A SENTIMENTALIST ON FOXES

It was inevitable in these tremendous times that among the many voices suggesting various drastic measures for our salvation, those of Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, the poultry farmers, should be heard loud as any advocating the extirpation of foxes, a measure, they say, which would result in a considerable addition to the food supply of the country in the form of eggs and chickens. Even so do the fruit-growers remind us in each recurring spring that it would be an immense advantage to the country if the village children were given one or two holidays each week in March and April, and sent out to hunt and destroy queen wasps, every wasp brought in to be paid for by a bun at the public cost. That the wasp, an eater of ripe fruit, is also for six months every year a greedy devourer of caterpillars and flies injurious to plant life, is a fact the fruit-grower ignores. The fox, too, has his uses to the farmer, seeing that he subsists largely on rats, mice, and voles, but he has a greater and nobler use, as the one four-footed creature left to us in these islands to be hunted, seeing that without this glorious sport we should want horses for our cavalry, and men of the right kind on their backs, to face the Huns who would destroy us.

Apart from all these questions and considerations, which humanitarians would laugh at, the fox is a being one cannot help loving. For he is, like man’s servant and friend the dog, highly intelligent, and is to the good honest dog like the picturesque and predatory gipsy to the respectable member of the community. He is a rascal, if you like, but a handsome red rascal, with a sharp, clever face and a bushy tail, and good to meet in any green place. This feeling of admiration and friendliness for the fox is occasionally the cause of a qualm of conscience in even the most hardened old hunter. “By gad, he deserved to escape!” is a not uncommon exclamation in the field, or, “I wish we had been able to spare him!” or even, “It was really hardly fair to kill him.”

Here let me relate an old forgotten fox story--a hunting incident of about eighty years ago--and how it first came to be told. When J. Britton, a labourer’s son in a small agricultural village in Wiltshire, and in later life the author of many big volumes on the “Beauties of England and Wales,” came up to London to earn a precarious living as bottle-washer, newspaper office boy, and in various other ways, it was from the first his ambition to see himself in print, and eventually, because of his importunity, he was allowed by a kindly editor to write a paragraph relating some little incident of his early years. What he wrote was the fox story--a hunting incident in the village that had deeply impressed his boy mind. The fox, hard pressed, and running for dear life, came into the village and took refuge in a labourer’s cottage, and entering by the kitchen door, passed into an inner room, and, jumping into a cradle where a baby was sleeping, concealed himself under the covering. The baby’s mother had gone out a little way, but presently seeing the street in a commotion, full of dogs and mounted men, she flew back to her cottage and rushed to the cradle, and plucking off the coverlet saw the fox snugly curled up by the side of her child, pretending to be, like the baby, fast asleep. She snatched the sleeping child up, then began screaming and beating the fox, until, leaping out of the cot, he fled from that inhospitable place, only to encounter the whole yelling pack at the threshold, where he was quickly worried to death.

The editor was so pleased with the anecdote that he not only printed it but encouraged the little rustic to write other things, and that is how his career as a writer began.

Now, albeit a sentimentalist, I would not say that the fox took refuge in a cradle with a sleeping baby and pretended to be asleep just to work on the kindly, maternal feelings of the cottage woman and so save his life, but I do say, and am pretty sure that not one of the Hunt and not a villager but felt that the killing of that particular fox was not quite the right thing to do, or not altogether fair.

This incident has served to remind me of another from South America, told to me by an Anglo-Argentine friend as we sat and talked one evening in Buenos Ayres, comparing notes about the ways of beasts and birds. The fox of that distant land is not red like his English cousin; his thick coat is composed of silver white and jet black hairs in about equal proportion, resulting in an iron grey colour, with fulvous tints on the face, legs and under parts. If not as pretty as our red fox, he is a fine-looking animal, with as sharp a nose and as thick a brush, and, mentally, does not differ in the least from him. He is not preserved or hunted in that country, but being injurious to poultry, is much persecuted.

