260 Animal Life 
preservers, that the badger is found on their estates 
often in considerable numbers. 
He is given to climbing up the hillsides and 
creeping under any piles of stones he may find. 
One naturalist and heather laird talks of him as a 
common tenant of the topmost pile of all, placed 
on the misty summit for the guidance of whomso- 
ever is wont to be abroad. Hach rocky cairn © 
capping the Glenfalloch range of the Grampians 
has its family of badgers. They seem to prosper 
on the foggy ptarmigan ground immediately beyond 
the heather and the grouse. Up there he can do 
little mischief even by chance; he may grub a 
long time ere he comes on one of the few 
scattered nests of the white grouse. His use and 
wont title to his tenement is seldom disturbed, 
except when the mountain fox, in spring, takes 
forcible possession, or without force simply enters 
and becomes a lodger in the pile, as the lowland 
Photograph by J. W. McLellan. ett fox in the earth of the lowland badger. The fox 
COMMON FOX. does not chmb so high, stoppmg short of the 
lonely summit cairn and the bare ptarmigan ground. 
His diet is more restricted, grubs and honey being of little use to him, roots still less. 
With five hungry little ones to look after he wants to be down where the blue hares— 
which form his staple diet—feed on the tender heather tips in the zone of the red 
grouse. : 
If there is no difference between the hill badger and the plain badger, seeing that 
he lives, unchanged, his dull, slow, hidden life, the same is not quite true as between 
the foxes. Though not to the extent of forming a new species, the mountain fox 
has been changed by his habits and moulded by his surroundings. It could not well 
be otherwise. The cub of a mountain fox will be a mountain fox in his turn; born 
in a chance pile on the hillside, he will breed in such another; and reared on mountain 
fare, he will feed on the same. Along the lower margin of his domain he may cross 
with the lowland fox, but only as the mountain hare may—on rare occasions, it 1s 
said not at all—cross with his relative of the plain. Be that as it may, he is the 
nobler animal. He stands higher on his legs, is bigger, broader mm the head, bushier 
in the tail. One describes the foxes of 
the broken Sutherlandshire country as 
almost as tall and powerful as greyhounds. 
He is not a sneak. There are no hen- 
houses about where an easy meal may be 
had, so be he can hoodwink the good 
wife of the cottage, nor pheasantries, nor 
other incentives to low cunning. He feeds 
on the open, where his quarry have learned, 
in the same hard school, how to look after 
themselves, and have, at least, an equal 
chance with him in the game. He differs 
almost as widely as the wild cat from the 
t ~ . 6 a 
Photograph by J. W. McLellan. tame cat, and, curiously enough, in some 
COMMON FOX. of the same ways. 
