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Page 19
The black-and-gray pup snarled furiously, and the vixen leaped backward
on the instant. Reflection made her scornfully ashamed of this movement,
and she stepped delicately forward again. The smaller pup whimpered
fearfully, and that was the poor thing's death-knell. The vixen promptly
broke its neck with one snap of her powerful jaws and dragged the little
creature out into the sunshine. All this time Master Black-and-Gray had
been growling fiercely--his entire small body quivering under the strain
of producing this martial sound. His fat back was pressed hard against
the rear wall of the cave--partly, perhaps, to give him courage, and
partly, no doubt, by way of getting a better purchase, so to say, for
the task of growling, which really required all his small stock of
strength.
Outside the cave, in the sunshine, the vixen was sniffing and nosing at
the body of the puppy she had killed. She presented her flank to
Black-and-Gray's view, and, for herself, could see nothing inside the
cave now. Black-and-Gray had seen his sister slain. The blood of great
aristocrats and heroes was in his veins. His wrath was tremendous,
overwhelming, in fact, and, but for the support of the cave's wall,
would certainly have been too much for his still uncertain sense of
balance. Suddenly now his ancestry spoke in this undeveloped creature.
Determination took and shook him, and spurred him forward. With a sort
of miniature roar--the merest little mixture of breathless growl, snarl,
and embryonic bark--he blundered forth from his dark corner, hurtling
over the cave's floor at a gait partaking of roll, crawl, and gallop,
and flung himself straight at the well-furred throat of the unsuspecting
vixen.
Even as an accomplished swordsman may be wounded by the unexpectedness
of the onslaught of some ignorant youngster who hardly knows a sword's
pommel from its point, so this murderously inclined vixen was bowled
over by the astounding attack of Master Black-and-Gray. The slope was
very steep and the pup's spring a bolt from the blue. The vixen slipped,
lost her footing, and went slithering down the dry grass from the ledge,
snapping at the air as she slid, with bites, any one of which would
easily have closed Black-and-Gray's career if they had reached him. But
the puppy was quite powerless to put on the brake, so to say, and his
progress down the slope was therefore far more rapid than that of the
vixen. The breath was entirely knocked out of Black-and-Gray when he
finally was brought up, all standing, by a sharp little rise of ground
alongside the gap past which one saw across the Sussex weald from
Desdemona's cave. Here it seemed he must pay the ultimate penalty of his
unheard-of temerity, and be despatched by the now thoroughly angered
vixen at her leisure.
But in that same moment a number of other things happened. In the first
place, having reached it from the far side of the ridge, Desdemona
appeared beside the mouth of her cave, dangling a young rabbit from her
jaws. In the second place, Finn appeared, climbing from the landward
side, in the gap beside which the puppy came to the end of its long
tumbling flight. Midway between the gap and the cave, the startled vixen
crouched on the slope, turning her head from the terrible vision of
Finn, upward to the scarcely less alarming vision of Desdemona, now
sniffing in the fact of her little daughter's murder.
The position was a parlous one for the vixen, and as she pulled herself
together for flight along the side of the slope she doubtless regretted
bitterly the curiosity which had impelled her to visit the den of her
departed relative.
The vixen leaped warily and doubled with real agility. But Finn was
easily her master in the arts of the chase, and his strength was ten
times greater than that of any fox in Sussex. The vixen was still well
within sight from Desdemona's cave when her time came. She leaped and
snapped, and faced overwhelming odds without wavering, but her race was
run when the wolfhound's great weight bore her to the earth and his
massive jaw closed about her ruff as a vise grips wood.
And in the moment of the vixen's death, just as Master Black-and-Gray so
far recovered his breath and his senses as to sit up and take stock of
himself; a pony's nose appeared in the gap alongside him and introduced
another new experience into this adventurous puppy's life. The pony must
have appeared to his gaze very much as an elephant would appear to a
child upon first view. But Black-and-Gray growled threateningly, though
he did take two or three backward steps. On the pony's back sat Betty
Murdoch, who now slid to the ground and knelt down beside the pup.
Then Desdemona came shuffling down the slope with reassuring little
whines of response to her son's growling. And to these there came Finn,
a trifle winded, and bearing traces of blood and fur about his bearded
gray muzzle. So Master Black-and-Gray, whose knowledge of his
fellow-inhabitants of the earth had hitherto been confined to Finn and
Desdemona and his own brothers and sisters--now defunct--found himself,
at the close of this most adventurous afternoon, the center of an
admiring, wondering circle formed by his mother and her wolfhound mate,
and the pony and Betty Murdoch. Having regarded each one among his
audience in turn questioningly, he finally waddled out to his mother and
thrust his somewhat bruised little nose greedily into her hanging dugs,
so that Desdemona, forgetful for the moment of other matters, was
impelled to lower herself to the turf and yield sustenance to her only
surviving offspring.
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