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Updated: May 2, 2025
"These Letters-Patent," continued Sir Giles, taking two parchment scrolls with large seals pendent from them from Lupo Vulp, and displaying them to the assemblage, "these Royal Letters," he repeated in his steady, stern tones, and glancing round with a look of half-defiance, "passed under the great seal, and bearing the king's sign-manual, as ye see, gentlemen, constitute the authority on which I act.
There was Captain Bludder, with his braggart air, attended by some half-dozen Alsatian bullies; Lupo Vulp, with his crafty looks; and the tipstaves all, in short, were present, excepting Clement Lanyere, and Sir Giles knew how to account for his absence.
The happy pair trotted off to hunt the thickets, till, just before dawn, Vulp, eager to show his skill and training, surprised two young rabbits sitting beneath a snow-laden tangle of briar and gorse, and gallantly shared the spoil with his woodland bride.
Thus it happened that he scarcely ventured, during the day, to attack even a young rabbit that frisked near his lair, lest, screaming to its dam for help, it should bring a very bedlam about his ears. While roaming abroad in the summer night, Vulp gradually became acquainted with all sorts of vermin-traps used by the keepers.
An adult fox, as a rule, does not pay frequent visits to a farmstead; but Vulp, like his sire, was passionately fond of poultry, and so, in after years, the vixen's instructions caused him to become the dread of every henwife in the district.
The fox-cub remained, however, among the woodlands where he had learned his earliest lessons, and, for another year, hunted and was hunted a vagrant bachelor. One starlit night, when in early winter the snow lay thick on the ground, Vulp heard the hunting call of a vixen prowling through the pines. A similar call had often reached his ears.
No wonder, then, that subsequently his manner towards an occasional hibernating wasp among the moss-roots in the gravel-pit was deferential in the extreme! Vulp and his mate soon learned that in rabbit-hunting it was exceedingly profitable to co-operate. Thus, while the vixen "lay up" near a warren, Vulp skirted the copse and chased the conies home towards his waiting spouse.
Frequently she scented a rabbit in a clump of fern or gorse after Vulp had passed it by; suddenly stopping, she would tell her lord of her discovery by signs he readily understood, and then, while he kept outside the tangle, would pounce on the coney in its retreat, or start it helter-skelter into his very jaws.
"But there is no proof that Osmond Mounchensey is living, your Highness," observed Lupo Vulp. "He has not been heard of for many years not, indeed, since the time when his debts were paid by Sir Ferdinando. Though Sir Giles has used every exertion for the purpose, he has never been able to discover any traces of him and it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that he is no more."
Presently, happening to glance behind along the line of the trail, Vulp caught sight of another fox, a rival for the vixen's affections, crouching in some bracken scarcely a dozen yards away. With a low grunt of rage, he dashed into the fern, but the watchful stranger simply moved aside, and frisked towards the vixen as she still crouched at the edge of the stream.
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