long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the
forest for him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the
smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of
pig, _roast_ pig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no
less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to give
my pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into
that he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not want
to; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, did
not escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into the
wide, sweet woods, my ancestral home.

[Illustration: The little foxes]

XII

THE LITTLE FOXES

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out
from the road:--

"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"

I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region,
and answered:--

"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens
lately."

"Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's been trapped and killed.
Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups
starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 've
hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em." And he
disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so
utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had
had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the
ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling
foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that
spread in every direction about him. I did not see which way he went,
for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing
through the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump to
think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up
and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs
and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after
hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of
little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did
not return.

He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open
field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! I
don't know how he foun