er simply
moved aside, and frisked towards the vixen as she still crouched at the
edge of the stream. In response to this insulting defiance, Vulp hurled
himself on the intruder, and bowled him over into the snow. The fight
was fast and furious; now one gained the advantage, then the other. The
grass beneath them became gradually bared of snow by their frantic
struggles, and marked here and there by a bunch of fur or a spot of
blood. At last the rival fox, his cheek torn badly beneath the eye,
showed signs of exhaustion; his breath came in quick, loud gasps; and
Vulp, pressing the attack, forced him to flee for life to a thicket on
the brow of the slope. There he dwelt and nursed his wounds, till, when
the snow melted, the huntsman's "In-hoick, in-hoick, loo-loo-in-hoick!"
resounded in the coverts, and he was routed from his lair for a last,
half-hearted chase, that ended as Melody pulled him down at a ford of
the river below the woods.

During the period of their comradeship--a period of privation for most
of Nature's wildlings--Vulp taught the vixen much of the lore he had
learned from his mother, while the vixen imparted to him the knowledge
she herself had gained when a cub. He taught her how to steal away from
the covert along the rough, rarely trodden paths between the
farm-labourers' cottages--where the scent lay so badly that the hounds
were unable to follow--directly the first faint notes of a horn, or the
dull thud of galloping hoofs, or the excited whimper of a "rioting"
puppy, indicated the approach of enemies. She taught him to baffle his
foes by chasing sheep across the stubbles, and then passing through a
line of strong scent where his own trail could not readily be
distinguished; also that to cross the river by leaping from stone to
stone in the ford was as sure a means of eluding pursuit as to swim the
pools and the shallows. He taught her, when hard pressed, to leap
suddenly aside from her path, run along the top rail of a fence, return
sharply on her line of scent, and follow, with a wide cast, a
loop-shaped trail, which, with a tangent through a ploughed field or dry
fallow, was usually sufficient to check pursuit till the scent became
faint and cold. And gradually each of these woodland rovers grew
acquainted with the peculiar whims and habits of the other. Vulp loved
to follow stealthily the trail of the rabbit, and then to lie in wait
till some imagined cause of alarm sent Bunny back through the "