The Fox and the Hound (15 page)

In spring, game was so plentiful that Tod had no trouble killing all he needed for both himself and the vixen; his main trouble was transportation. Tod carried all his kills in his mouth - even with comparatively large quarry like a pheasant he never slung it over his shoulder - and when the results of a night’s hunting were a mixed bag suck as ten mice, a pigeon, a starling, and a muskrat, it would have required several trips to get them all to the scrub-oak patch. Tod hit on an ingenious solution to the difficulty. Once when he was returning with a mouthful of four mice, he came on two cock pheasant fighting. This was too good a chance to miss, and dropping the mice, Tod slunk up on the birds, crawling on his belly through the bunchgrass. He got one bird and then came the problem of transportation, for Tod refused to leave the mice. After some thought, he neatly tucked the mice under the pheasant’s wing - two mice under each wing - and then triumphantly carried the whole load to the den.

It was nearly a month before the pups' eyes opened, which was lucky for the vixen, as they were such restless little things they would have crawled out of the den in spite of her best efforts and in their helpless state would have fallen easy victims to any passing predator, even a crow. When their eyes did open they were a blue-gray, only slowly turning to the yellow amber of the adult fox. They were still in their baby wool, and except for their long noses and triangular heads, looked more like baby lambs than foxes. Instead of being black, their noses were flesh colored, and they still had their baby teeth. They were very clumsy, and fell over themselves rather than walked, but at the end of five weeks they could scamper around. From then on their progress was rapid.

        The vixen was now in the process of weaning them. She was running out of milk, and the constant nursing that had at first given her such exquisite satisfaction and made her adore the pups was now becoming more and more of a nuisance. When the constant pushing and worrying at her teats became too irritating and she would turn on her stomach; if the pups insisted she would walk away and leave them. Now that the first flush of delight in them was passing with the end of her milk, she became more of a disciplinarian. When the strongest and most aggressive of the pups rushed at her to demand his right to nurse, she whiled on him with a sudden snarl that made him fall over on his back in astonishment. She allowed Tod to approach the litter and even permitted him to clean out the pups’ anuses with his tongue, a right she had always reserved for herself. Without the cleaning, the pups’ rectums would soon have become clogged and they would have died. As the pups exercised more and gained more control over their body functions, their feces became harder, so the parents abandoned the cleaning practice that was no no longer necessary.

As the litter could not as yet eat hard food, the mother fed them by regurgitating food already digested in her own stomach. The pups soon learned to like this stimulating diet more than the plain milk - in fact, they would never lose their taste for it and would eat vomit more readily than any other food. At first the vixen gave them only well-digested food, then partly digested, and finally regurgitated it only a few minutes after eating. When the pups were able to eat that, she brought them freshly killed prey, carefully ripped open, for the pups’ milk teeth could not bite through tough hide; and besides, they still had no idea that eatable flesh lay under the hard skin.

        By now the pups were strong enough to leave the den and scramble about outside. Their active minds had become bored with the dark, uninteresting den and they were delighted, if a little alarmed, by the world outside. Even the dried, hard-packed earth at the den’s opening was a source of wonder to them. They sniffed at stones, nudging the strange objects with their noses, and then leaped back, terrified, when the stones rolled. Feathers were safer. They could bat them around with their paws, grab them as they fluttered down, roll on them, and steal them from each other. The strange smell of the woodchuck hide and the rabbit legs - quite different from the odor of the fresh meat their mother had fed them - at first made the pups suspicious, but as they grew older the rabbit legs made even better toys than the feathers. They staged tugs-of-war with the legs, pounced on them, and shook them ferociously.

During these sports the vixen would lie on the earth mound, watching her children with obvious pride and love, her usual wary look erased by a maternal smile. So entirely did her expression change, she seemed like a completely different animal from the alert huntress, the crawling sycophant, or the furious virago of her former moods.

