t before a
snowstorm, I'd take a trap and put it in this spot. I'd handle it with
gloves, and I'd smoke it, and rub fir boughs on it to take away the
human smell, and then the snow would come and cover it up, and yet those
foxes would know it was a trap and walk all around it. It's a wonderful
thing, that sense of smell in animals, if it is a sense of smell. Joe
here has got a good bit of it."

"What kind of traps were they, father?" asked Mr. Harry.

"Cruel ones--steel ones. They'd catch an animal by the leg and sometimes
break the bone, the leg would bleed, and below the jaws of he trap it
would freeze, there being no circulation of the blood. Those steel traps
are an abomination. The people around here use one made on the same
principle for catching rats. I wouldn't have them on my place for any
money. I believe we've got to give an account for all the unnecessary
suffering we put on animals."

"You'll have some to answer for, John, according to your own story,"
said Mrs. Wood.

"I have suffered already," he said. "Many a night I've lain on my bed
and groaned, when I thought of needless cruelties I'd put upon animals
when I was a young, unthinking boy--and I was pretty carefully brought
up, too, according to our light in those days. I often think that if I
was cruel, with all the instruction I had to be merciful, what can be
expected of the children that get no good teaching at all when they're
young."

"Tell us some more about the foxes, Mr. Wood," said Mr. Maxwell.

"Well, we used to have rare sport hunting them with fox-hounds. I'd
often go off for the day with my hounds. Sometimes in the early morning
they'd find a track in the snow. The leader for scent would go back and
forth, to find out which way the fox was going. I can see him now. All
the time that he ran, now one way and now another on the track of the
fox, he was silent, but kept his tail aloft, wagging it as a signal to
the hounds behind. He was leader in scent, but he did not like bloody,
dangerous fights. By-and-by, he would decide which way the fox had gone.
Then his tail, still kept high in the air, would wag more violently. The
rest followed him in single file, going pretty slow, so as to enable us
to keep up to them. By-and-by, they would come to a place where the fox
was sleeping for the day. As soon as he was disturbed he would leave his
bed under some thick fir or spruce branches near the ground. This flung
his fresh scent into the air.