FOXES AND OTHER NEIGHBORS 239 



northern Michigan, two lumbermen saw a fox's den 

 and poked into it. Nothing happened, so they 

 went on. Returning at night, they saw that fresh 

 tracks led from this den to a newly dug burrow not 

 far away, and surmised that the mother fox had 

 moved her family. Thereupon they started digging. 

 As they dug they could hear the fox digging ahead 

 of them in the ground, and it became evident she 

 was tunneling in a circle, to reach the entrance 

 ahead of them and escape. So one of the men dug 

 ahead to cut her off, and the other dug behind her. 

 The latter digger came speedily upon four puppies, 

 and the former reached the old fox herself. She had 

 been forced to abandon most of her litter in her mad 

 effort to escape ; but she was carrying one baby with 

 her, all she could hope to save. Two other men from 

 the same camp found a fox's hole in a fallen, hollow 

 tree and started to chop the family out. In this 

 case the mother drove all the family — five again — 

 up the center of a hollow branch ahead of her. The 

 choppers came upon her from behind. They tied 

 her hind legs together and then tied this thong to a 

 pole, thus pulling her out from a safe distance, for 

 she was fighting mad, and a fox's bite is not a pleas- 

 ant thing. In front of her were the pups, the fore- 

 most one so jammed into the rotten wood near the 

 end of the branch that he could hardly breathe. 

 This litter was more than a month old, and every 

 one of them lived in captivity on the near-by fox 

 farm. 



It is in winter, of course, that you can most 

 readily track a fox and find his hole. Unlike the 

 average dog, he leaves but two prints in the snow 



