I shall never forget discovering this litter.  When looking down a rabbit-hole I heard a scuffle.  A young cub came up to the mouth of the hole, saw me, and dashed back again into the earth.  This was the smallest place I ever saw cubs laid up in.  The vixen happened to be a very little one.

It is amusing to watch the cubs playing in the corn on a summer’s evening.  If you go up wind you can approach within ten yards of them.  Round and round they gambol, tumbling each other over for all the world like young puppies.  They take little notice of you at first; but after a time they suddenly stop playing, stare hard at you for half a minute, then bolt off helter-skelter into the forest of waving green wheat.

One word more about the scent of foxes.  Not long ago a man wrote to the Field saying that he had proved by experiment that on the saturation or relative humidity of the air the hunter’s hopes depend:  in fact, he announced that he had solved the riddle of scent.  It so happened that for some years the present writer had also been amusing himself with experiments of the same nature, and at one time entertained the hope that by means of the hygrometer he would arrive at a solution of the mystery.  But alas! it was not to be.  On several occasions when the air was well-nigh saturated, scent proved abominable.  That the relative humidity of the air is not the all-important factor was often proved by the bad scent experienced just before rain and storms, when the hygrometer showed a saturation of considerably over ninety per cent.  But there are undoubtedly other complications besides the evaporations from the soil and the relative humidity of the air to be considered in making an enquiry into the causes of good and bad scent.  The amount of moisture in the ground, the state of the soil in reference to the all-important question of whether it carries or not, the temperature of the air, and last, but not by any means least, the condition of the quarry, be it fox, stag, or hare, are all questions of vital importance, complicating matters and preventing a solution of the mysteries of scent.

As the atmosphere is variable, so also must scent be variable.  The two things are inseparably bound up with one another.  For this reason, if after a period of rainy weather we have an anti-cyclone in the winter without severe frost, and an absence of bright sunny days, we can usually depend on a scent.  Instead of the air rising, there is during an anti-cyclone, as we all know, a tendency towards a gentle down-flow of air or at all events a steady pressure, and this causes smoke, whether from a railway engine or a tobacco pipe, to hang in the air and scent to lie breast high.