In dark winter mornings,or in short winter afternoons,I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp,unable to resist the instinct of the chase,and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals,proving that man was in the rear.The woods ring again,and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond,nor following pack pursuing their Acton.And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy,seeking their inn.They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe,or if he would run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake him;but,having left his pursuers far behind,he stops to rest and listen till they come up,and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts,where the hunters await him.Sometimes,however,he will run upon a wall many rods,and then leap off far to one side,and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent.A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles,run part way across,and then return to the same shore.Ere long the hounds arrived,but here they lost the scent.Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door,and circle round my house,and yelp and hound without regarding me,as if afflicted by a species of madness,so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit.Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox,for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this.One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track,and had been hunting for a week by himself.But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him,for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking,“What do you do here?”He had lost a dog,but found a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue,who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest,and at such times looked in upon me,told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood;and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching,and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road,and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road,and his swift bullet had not touched him.Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit,hunting on their own account,and disappeared again in the woods.Late in the afternoon,as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden,he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox;and on they came,their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer,now from Well Meadow,now from the Baker Farm.For a long time he stood still and listened to their music,so sweet to a hunter's ear,when suddenly the fox appeared,threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace,whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves,swift and still,keeping the ground,leaving his pursuers far behind;and,leaping upon a rock amid the woods,he sat erect and listening,with his back to the hunter.For a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm;but that was a short-lived mood,and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled,and whang!-the fox,rolling over the rock,lay dead on the ground.The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds.Still on they came,and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry.At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground,and snapping the air as if possessed,and ran directly to the rock;but,spying the dead fox,she suddenly ceased her hounding,as if struck dumb with amazement,and walked round and round him in silence;and one by one her pups arrived,and,like their mother,were sobered into silence by the mystery.Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst,and the mystery was solved.They waited in silence while he skinned the fox,then followed the brush a while,and at length turned off into the woods again.That evening a Weston squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds,and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston woods.The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin;but the other declined it and departed.He did not find his hounds that night,but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farmhouse for the night,whence,having been well fed,they took their departure early in the morning.
