Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/177

Rh wild rose, elderberry, and buttonbush, laced and interlaced with the choking orange strands of that parasite, the dodder.

Beside the stream, and at times crossing it, a path, trodden deep, twisted in and out of the marsh. It was too narrow to have been made by human feet, nor could any man have found and followed so unerringly the little ridges of dry going hidden away between the bogs and under the lush growth. Packed hard by long years of use, nowhere in the path's whole length did any paw-print show. Only in snow-time was the white page printed deep with tracks like those of a dog, but cleaner cut and running in a straight line instead of spraddling to one side. Nor was there ever in these trails the little furrow which a dragging paw makes. Only a fox could have made that long straight line, where every paw-print was stamped in the soft snow as if with a die. From Cold Spring to Darby Creek the long narrow valley belonged to the fox-folk.

Close beside the spring itself, at the very edge of its fringe of bushes, was a deep burrow that ran out into the open field, and yet was so cunningly hidden by a rock and masked by bushes and long grass that few humans ever suspected that a sly, old, gray fox had lived there for a fox-lifetime, or nearly ten years. His range extended to the swamp on the south, and up through the tangle of little wooded hills and valleys to the north known throughout the countryside as the Ridge.

The other end of Fox Valley, and all the Darby