FOX HUNTING IN AMERICA. 269 
with greater ease and quickness, and the scene becomes ani- 
mating and exciting. Now the masters dash into the chase, 
and with wild, eager yells of bursting excitment, they spur 
after the roaring pack and regardless plunge at headlong 
speed over and through the difficulties of the ground. 
When the woods are free from underbrush, which is often 
the case in Virginia and the Carolinas, the grass and bushes 
being burnt almost annually, many of the sportsmen keep up 
with the dogs, and the fox is frequently in sight. He now 
resorts to some of the manceuvres for which he is famous; 
he plunges into a thicket, doubles, runs into the water, leaps 
on to a log, or perhaps gets upon a worm fence and runs 
along the top of it for a hundred yards, leaping from it with 
a desperate bound and continuing his flight in the vain hope 
of escape. At length he becomes fatigued; he once more 
drives into the closest thickets, where he doubles hurriedly ; 
he hears and even sees the dogs upon him, and as a last resort 
climbs a small tree. The hounds and hunters are almost in- 
stantly at the foot of it, and while the former are barking 
fiercely at the terrified animal, the latter usually determine 
to give him another chance for his life. The dogs are taken 
off to a little distance, and the fox is forced to leap to the 
ground by reaching him with a long pole or throwing a billet 
of wood at him; he is allowed a quarter of an hour before 
the hounds are permitted to pursue him; but he is now less 
able to escape than before, he has become stiff and chill, is 
.800n overtaken, and falls an easy prey, turning, however, 
upon his pursuers, with a fierce despair, and snapping at them 
indomitably, game to the last. 
The extraordinary cunning and sagacity of the Gray Fox 
is so much the constant theme of Southern hunters, that we 
might collect quite a volume of well authenticated stories of 
its feats; but the best of the joke is, that wonderful as are 
the stories they tell of it, we in Kentucky, and wherever the 
Red Fox has yet made its appearance, manage to out-Herod 
