THE BADGER 



distant. Year after year the fox cubs pros- 

 pered and grew up, till one summer the keeper 

 found a fox cub in a field with his head bitten 

 in two and terribly worried. I did not know 

 how to account for it. I watched the vixen 

 and the other cubs one evening to see that 

 they were all right, and saw them, but found 

 they had left the earth and were in the 

 covert. For two years all went well and the 

 foxes were unmolested, and then occurred 

 something that gave me a clue to the death 

 of the cub three years before Two vixens lay 

 in at the badgers' earth, and brought up their 

 families of seven and four respectively, till 

 they were about one-third grown. There 

 were then to my knowledge at least four 

 badgers and twelve foxes in these two earths. 

 On one or two occasions the stillness of the 

 night was broken by the veriest pandemonium 

 at the earth, but still I did not think much 

 of it. At the end of the hunting season, at 

 the end of April, when the cubs were seven 

 or eight weeks old, and a fortnight after the 

 hounds had been through the coverts, I found 

 the largest and finest of the vixens dead, and 



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