Game and game-birds -- Great Britain; Gamekeepers -- Great Britain; Natural history -- Great Britain
The story has a sequel. A town doctor saw the vixen a few moments after
her escape; and happened to find himself sitting next to a M.F.H. at
dinner. The doctor remarked, with a well-meant attempt at affability,
"Foxes seem to be plentiful in your neighbourhood this year." "What
makes you think so?" asked the M.F.H., with encouraging eagerness.
"Why, only the other day, passing your place about noon, I saw a vixen
with cubs trotting across your lawn." The doctor swiftly perceived that
he had let the fox out of the bag, so black was the look that came over
the Master's face. But it was months before he solved the full riddle
of the black look, when he learned that the fox he had seen on the lawn
in broad daylight had only just escaped from her wire-net prison, so
saving herself from the ignominy of being turned down with her cubs.
The keeper finds his game-nests with his eyes, the fox with his nose.
The keeper who must preserve game and preserves foxes takes steps to
overcome the scent of his birds. He sprinkles the neighbourhood of all
the nests he can find with some strong-smelling fluid. But the foulest
or strongest scent will not save a bird when a fox has once seen her.
Fortunately he is not clever enough to know a new trap from an old one,
nor a sound from a broken one, and the keeper finds at nesting-time a
good use for his disused traps, placing them about birds sitting in
dangerous spots. Anything in the shape of scrap-iron the fox suspects;
anything unusual about a nest, such as a piece of newspaper on a bush
near by, will arouse his fears, and possibly save a bird's life. But as
rooks learn to treat scarecrows with contempt, so foxes learn to have
no fear for harmless terrors, and the keeper rings the changes on all
the fox-alarming devices which experience and ingenuity can suggest.
* * * * *
Dog-Washing Days
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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