encouraged to go for him and hunted him again back to the wood, and was
then in turn chased back to its master, After several repetitions of
this performance, the gentleman went home, the fox still following, and
on going in closed the gate behind him, leaving the fox outside, sitting
in the road as if waiting for him to come out again to have some more
fun.

This incident serves to remind me of an experience I had one evening in
King's Copse, an immense wood of oak and pine in the New Forest near
Exbury. It was growing dark when I heard on or close to the ground, some
twenty to thirty yards before me, a low, wailing cry, resembling the
hunger-cry of the young, long-eared owl. I began cautiously advancing,
trying to see it, but as I advanced the cry receded, as if the bird was
flitting from me. Now, just after I had begun following the sound, a fox
uttered his sudden, startlingly loud scream about forty yards away on my
right hand, and the next moment a second fox screamed on my left, and
from that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two foxes, always
keeping abreast of me, always at the same distance, one screaming and
the other replying about every half-minute. The distressful bird-sound
ceased, and I turned and went off in another direction, to get out of
the wood on the side nearest the place where I was staying, the foxes
keeping with me until I was out.

What moved them to act in such a way is a mystery, but it was perhaps
play to them.

Another curious instance of foxes playing was related to me by a
gentleman at the little village of Inkpen, near the Beacon, in
Berkshire. He told me that when it happened, a good many years ago, he
sent an account of it to the "Field." His gamekeeper took him one day