TOMMY FOX LEARNS TO HUNT


Tommy Fox was hunting crickets in the field near his mother's house.
Being a young fox, not much more than half-grown, Tommy knew very
little of hunting. In fact, crickets were about the only thing he
could hunt and _catch_. Of course, any one can _hunt_. The hard part
of it is to _catch_ what you are hunting.

Tommy was glad that he knew how to capture crickets, for he was very
fond of them. To be sure, it took a great many crickets to satisfy his
hunger. But they were good when he wanted a light lunch; and there was
fun, too, in hunting them.

This is the way Tommy Fox caught crickets. He would stand very still
in the tall grass and watch sharply. Wherever he saw the grass moving,
Tommy would pounce upon that spot, bringing his two front paws down
tight against the ground. And in the bunch of grass that lay beneath
his paws Tommy almost always found a fat cricket.

There was just one drawback about that kind of hunting. He could catch
crickets only upon still days, when there was no wind; because when
the wind blew, the grass waved everywhere, and Tommy couldn't tell
whether it was crickets or whether it was wind that made the grass
move.

Well, upon this very day when Tommy Fox was amusing himself, and
swallowing crickets as fast as he could grab them, his mother came out
of her house and watched him for a little while. Tommy was feeling