A Parental Fox An ex-soldier, with whom I was discussing
the opening of the hunting season and the excessive earliness of the cubbing season, told me a strange and moving tale of a pair of foxes in the Great War. The unhappy . vixen coming back to her litter was caught up in the barbed wire . entanglement set up round a battery, and perished. The dogfox, as soon as he dis- covered the tragedy, brought the whole litter of young cubs into the battery itself and there brought them up in safety. It is amazing how the natural fear of man will vanish before a greater fear, a more insistent danger. I know many examples in creatures of very different sorts. The most remarkable,. I think, concerns a hare that crouched between the sportsman's feet when pursued by an ermine (in Canada) and of a lark that crouched in a small boat when pursued by a hawk. .
Previous page
