ase almost to the cliffs on the distant coast.

One dark and dismal night in December, Vulp, on returning to the home
thickets, failed to find his dam. Her trail was fresh; she had evidently
escaped the day's hunt; but all his efforts to follow her met with no
sort of success. Nature had brought about a separation; in the company
of an adult fox, whose scent lay also on the woodland path, the vixen
had departed from her haunts. The fox-cub remained, however, among the
woodlands where he had learned his earliest lessons, and, for another
year, hunted and was hunted--a vagrant bachelor.

IV.

A CRY OF THE NIGHT.

One starlit night, when in early winter the snow lay thick on the
ground, Vulp heard the hunting call of a vixen prowling through the
pines. A similar call had often reached his ears. Not long after his dam
deserted him, the cry had come from a furze-brake on a neighbouring
hill-top, and, hastening thither, he had wandered long and wearily,
recognising, though with misgiving, his mother's voice. But the exact
meaning of the call, not being a matter for his mother's teaching, was
unknown to him at the time. Now, however, he was a strong, well fed,
fully developed fox, able to hold his own against all rivals, and the
cry possessed for him a strange, new significance: "The night is white;
man is asleep; I hunt alone!" Almost like a big brown leaf he seemed to
drift across the moonlit snow, nearer and nearer to the pines. He paused
for a moment to sniff the trail; then, with a joyous "yap" of greeting,
he bounded over the hedge, reached the aisles of the wood, and
gambolled--again like a big, wind-blown leaf--about the sleek, handsome
creature whose call he had heard. The happy pair trotted off to hunt the
thickets, till, just before dawn, Vulp, eager to show his skill and
training, surprised two young rabbits sitting beneath a snow-laden
tangle of briar and gorse, and gallantly shared the spoil with his
woodland bride. They feasted long and heartily, afterwards journeying to
the banks of a rill, that, like a black ribbon, flowed through the glen;
and there, crouching together at the margin, they lapped the water with
eager, thirsty tongues.

Presently, happening to glance behind along the line of the trail, Vulp
caught sight of another fox, a rival for the vixen's affections,
crouching in some bracken scarcely a dozen yards away. With a low grunt
of rage, he dashed into the fern, but the watchful strang