My friend had been sheep farming on the western frontier, and one winter evening when he was alone in his ranch he was sitting by the fire whiling away the long hours before bed-time by playing on his flute. Two or three times he thought he heard a sound of a person pressing heavily against the door from the outside, but being very intent on his music, he took no notice. By and by there was a distinct creaking of the wood, and getting up and putting down his flute he took up the gun, and, stepping to the door, seized the handle and pulled it open very suddenly, when down at his feet on the floor of the room tumbled a big dog fox. He had been standing up on his hind legs, his fore feet pressed against the door and his ear at the keyhole, listening to the dulcet sounds. The fox rolled on the floor, frightened and confused by the light; then, picking himself up, dashed out, but before going twenty yards he pulled up and looked back just when the gun was at my friend’s shoulder. There had been no time for reflection, and in a moment Reynard, or Robert as we sometimes call him, was on the ground bleeding his life out.

I did not like the end of his story, and I fancied, too, from his look that he rather hated himself for having killed that particular fox, and regretted having told me about it.

In another instance which remains to be told, the fox, in England this time, who had got into trouble, and was in dire danger, was saved not once, but twice, just because there was time for reflection. It was told to me at Sidmouth by an old fisherman well known to the people in that town as “Uncle Sam,” a rank sentimentalist, like myself, to whom birds and beasts were as much as human beings. It chanced that in 1887 he was occupied in collecting materials for a big bonfire on the summit of Barrow Hill, a high hill on the coast west of the town, in preparation for Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee, when one day, on coming down from his work, he met a band of excited boys, all armed with long, stout sticks, which they had just cut in the adjacent wood.

Uncle Sam stopped them and told them he knew very well what they were after; they had got their sticks to beat the bushes for birds, and he was determined to prevent their doing such a thing. The boys all cried out, denying that they had any such intention, and told him they had found a fox caught in a steel trap with one of its fore legs crushed, and as it would perhaps be a long time before the keeper would come round, they were going to kill the fox with their sticks to put it out of its misery. Uncle Sam said it would be better to save its life, and asked them to take him to the spot. This they did willingly, and there, sure enough, was a big fine fox held by one leg, crushed above the knee. He was in a savage temper, and with ears laid back and teeth bared he appeared ready to fight for his life against the crowd. Uncle Sam made them place themselves before the tortured beast, and tease him with their sticks, pretending to aim blows at his head. He in the meantime succeeded in setting the end of his stick on the shaft of the gin, and, pressing down, caused the teeth to relax their grip, and in a moment the fox was free, and, darting away, disappeared from their sight in the wood.

A year or so later, Uncle Sam heard of his rescued fox, a three-legged one, the crushed limb having fallen or been gnawed off. He had been seen near that spot where he had been caught. This was close to the highest part of the wall-like cliff, and he had a refuge somewhere among the rocks in the face of it some forty or more feet below the summit. Those, too, who walked on the sands beneath the cliff sometimes saw his tracks--the footprints of a three-legged fox. Doubtless he had modified his way of life, and subsisted partly on small crabs and anything eatable the sea cast up on the beach, and for the rest on voles and other small deer obtainable near the cliff. At all events he was never met with at any distance from the sea, and was in no danger from the Hunt, as he was always close to his fortress in the precipitous cliff.

One day a farmer, the tenant of the land at that spot, who was out with his gun and walking quickly on the narrow path in the larch wood close to the cliff, looking out for rabbits, came face to face with the three-legged fox. He stopped short, and so did the fox, and the gun was brought to the shoulder and the finger to the trigger, for it is a fact that foxes _are_ shot in England by farmers when they are too numerous, and in any case here was a useless animal for hunting purposes, since he had but three legs. But before the finger touched the trigger, it came into the man’s mind that this animal had done him no harm, and he said, “Why should I kill him? No, I’ll let him keep his life,” and so the fox escaped again.

More was heard from time to time about the three-legged fox, and that went on until quite recently--about four years ago, I was told. If we may suppose the fox to have been two or three years old when caught in a trap, and that he finished his life four or five years ago, he must have lived about twenty-six years. That would be a much longer period than the domestic dog has, and for all I know the fox may be living still, or, if dead, he may have ended his life accidentally.