yn valley, the various scents and sounds were full of meaning, and
constituted a record of the night such as only the woodland folk have
learned fully to understand. The smell of the fox lay strong on a path
between the oaks; with it was mingled the scent of a bird; and a white
feather, caught by a puff of wind, fluttered in the grass: young
Reynard, boldest of an early family in the "earth," had stolen a fowl
from a neighbouring farmyard near the river, and had carried it--not
slung over his shoulders, as fanciful writers declare, but with its tail
almost touching the soil--into the thicket beyond the wood. Rabbits had
wandered in the undergrowth; and, near a large warren, the stale,
peculiar odour of a stoat that had evidently prowled at dusk lingered on
the dewy soil. The signs of blackbirds and pigeons among the loose
leaf-mould were also faint; as soon as night had fallen, the birds had
flown to roost in the branches overhead. The short, coughing bark of an
old fox came from the edge of the wood; and then for some time all was
quiet, till the musical cry of an otter sounded low and clear from the
river beneath the steep.

These familiar voices of the wilderness caused the badger no anxiety;
they told her of freedom from danger; they were to her assuring signals
from the watchers of the night. But the howl of a dog in a distant
farmstead, and the bleat of a restless sheep in the pasture on the far
side of the hill, told her a different story; they reminded her, as the
smell of the fowl had done, that man, arch-enemy of the woodland people,
might in any capricious moment threaten her existence, seeking to
destroy her even while by day she slumbered in her chamber under the
roots of the forest trees.

She crossed the gap, where the river-path joined the down-stream
boundary of the wood, then, with awkward, shambling stride, climbed the
steep pasture, and for a few moments paused to watch and listen in the
deep shadows of the hedge on the brow of the slope. A rabbit, that had
lain out all night in her "seat" beneath the briars, rushed quickly from
the undergrowth, and fled for safety to a burrow in the middle of the
field. A small, dim form appeared for a moment by a wattled opening
between the pasture and the cornfield above, then, with a rustle of dry
leaves, vanished on the further side--a polecat was returning to her
home in a pile of stones that occupied a hollow on the edge of the wood.

Day was slowly breaking