him that just in front of his hungry nose a 

 grouse was hidden, all unconscious of dan- 

 <£fhe O/'Beec/i ger. I found the spot, trailing the fox, a few 

 ^TvTr/tfge hours later. How cautious he was ! The sly 

 jfc^ trail was eloquent with hunger and antici- 



pation. A few feet away from the promising 

 hole he had stopped, looking keenly over the 

 snow to find some suspicious roundness on 

 the smooth surface. Ah ! there it was, 

 just by the edge of a juniper thicket. He 

 crouched down, stole forward, pushing a deep 

 trail with his body, settled himself firmly and 

 sprang. And there, just beside the hole his 

 paws had made in the snow, was another 

 hole where the grouse had burst out, scat- 

 tering snow all over his enemy, who had 

 miscalculated by a foot, and thundered away 

 to the safety and shelter of the pines. 



There was another enemy, who ought to 

 have known better, following the old beech 

 partridge all one early spring when snow 

 was deep and food scarce. One day, in 

 crossing the partridge's southern range, I 

 met a small boy, — a keen little fellow, with 

 the instincts of a fox for hunting. He had 