Tod was nearly as delighted with the pups as his mate, but she was still suspicious and somewhat jealous. If the pups ran to him, she called them off with a quick, hard bark that the pups seemed to recognize instantly as a warning, for they turned away at once, tumbling over themselves to reach either the vixen or the mouth of the burrow. By degrees she relented and let him play with the pups but if any of them seemed too pleased with the game, she would rush in, grab the offender none to gently by the neck and carry him squalling and kicking back to the den.

        Mostly the pups played with each other and learned how to use their teeth, how to jump forward and backward in their mock fights, and how to employ their long forelegs. They also learned from their toys how to grab a moving object, how to get the best purchase on it, and how to hold it steady for a bite. One of the pups was bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than the others, just as one was small and weak - the runt of the litter. As the pups grew older, their playful fights became more serious and real battles raged among them until the biggest pup was able to convince the others that he was the dominant one. Since they were not “pack animals,” the issue of who was the leader was not so serious a consideration as it would be among dogs and wolves, and everyone was glad when the problem was solved and they could relax.

The biggest pup was the first to make a “kill.” While turning over a rabbit skin, he uncovered a burying beetle that tried to scuttle away. The pup regarded the scurrying creature suspiciously, his black nose between his forepaws. Then he knocked it over with one deft pat. The beetle lay kicking its legs in the air, while the pup put his head next to the ground and regarded it sideways, not sure what to do next, Ultimately he summoned up enough courage to dispatch it with a nip. Then he ate his first quarry proudly. It was much juicier than the dead food his parents brought him, and he went looking for more, deftly turning over the other skins with his nose after first sniffing under them. The other pups soon got the idea and went beetle hunting on their own. The quest took them off the earth mound and among the oaks, where they knocked the dead leaves about and pulled pieces of bark off trees when their noses told them something was underneath, and a little vixen had a moment of supreme triumph when she found a white-footed mouse with squirming young clinging to her teats, hampering her escape. This was the first warm-blooded quarry any of them had seen alive, and the scent of it drove them all wild. The vixen had a hard time keeping her quarry from her rapacious siblings, but she managed to tear it to pieces and swallow it while they were picking up the dropped babies.

        The mother had been watching this exploit, and the next day she brought them in a live mouse and dropped it in the midst of the litter. The pups never hesitated; they tore it to bits in an instant. After a few more mice, the mother brought in a live rabbit paralyzed by a bite across the loins, yet still able to kick. This was more fearsome quarry and none dared to do more than sniff at the monster until the biggest bravely rushed in. The rabbit gave a frantic kick that sent the pup running in terror, at which the mother promptly sprang in and dispatched the rabbit with one scientific neck nip. Even so, it was some time before the pups would break into the corpse. They got dead rabbits after that until they had overcome their fear. Then Tod brought in another wounded rabbit. This time the biggest pup was able to kill it. He dragged his prey away and stood guard over it, snarling at the others, refusing to eat for fear they might get some too. He was so excited at his victory that he forgot his hunger and ended by eating only the head.

The biggest pup was a bully, and whenever either of the parents brought in food, alive or dead, he would charge forward, grab it as his right, and then if he was not especially hungry sit on it to keep the others away. I-laving learned that rabbits and small birds could not hurt him, he rushed in recklessly, seizing the quarry wherever was easiest and often not bothering to kill it after he had carried it off. The big cub was the vixen's favorite and she indulged his antics, but one day when she was not around, Tod brought in a muskrat with a broken leg and dropped it on the earth mound. The big pup rushed vaingloriously in, only to receive a bite that sent him away screaming. Not until the rest of the litter had worried the crippled animal until it was too exhausted to resist did he return to deliver a death bite. After that he was much more cautious about how he blundered in blindly, and always killed the quarry as quickly as possible.

