The care of the hens is one of Farmer Brown's boy's duties. It is one
of those duties which most of the time is a pleasure. He likes the
biddies, and he likes to take care of them. Every morning one of the
first things he does is to feed them and open the henhouse so that
they can run in the henyard if they want to. Every night he goes out
just before dark, collects the eggs and locks the henhouse so that no
harm can come to the biddies while they are asleep on their roosts.
After the big snowstorm he had shovelled a place in the henyard
where the hens could come out and exercise and get a sun-bath when
they wanted to, and in the very warmest part of the clay they would
do this. Always in the daytime he took the greatest care to see
that the henyard gate was fastened, for no one knew better than he
how bold Granny and Reddy Fox can be when they are very hungry, and
in winter they are very apt to be very hungry most of the time. So
he didn't intend to give them a chance to slip into that henyard
while the biddies were out, or to give the biddies a chance to stray
outside where they might be still more easily caught.

But at night he sometimes left that gate open, as Granny Fox had
found out. You see, he thought it didn't matter because the hens
were locked in their warm house and so were safe, anyway.

It was just at dusk of the afternoon of the day when Granny and Reddy
Fox had talked over a plan to get one of those fat hens that Farmer
Brown's boy collected the eggs and saw to it that the biddies had gone
to roost for the night. He had just started to close the little
sliding door across the hole through which the hens went in and out in
the daytime when Bowser the Hound began to make a great racket, as if
terribly excited about something.