have to take many precautions to prevent their winter stores being
plundered by the squirrels, who live, as it were, from hand to
mouth.

We see several fresh fox-tracks, and wish for the hound, but there
are no tidings of him. After half an hour's floundering and
cautiously picking our way through the woods, we emerge into a
cleared field that stretches up from the valley below, and just laps
over the back of the mountain. It is a broad belt of white that
drops down and down till it joins other fields that sweep along the
base of the mountain, a mile away. To the east, through a deep
defile in the mountains, a landscape in an adjoining county lifts
itself up, like a bank of white and gray clouds.

When the experienced fox-hunter comes out upon such an eminence as
this, he always scrutinizes the fields closely that lie beneath him,
and it many times happens that his sharp eye detects Reynard asleep
upon a rock or a stone wall, in which case, if he be armed with a
rifle and his dog be not near, the poor creature never wakens from
his slumber. The fox nearly always takes his nap in the open fields,
along the sides of the ridges, or under the mountain, where he can
look down upon the busy farms beneath and hear their many sounds,
the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the cackling of hens, the
voices of men and boys, or the sound of travel upon the highway. It
is on that side, too, that he keeps the sharpest lookout, and the
appearance of the hunter above and behind him is always a surprise.

[Illustration: THE FOX-HUNTER AND HIS HOUND]

We pause here, and, with alert ears turned toward the Big Mountain