The sun went down in a spindrift of pale gold and gray, which faded into a bank of lead-colored cloud. The next morning the woods and fields were dumb with snow. No blue jays squalled, nor white-skirted juncos clicked; neither were there any nuthatches running gruntingly up and down the tree-trunks. There was not even the caw of a passing crow from the cold sky. As I followed an unbroken wood-road, it seemed as if all the wild-folk were gone.
The snow told another story. On its smooth surface were records of the lives that had throbbed and passed and ebbed beneath the silent trees. Just ahead of me the road crossed a circle where, a half-century ago, the charcoal-burners had set the round stamp of one of their pits. On the level snow there was a curious trail of zigzag tracks. They were deep and close-set, and made by some animal that walked flat-footed. I recognized the trail of the unhasting skunk. Other animals may jump and run and skurry through life, but the motto of the skunk is, "Don't hurry, others will." The tracks of the fore-paw, when examined closely, showed long claw-marks which were absent from the print of the hind feet. Occasionally the trail changed into a series of groups of four tracks arranged in a diagonal straight line, which marked where the skunk had broken into the clumsy gallop which is its fastest gait. Most of the time this particular skunk had walked in a slow and dignified manner. By the edge of the woods he had stopped and dug deeply into a rotten log, evidently looking for winter-bound crickets and grubs.
At this point another character was added to the plot of this snow story. Approaching at right angles to the trail of the skunk were the tracks of a red fox. I knew he was red, because that is the only kind of fox found in that part of New England. I knew them to be the tracks of a fox, because they ran straight instead of spraddling like a dog, and never showed any mark of a dragging foot. The trail told what had happened. The first tracks were the far-apart ones of a hunting fox. When he reached the skunk's trail, the foot-prints became close together and ran parallel to the trail and some distance away from it. The fox was evidently following the tracks in a thoughtful mood. He was a young fox, or he would not have followed them at all. At the edge of the clearing he had sighted the skunk and stopped, for the prints were melted deep into the snow. Sometimes an old and hungry fox will kill a skunk. In order to do this safely, the spine of the skunk must be broken instantly by a single pounce, thus paralyzing the muscles on which the skunk depends for his defense; for the skunk invented the gas-attack a million years before the Boche. No living animal can stay within range of the choking fumes of the liquid musk which the skunk can throw for a distance of several feet. The snow told me what happened next. It was a sad story. The fox had sprung and landed beside the skunk, intending to snap it up like a rabbit. The skunk snapped first. Around the log was a tangle of fox-tracks, with flurries and ridges and holes in the snow where the fox had rolled and burrowed. Out of the farther side a series of tremendous bounds showed where a wiser and a smellier fox had departed from that skunk with an initial velocity of close to one mile per minute. Finally, out of the confused circle came the neat, methodical trail of the unruffled skunk as he moved sedately away. Probably to the end of his life the device of a black-and-white tail rampant will always be associated in that fox's mind with the useful maxim, "Mind your own business."