BEAUTY OF THE FOX

It is only by a fortunate chance, a rare conjunction of circumstances, that we are able to see any wild animal at its best. And by animal it must be explained is here meant a hair-clothed vertebrate that suckles its young and goes on four feet.

Chiefly on this account it would be hard in any company of men well acquainted with our fauna to find two persons to agree as to which is the handsomest or prettiest of our indigenous mammals.

Undoubtedly the stag, one would exclaim: another would perhaps venture to name the field-mouse, or the dormouse, or the water-vole, that quaint miniature beaver in his sealskin-coloured coat, sitting erect on the streamlet’s margin busily nibbling at the pale end of a polished rush stalk which he has cut off at the root and is now holding clasped to his breast with his little hands. Any one who had thus seen him, the brown sunlit bank, with its hanging drapery of foliage and flowers for background, reflected in the clear water below, could well be pardoned for praising his beauty and giving him the palm. Another would champion the squirrel, that pretty, passionate creature, most birdlike of mammals; and some white-haired veteran sportsman would perhaps speak in glowing terms of the wild cat as seen in a tearing rage. A word, too, would be spoken for the otter, and the weasel, and the hare, and the harvest-mouse, and the white Chillingham bull, and the wild goat on the Welsh mountains. These two last, after some discussion, would doubtless be disqualified, and the roe and fallow deer entered instead; but no person would say a word about the wolf and wild boar, the last of these noble quadrupeds having been slain by some Royal hunter half a thousand or more years ago. And no one would mention the marten, or even know whether or not, like the wolf and boar, it had become “part and parcel of the dreadful past.” Some one would, however, put in a plea for the hermit badger--one with sharper sight or more patient than the others, or perhaps more fortunate; and the company would be highly amused.

The rough, grizzled brock, our little British bear, would perhaps be better described as a fearsome or sublime than a beautiful beast. At all events, I lately had a singular instance of the terrifying effect of a badger related to me by a rural policeman in West Cornwall, a giant six feet six in height, a mighty wrestler, withal a sober, religious man, himself a terror to all evil-doers in the place. His beat extends on one side to the border of a wide, level moor, and one very dark night last winter he was at this desolate spot when he heard the distant sound of a horse cantering over the ground. The heavy rains had flooded the land, and he heard the splash of the hoofs as the horse came towards him. “Who could this be out on horseback at twelve o’clock on a dark winter night?” he asked himself; and listened and waited while the sound grew louder and louder and came nearer and nearer, and he strained his eyes to see the figure of a man on horseback emerging from the gloom, and could see nothing. Then it suddenly came into his mind that it was no material horseman, but a spirit accustomed to ride at that hour in that place, and his hair stood up on his head like the bristles on a pig’s back. “It almost lifted my helmet off,” he confessed, and he would have fled, but his trembling legs refused to move. Then, all at once, when he was about to drop, fainting with extreme terror, the cause of the sound appeared--an old dog badger trotting over the flooded moor, vigorously pounding the water with his feet, and making as much noise as a trotting horse with his hoofs. The badger was seven or eight yards away when he first caught sight of him, and the badger, too, then saw a sublime and terrifying creature standing motionless before him, and for a few moments they stared at one another; then the badger turned aside and vanished into the darkness.

To return. It was the sight of a fox that set me speculating on this subject. I have seen more foxes than I can remember, but never one that was the equal of this one; yet he was, I daresay, an ordinary specimen, with nothing to distinguish him from any other large dog fox in good condition with a fine coat of hair and a thick brush. It was in Savernake Forest that, on emerging from a beech-wood, I noticed at a distance of seventy to eighty yards away on the wide green level open space before me a number of rabbits sitting up at the mouths of their burrows, all staring in wide-eyed alarm in one direction. Not at me, but towards a patch of dead rust-red bracken, some clumps of which were still standing, although the time was now the end of March. At intervals some of the rabbits would drop their fore-feet down and begin nibbling at the grass; then in a moment they would all start up and stare once more at the patch of bracken. I walked slowly to this red patch, and when I approached it a large fox got up and moved reluctantly away. The rough red fern on which he had been lying had made him invisible to me until he moved; but he had been plainly visible to the rabbits all the time. He trotted quietly away to a distance of about forty yards, then stopped, and half turning round, stood regarding me for some time. Standing on that carpet of vivid green spring grass, with the clear morning sunlight full on him, his red colour took an intensity and richness never previously seen. In form he appeared no less distinguished than in colour. His sharp, subtle face, large, leaf-shaped pointed ears, black without and white within, and graceful bushy tail, gave him the appearance of a dog idealised and made beautiful; and he was to the rough brown or red common dog what the finest human type--a model for a Phidias or a Praxiteles--is to a Connemara peasant or a Greenlander.