It was not like quail shooting or other sport open to any amateur. It was an art. It called for craft and for experience and for a rudimentary knowledge of the habits of foxes and for perfect marksmanship. Also it required the aid of a well-trained foxhound;—not the type of foxhound the pink coats trail after, in conventional hunting fields—not the spruce foxhound on exhibition at dogshows—but rangy and stringy and wise and tireless dogs of dubious pedigree but vast fox-sense. A veteran hunter with a good hound, in that part of the country and in those days, could readily pay the year’s taxes and improvements on his farm by the fox-pelts he was able to secure in a single month’s roaming of the hills. Wherefore, now that the year’s farmwork was done, these few experts began their season of lucrative and sportless sport. Time and again some gaunt and sad-faced hound, that fall, hit Pitchdark’s confused trail; only to veer from it presently when his nostrils caught the unmistakable dog-scent along with it. Still oftener did a hound cling tenaciously to that trail; only to be outwitted by the vixen’s cleverer manœuvres. Pitchdark had as much genius for eluding pursuit as for climbing unclimbable fences. There are such foxes. In these retreats from pursuing hounds it was she who took up afresh the leadership she had laid down. Ruff followed her, implicitly, in her many mazelike twists and doublings. At first he followed, blindly. But gradually he began to get the hang of it, and to devise collie improvements on the hide-and-seek game. He and she were alone in their wanderings; especially since the hunting season forced them higher among the almost inaccessible peaks of the range. Foxes that crossed their path or happened to sight or scent them fled as ever in terror at the dog-smell. In midwinter, the day after a “tracking snow” had fallen, one Jeffreys Holt, an aged fox-hunter, tramping home with his tired hound at his heels, chanced upon an incredible sight. An animal rounded a bend of rock on a hillside perhaps a hundred yards in front of him; and stood there, stockstill, for a few seconds, sharply outlined against the snow. Then, as Holt stared slackjawed, the creature oozed from sight into a crevice. Holt plunged ahead, urging his weary hound to the chase. But by the time he reached the crevice there was no sign of the quarry. The cleft led through to an opening on the far side of a rocky outcrop. Thence a hundred-yard rib of rock jutted above the snow. Along this, presumably, had the prey fled; for there were no further marks of him in the whiteness. Holt cast his dog futilely upon the trail. He studied the footprints in the snow at the point where first the beast had been standing. Then he plodded home. Whitefoot, from the safety of another double-entry rock-lair, a furlong away, watched him depart. Long immunity had made the big dog-fox overbold. Yet this was the first time human eyes had focused on him for two years.