FOXES AND OTHER NEIGHBORS 235 



and dad stationed me at the end of a run and told 

 me to wait while he drove him up. The fox came, all 

 right, but before I could get a shot he sprang up on 

 a stone wall — we called it a stone fence on Long 

 Island— and sat there directly between me and a 

 herd of sheep. I couldn't fire without hitting a 

 sheep, and he knew it. He just sat and looked at me 

 a minute, with his mouth open and his sides shaking 

 with laughter. If ever an animal laughed, he did. 

 Then he sprang down right into the middle of the 

 flock, and drove them across the pasture, keeping 

 himself surrounded all the way. I never had a 

 chance at him. When dad came up he was mad, I 

 tell you. 'The old fox laughed at me, dad,' I cried. 



" 'Who wouldn't laugh at you?' dad said. I guess 

 he knew I was kind of glad the fox got away. My 

 job now is saving wild things, not killing 'em, and 

 while the foxes get a lot of chickens and hens every 

 year, along with partridges, pheasants, and rabbits 

 (they've got thousands of rabbits the past two 

 winters), I'm not at all sure they don't pay for what 

 they take by their destruction of mice and other 

 objectionable things. Anyhow, they're too smart 

 to destroy." 



Those people, indeed, who have not made an 

 effort to explore the woods and fields have little 

 idea how much wild life still lives close to our hab- 

 itations in the old northeastern states, even of the 

 fur-bearing or flesh-eating breeds, from muskrat and 

 mink and weasels up to wildcats. It will probably 

 surprise most readers to learn that from a single 

 village of two thousand people on the Housatonic 

 River in northwestern Connecticut $15,000 worth of 



