Would she?  Hers was a mother’s love.  There was but one to watch them this time, the fourth night, when the quavering whine of the little one was followed by that shadowy form above the wood-pile.

But carrying no fowl or food that could be seen.  Had the keen huntress failed at last?  Had she no head of game for this her only charge, or had she learned to trust his captors for his food?

No, far from all this.  The wild-wood mother’s heart and hate were true.  Her only thought had been to set him free.  All means she knew she tried, and every danger braved to tend him well and help him to be free.  But all had failed.

Like a shadow she came and in a moment was gone, and Tip seized on something dropped, and crunched and chewed with relish what she brought.  But even as he ate, a knife-like pang shot through and a scream of pain escaped him.  Then there was a momentary struggle and the little fox was dead.

The mother’s love was strong in Vix, but a higher thought was stronger.  She knew right well the poison’s power; she knew the poison bait, and would have taught him had he lived to know and shun it too.  But now at last when she must choose for him a wretched prisoner’s life or sudden death, she quenched the mother in her breast and freed him by the one remaining door.

* * * * *

It is when the snow is on the ground that we take the census of the woods, and when the winter came it told me that Vix no longer roamed the woods of Erindale.  Where she went it never told, but only this, that she was gone.

Gone, perhaps, to some other far-off haunt to leave behind the sad remembrance of her murdered little ones and mate.  Or gone, may be, deliberately, from the scene of a sorrowful life, as many a wild-wood mother has gone, by the means that she herself had used to free her young one, the last of all her brood.