OX.

Comparatively little seems to be known of the night side of wild life in
this country. Night watching involves prolonged exposure, unremitting
vigilance, absolute quietness; and yet, to the most alert observer, it
often results in nothing but disappointment and vexation.

Some time ago, during the moonlit nights of several months, I kept
watch, near a "set" inhabited by half-a-dozen badgers, a vixen and her
cubs, a rabbit and her numerous progeny, and a solitary little buck
wood-mouse, whose close acquaintanceship I made after I had captured him
in a butterfly-net placed as a spring-trap above his narrow run-way in
the grass. This "set"--which I have already partly described, in writing
of Brock, the badger--seemed to be the common lodging house of the
wood. Its numerous inhabitants, though not on terms of friendship, were,
apparently, not at enmity. The wood-mouse and the rabbits, while
entering or leaving the underground passages, and wandering through the
paths in the wood, took care to avoid their powerful neighbours; the
foxes, believing that out of sight is out of mind, avoided with equal
care all chances of encountering the badgers; and the badgers, sluggish
in movement and tolerant in disposition, refrained from evicting the
foxes or digging out the rabbits.

In the undergrowth, but away from the well worn tracks used by the
creatures as they stole out to feed, I had chosen three hiding places,
representing in their relative positions the corners of a triangle the
centre of which was the main entrance to the "set." I was thus able,
whatever might be the direction of the wind, to lie to leeward and
obtain a clear view of the principal opening, while I incurred but
slight risk of detection, unless the rabbits or the wood-mouse crept
into the brambles.

It was during the last week of watching that my patience received its
best rewards. Almost regularly then, as the shadows deepened before
moonrise, the rabbits stole out, and, sometimes with no hesitation,
sometimes after much cautious reconnoitring and sniffing the air and
"drumming" alarm signals on the mound before their door, hopped along
the paths towards the clover-fields outside the wood. Soon after the
rabbits appeared, the wood-mouse timidly peeped around the corner of the
entrance, and, seeing nothing of his enemy, the brown owl, disappeared,
with a rustle, among the dead leaves that filled a hollow where the old,
disused workings of the "set" h