In another quarter-hour the starving pup was sniffing about the locked kitchen door of a farmhouse. Within, he could smell milk and meat and bread. But that was all the good it did him. Timidly he skirted the house for ingress. Almost had he completed the round when a stronger odour smote his senses. It was a smell which, of old he would have disregarded. But, with the primal impulse of famine, other atavistic traits were stirring in the back of his necessity-sharpened brain. His new scent was not of prepared food, but of hot and living prey. Bobby paused by the unlatched door of the farm chicken coop. Tentatively he scratched at the white-washed panel. Under the pressure the door swung inward. Out gushed a pleasant warmth and a monstrously augmented repetition of the whiff which had drawn him to the henhouse. Just above him, well within reach, perched fifteen or twenty feathery balls of varicoloured fluff. And famine did the rest. Acting on some impulse wholly beyond his ken, Bobby sprang aloft and drove his white milk teeth deep into the breast of a Plymouth Rock hen. Instantly, his ears were assailed by a most ungodly racket. The quiet hencoop was hideous with eldritch squawks and was alive with feathers. All Bobby’s natural fear urged him to drop this flapping and squawking hen and to run for his life. But something infinitely more potent than fear had taken hold upon him. Through his fright surged a sensation of mad rapture. He had set teeth in live prey. Blood was hot in his nostrils. Quivering flesh was twisting and struggling between his tense jaws. For the moment he was a primitive forest beast. Still gripping his noisy five-pound burden, he galloped out of the hencoop and across the barnyard; heading instinctively for the lair in which he had found a soft bed and safety from human intruders. As he fled, he heard a man’s bellowing voice. A light showed in an upper window of the house. Bobby ran the faster. The hen was heavy, for so spindling a killer. But Bobby’s overshot jaws held firm. He dared not pause to eat his kill, until he should be safe away from the shouting man. Stumbling into his platform den, half dead with hunger and fatigue, the dog sought his bed of leaves. And there he feasted, rather than ate. For never before had he known such a meal. And when the last edible morsel of it was gorged, he snuggled happily down in his nest and slept. Poultry bones are the worst and most dangerous fare for any domesticated dog. Their slivers tear murderously at throat and stomach and intestines; and have claimed their slain victims by the hundred. Yet, since the beginning of time, wild animals, as foxes and wolves, have fed with impunity on such bones. No naturalist knows just why. And for some reason Bobby was no more the worse for his orgy of crunched chicken-bones than a coyote would have been.