298 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



Profound as seems the stillness of a calm winter's night 

 when we pause to listen in the garden or among the woods, 

 it is seldom long before we hear some significant sound. 

 Sometimes it is the cry of the hunter ; more often the subtle 

 rustling caused by the passage of its timid prey. The brown 

 owl halloos in the woods, or the white one screeches over 

 the cornfield ; at midwinter and early in the year, the bark 

 of the dog-fox comes down from the warm side of the brake. 

 Foxes bark when seeking mates, or when living in compara- 

 tively close attachment to them in the early months of the 

 year before the cubs are born. They hunt in skulking 

 silence ; but the bark of the fox is a sound full of meaning to 

 the keeper and to all others whose thoughts run on the wild 

 life of the countryside. The farmer thinks of his poultry, 

 and reminds himself to look to-morrow at the loose plank in 

 the side of the henhouse ; and the lover of wild life recalls 

 the litter of lithe and chubby cubs which he used to watch 

 playing by the mouth of their earth last Easter-time, and 

 thinks of the other secret woodland existences on which the 

 dog-fox is stealing in enmity to-night. Beneath the peace 

 and darkness of the night the eternal strife of Nature seems 

 always more intense by contrast with the overlying calm. 

 Death never comes more savagely than to the sparrow 

 caught from its sleep by the wood-owl's claws ; and even in 

 the quiet border the gardener knows what a scene of pillage 

 may meet him in the morning, if the wood-mice have already 

 discovered his sprouting crocus-bulbs. 



Wood-mice have been said, and probably with truth, to be 

 the most numerous species of animal in Britain ; the only 

 likely rival to this pre-eminence would be the common rat. 

 But wood-mice abound in outlying woods and copses to which 

 rats seldom penetrate ; and they are also common in many 

 town gardens, though they do not compete with the rat in 



