When I shall have been milking and huckleberrying and hen’s nesting and aimlessly wandering over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall have found, it may be, the very last of the woodchuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred years, for the families in the old holes keep multiplying, and the new holes keep multiplying too. But woodchucks are not the only “things,” not the only crop that the farm yields, although it must certainly seem that there can be little room on these scant acres for anything more. My farming, however, is intensive,—from the tops of my tallest pines to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows,—so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chipmunks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits (few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many foxes). Lately I found a den of young foxes within barking distance of the house, but along a stony ridge on the adjoining farm. No one would believe in the number of foxes (or the number of times I have counted the same fox) here on the farm, and this only sixteen miles by the roundabout road from Boston Common! But let him live here—and keep chickens! One day, as we were sitting down to a noon dinner, I heard the hens squawk, and out I tore. The fox had a big black hen and was making off for the woods. I made after the fox. There is a sharp ridge back of the henyard, which was thickly covered with stump sprouts and slashings. The fox took to the ridge. From the house to the henyard it is all downhill, and I wanted that hen. She weighed a good eight pounds,—a load for any fox,—and what with her squawking and flopping, the tangle of brush and the steep hillside, it is small wonder that just short of the top I fell upon her, to the great sorrow of the fox, who held on until I was within reach of him. But such an experience as this, while it would be quite impossible to a summer boarder, is yet a not uncommon experience for my unobserving, fox-hating neighbors. They seldom see more, however; whereas, a study of the lay of the land hereabout reveals a real fox community overlying our farm community like some faint tracing. We humans possess the land by day and the foxes keep to their dens; the foxes possess the land at night and we humans take to our dens. One of the high roads of the foxes runs across the farm. Foxes, like men, are more or less mechanical in their coming and going. They will move within certain well-defined boundaries, running certain definite routes; crossing the stream at a particular ford every time, traveling this ridge and not that, leaving the road at this point, and swinging off in just such a circle through the swamp. One autumn two foxes were shot at my lower bars as they were jumping the little river. Their road crosses the stream here, then leads through the bars, along the base of the ridge, and up my path to the pasture.