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 collided 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 example 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.