THE HUNTED CUB 



For this reason, an inexperienced person may 

 easily imagine that he is a fresh one. 



Clever as a fox is, his mind is strictly limited 

 by experience. Once he has been to a place, 



he can go straight there again by day or night, 

 but if he is forced beyond the boundary of his 

 own particular beat, the limitation of his mind is 

 apt to prove his final undoing. We have known 

 a fox, hard pressed by hounds in country strange 

 to him, go past several places in which he could 

 have found sanctuary. It was quite evident 

 that he did not know about these places, and 

 though he could hardly fail to have seen them as 

 he passed, he was apparently unable to grasp 

 the probability that they might afford him 

 refuge from his enemies. The mind of the fox 

 appears to be a mass of facts, garnered during his 

 wanderings and packed away in his brain for 

 future reference. To these facts he trusts, but 

 anything in the shape of a probability is quite 

 beyond him. 



One often hears it said that a fox hard-pressed 

 by hounds will run round a covert rather than 

 enter it, because in his heated condition the 

 wood is likely to half smother him. Although 

 hunted foxes often do skirt coverts during the 

 course of a run, the woods are usually small ones, 

 and the fox, having probably often visited them 

 before, knows that they contain no safe retreat, 

 and that the mere fact of running through them 

 would only hamper him in his attempt to reach 

 some definite point that he has in mind. We 

 have on many occasions seen a hunted fox enter 

 large woodlands in preference to skirting them, 

 and as a fox would hardly feel the effects of the 

 heat more in a big covert than a small one, it 

 rather points to our theory being the correct one. 



57 



