How Animals Talk 



dinary sense-perception. Out of several examples 

 that occur to me, here are two which especially 

 challenge the attention: 



One early spring a she-fox was caught in her den, 

 some five miles from the village where I then 

 harbored. She was carefully bagged, carried a few 

 rods to an old wood road, placed in a wagon and 

 driven over country highways to the village, where 

 she was confined in a roomy pen in a man's door- 

 yard. A few nights later came a snowfall, and 

 in the morning there were the tracks of a male 

 fox heading straight to the vixen and making a 

 path round about her pen. She was his mate, 

 presumably, and when we found his tracks our 

 first feeling of admiration at his boldness was soon 

 replaced by the puzzling question of how he had 

 found her so quickly and so surely. To answer 

 that question, if possible, I followed his back 

 trail. 



Now the trail of a fox in the wilderness, where 

 he is sometimes hunted by wolves or other hungry 

 prowlers, is a bewildering succession of twistings 

 and crisscrosses; in a settled region, where his 

 natural enemies are extinct, his trail is bolder, 

 more straightforward, easier to read; and in 

 either case you can quickly tell by the "signs" 

 whether your fox is male or female, whether hunt- 

 ing or roaming, or hungry or satisfied. Also you 



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