        The pups seldom came out in daytime. When the sun dropped, a head would appear at the den’s mouth with huge ears pricked for the slightest noise and the big baby eyes eager and curious. After a careful check, the pup would emerge and start foraging. He would first examine the remnants of food left around the den, grab a bird's wing and shake it ferociously, and then roll on his back, steadying the wing with all four feet. By now another pup would appear and take a flying leap on his brother. Both pups would roll around, growling and pretending to bite. Such mimic fights could still lead to real combats, but the rest of the litter would come out to join the fun. Then there were games - hide-and-seek, Icing of the castle, tag, and follow the leader in which the parents often joined. The whole family would race through the woods, Tod leading, then the biggest pup, then the vixen, and then the rest of the family strung out in a long line. They seemed held together by an invisible string, and no matter how Tod dodged and ducked through the cover, the rest followed him, nose to brush, until all were tired. Then they played hide the thimble. The parents had left dead mice, birds, and rabbits in the cover, some in plain sight, others under leaves. The pups had to find them. The litter spread out while the parents watched how they used their noses and eyes to find the caches. When it was time for Tod to check his scent posts and do some hunting on his own, he would lope away while the vixen called the pups to her with the single shrill bark.

        The pups learned by imitating their parent, since, except for a few calls, the adults made no sound. The pups were instinctively cautious - they were afraid of every new object, be it a stone, a toad, or a new type of quarry brought in by their parents. Watching the adults, they learned what creatures in this strange new world were dangerous and which were not. A screaming mother robin diving at your head was not dangerous, but a great horned owl drifting by on silent wings was - the instant reactions of their parents told them as much The scent of cattle meant nothing, but the scent of a passing dog did. Left to themselves, the pups should have been more alarmed of a cow than of a dog - they would probably have regarded the dog as another fox - but the tensing of their parents when dog scent was in the air taught them differently. They were highly imitative, even following exactly in the vixen's footsteps when she took them out for their first hunting lessons. the whole family walking in single file. Their reflexes were lightning quick; and at first they had no idea how to control them, so they were constantly "jumpy." As there grew in confidence, they kept their alertness but tempered it with knowledge. They could be quick as red flashes when necessary, yet they seldom made an unnecessary move.

The parents were amazingly shrewd in some matters concerning the den and young, yet surprisingly stupid in others. They always approached the den from downwind to detect the presence of any enemy, and checked the cover to see if any humans had found their home. If so. the vixen was prepared to move the pups instantly to another burrow that she had already selected to  use in emergencies. On the other hand they made no attempt to conceal the den entrance. and as the pups grew older they left a series of trails through the cover and on the adjacent hillside all pointing toward the den entrance like the spokes of a wheel. The refuse of the prey they left lying around immediately marked the entrance as an occupied fox den, yet this never occurred to the pair. They did not kill near the den and the farmer's roosters, who could be heard crooning every morning from a nearby farm, were quite safe from the parents. This was not from fear of retribution - there were several rabbits and low-nesting birds in the cover who shared the same immunity - but rather because they did not like to call attention to the den by hunting near it, and slipped away from the sacred spot as quietly and inconspicuously  as possible.

The pups' first hunting exploits were directed mainly against insects, with a rare mouse. They learned to catch May beetles and June bugs, making graceful sinuous observation leaps to clear high grass while watching the progress of their prey. Later, the vixen took them to the cow pasture and showed them how to turn over cow flops to get the dung beetles underneath. They could sneak up on crickets, spotting the insects' position by their chirping or by slight noises with marvelous accuracy. They also learned how good fresh grass tastes, new buds and berries. They discovered that a skunk was not such easy prey as he seemed although the biggest cub required a personal demonstration of this fact before he was convinced, and had to roll in a mud wallow afterward - and that a nest of yellow jackets are not to be dug up as casually as an ants' nest. The pup who made this mistake also had to take a trip to the wallow. The pups were perfectly content to live on these easily obtained food sources, and reluctant to exert themselves to catch other prey. In fact, so reluctant were they to learn the strenuous and occasionally dangerous techniques of hunting big game that few if any of them would have survived the winter when neither insects nor plants would be available. The parents knew this, but they had no way of conveying their knowledge to the cubs except to encourage them by example to hunt warm-blooded quarry. As the pups would rather play than hunt, the parents' efforts were not noticeably successful.