresh scent everywhere without being able to follow it to any end except the empty vines. Another hound, a youngster with a notion in his head that anything which runs must go ahead, plunged into the stream, swam it, and went casting about the woods on the farther side.

Meanwhile there was a stir, the ghost of a motion, in the leaning stub. Over the top of it came two furry ears, then a pointed nose and a bright yellow eye. The fox was there, watching every play of the game with intense interest; and in his cocked ears, his inquisitive nose, his wrinkling eyebrows, were the same lively expressions that you see in the face of a fox when he is hunting mice, and thinks he hears one rustling about in the frozen grass.

PLAYERS IN SABLE

In severe weather, when snow lay deep on the silent fields, a few crows would enter the yard in view of my birds’ table, sitting aloof in trees where they could view the feast, but making no attempt to join it. I did not then know that crows are nest-robbers, like the jay, or that the smallest bird at the table was ready to bristle his feathers if one of the black bandits approached too near.