The Heart of a Dog — Key Ideas to Explore

the National Exhibition of silver foxes. They had spent days at successful fox farms, studying every detail of management and memorising the rigid diet-charts. They had committed to memory every fact and hint in Bulletin No. 1151 of the United States Department of Agriculture—issued for the help of novice breeders of silver foxes.

They had mastered each and every available scrap of exact information concerning the physical welfare of captive silver foxes. But, for lack of half a lifetime’s close application to the theme, their knowledge of fox mentality and fox nature was nil.

Now one may raise chickens or hogs or even cattle, without taking greatly into account the inner workings of such animals’ brains. But no man yet has made a success of raising foxes or their fifth cousin, the collie, without spending more time in studying out the mental than the physical beast.

On the kitchen wall of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., was the printed dietary of silver foxes. On the one library shelf of the kennel was all the available literature on silver fox breeding, from government pamphlets to a three-volume monograph. In the four-acre space within the kennel enclosure were thirty model runways, twenty by twenty feet; each equipped with a model shelter-house and ten of them further fitted out with model brood nests.

In twenty-four of these thirty model runways abode twenty-four model silver foxes, one to each yard at this autumn season—twenty-four silver foxes, pedigreed and registered—foxes whose lump value was something more than $7,400. Thanks to the balanced rations and meticulous care lavished on them, all twenty-four were in the pink of form.

All twenty-four seemed as nearly contented as can a wild thing which no longer has the zest of gambling with death for its daily food and which is stared at with indecent closeness and frequency by dread humans.

But the partners of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., failed to take note, among other things, of the uncanny genius certain foxes possess for sapping and mining; nor that some foxes are almost as deft at climbing as is a cinnamon bear. True, the average silver fox is neither a gifted burrower nor climber. But neither are such talents rare.

For example, King Whitefoot II, in Number 8 run, could have given a mole useful hints in underground burrowing. Lady Pitchdark, the temperamental young vixen in Number 17 run, might wellnigh have qualified as the vulpine fly. Because neither of these costly specimens spent their time in sporadic demonstration of their arts, in the view of humans, those same humans did not suspect the accomplishments.

Then came an ice-bright moonlit night in late November—a night to stir every quadruped’s blood to tingling life and to set humans to crouching over fireplaces. Ten minutes after Rance and Ethan Venner, the kennel partners, finished their perfunctory evening rounds of the yards, King Whitefoot II was blithely at work.

Foxes and other burrowing beasts seek instinctively the corners or the edges of yards, when striving to dig a way out. Any student of their ways will tell you that. Wherefore, as in most fox-kennels, the corners and inner edges of the Stippled Silver yards were fringed with a half-yard of mesh-wire, laid flat on the ground.

Whitefoot chose a spot six inches on the hither edge of a border-wire and began his tunnel. He did not waste strength by digging deep. He channelled a shallow tube, directly under the flat-laid wire. Indeed, the wire itself formed the top of his tunnel. The frost was not yet deep enough or hard enough to impede his work. Nor, luckily for him, did he have to circumnavigate any big underground rock.

In forty-two minutes from the time he began to dig, his pointed black nose and his wide-cheeked stippled black face was emerging into the open, a few inches outside his yard.

Wriggling out of his tunnel, he shook himself daintily to rid his shimmering silver-flecked black coat of such dirt as clung to it. Then he glanced about him. From the nearby wire runs, twenty-three pairs of slitted topaz eyes flamed avidly at him. Twenty-three ebony bodies crouched moveless; the moon glinting bright on their silver stipples and snowy tailtips.

The eyes of his world were on the fugitive. The nerves of his world were taut and vibrant with thrill at his escapade. But they were sportsmen in their own way, these twenty-three prisoners who looked on while their more skilled fellow won his way to liberty. Not a whine, not so much as a deep-drawn breath gave token of the excitement that was theirs. No yelping bark brought the partners out to investigate. These captives could help their comrade only by silence. And they gave him silence to a suffocating degree.