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 farm dogs from a safe distance when he wanted to discover if they were at home, and played with the fox hounds in an amazing manner.

His stratagems in eluding the pack had often been described by the members of the club at their banquets at the clubhouse on the bank of the river; the river that ran through the meadows where Redcoat hunted mice; the river which with very thin ice had saved the wary red fox more than once. The old dodges such as back-tracking, and then jumping upon a boulder and then away by a series of leaps from stone to stone, was too old to need description. But Redcoat had several variations of that dodge, which were most successful. There was the old dodge of making a fox and geese track of the trail, and then leaving it by a back track, or running in the brook, and upon the railroad track. This latter dodge was a favorite strategy and one that had often non-plussed the pack. Then he would run in a skunk's track, if he could find one, until the pack could not tell whether they were following