the woods, this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.

It does more, it throngs him—our fellow mortal of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of his life—none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these wintry fields.

We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bungalow floor. We shall always creep around by the wall, whimpering.

But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.

So must we listen to the winter winds, to the whistle of the soaring hawk, to the cry of the trailing hounds.

I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly, and with almost a command bid me hear the music of the baying pack. There are hollow halls in the swamps that lie to the east and north and west of me, that catch up the cry of the fox hounds, that blend it, mellow it, round it, and roll it, rising and falling over the meadows these autumn nights in great globes of sound, as pure and sweet as the pearly notes of the wood thrush rolling around their silver basin in the summer dusk.

It is a different kind of music when the pack breaks into the open on the warm trail: a chorus then of individual tongues singing the ecstasy of pursuit. My blood leaps; the natural primitive wild thing of muscle and nerve and instinct within me slips its leash, and on past with the pack it drives, the scent of the trail single and sweet in its nostrils, a very fire in its blood, motion, motion, motion in its bounding muscles, and in its being a mighty music, spheric and immortal, a carol, chant and pæan, nature’s “unjarred chime,”—

But what about the fox and his share in this gloria? It is a solemn music to him, certainly, loping wearily on ahead; but what part has he in the chorus? No part, perhaps, unless we grimly call him its conductor. But the point is the chorus, that it never ceases, the hounds at this moment, not the fox, in the leading rôle.

“But the chorus ceases for me,” you say. “My heart is with the poor fox.” So is mine, and mine is with the dogs too. Many a night I have bayed with the pack, and as often, oftener, I think, I have loped and dodged and doubled with the fox, pitting limb against limb, lung against lung, wit against wit, and always escaping. More than once, in the warm moonlight of the early fall, I have led them on and on, spurring their lagging muscles with a sight of my brush, on and on, through the moonlit night, through the day, on into the moon again, and on until—only the stir of my own footsteps has followed me. Then doubling once more, creeping back a little upon my track, I have looked at my pursuers, silent and stiff upon the trail, and, ere the echo of their cry has died away, I have caught up the chorus and carried it single-throated through the wheeling singing spheres.

There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That a fox ever purposely ran a dog to death, would be hard to prove; but that the dogs run themselves to death in a single extended chase after a single fox is a common occurrence here in the woods about the farm. Occasionally the fox may be overtaken by the hounds; seldom, however, except in the case of a very young one or of a stranger, unacquainted with the lay of the land, driven into the rough country here by an unusual combination of circumstances.

I have been both fox and hound; I have run the race too often not to know that both enjoy it at times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago the dogs carried a young fox around and around the farm, hunting him here, there, everywhere, as if in a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox would have led them on a long coursing run across the range. It was early fall and warm, so that at dusk the dogs were caught and taken off the trail. The fox soon sauntered up through the mowing field behind the barn, came out upon the bare knoll near the house, and sat there in the moonlight yapping down at Rex and Dewy, the house dogs in the two farms below. Rex is a Scotch collie, Dewy a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been tail-ender in the pack for a while during the afternoon. Both dogs answered back at the young fox. But he could not egg them on. Rex was too fat, Dewy had had enough; not so the young fox. It had been fun. He wanted more. “Come on, Dewy!” he cried. “Come on, Rex, play tag again. You’re still ‘it.’”

I was at work with my chickens one day when the fox broke from cover in the tall woods, struck the old wagon road along the ridge, and came at a gallop down behind the hencoops, with five hounds not a minute behind. They passed with a crash and were gone—up over the ridge and down into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack had broken, deploying in every direction, beating the ground over and over. Reynard had given them the slip, on the ridge-side, evidently, for there were no cries from below in the swamp.

The noon whistles blew, and leaving my work I went down to re-stake my cow in the meadow. I had just drawn her chain-pin when down the road through the orchard behind me came the fox, hopping high up and down, his neck stretched, his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a white hen of my neighbor’s, he made for her, clear to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher for a better view, he sighted another hen in the front yard, skipped in gayly through the fence, seized her, loped across the road, and away up the birch-grown hills beyond.

The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes before. He had fooled them. He had done it again and again. They were even now yelping at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge. Let them