BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 53 
watching with guns. Clearly, he’d have to aban- 
don his warm, familiar den for a time, and move 
on to new hunting grounds. So one evening, 
just after sundown, he started off. 
He traveled about twenty miles that night— 
that is, he reached at dawn a place twenty miles 
from his starting point—and never got a thing, 
though he tracked a cottontail a long way, only 
to find it in a hole between two hemlock roots, too 
small for him to enter. At dawn, however, he 
came upon a farm on a back road, well up under 
a mountainside. He heard the hens and rooster 
from afar, and slunk up cautiously. No dog 
barked. The farmer was up, for there was the 
ves, he heard 
smell of wood smoke in the air and 
it now, the ring of milk ina pail. But that came 
from the barn. The hens were in a house behind 
the barn. In front was a high wire fence. Big 
Reddy, from behind a bush, studied the situation. 
The hen-house roof sloped down behind, and he 
could jump to it from the snow. But how about 
the other side? How would he get out again? 
He sneaked a little farther around, till he could 
see into the yard, a look of crafty satisfaction 
