He moved an inch or two forward and stopped.
He sniffed again. He was always especially careful when coming out from his hole.
He inched forward a little more. The front half of his body was now in the open.
His black nose twitched from side to side, sniffing and sniffing for the scent of danger. He found none, and he was just about to go trotting forward into the wood when he heard or thought he heard a tiny noise, a soft rustling sound, as though someone had moved a foot ever so gently through a patch of dry leaves.
Mr Fox flattened his body against the ground and lay very still, his ears pricked. He waited a long time, but he heard nothing more.
'It must have been a field-mouse,' he told himself, 'or some other small animal.'
He crept a little further out of the hole... then further still. He was almost right out in the open now. He took a last careful look around. The wood was murky and very still. Somewhere in the sky the moon was shining.
Just then, his sharp night-eyes caught a glint of something bright behind a tree not far away. It was a small silver speck of moonlight shining on a polished surface. Mr Fox lay still, watching it. What on earth was it? Now it was moving. It was coming up and up... Great heavens! It was the barrel of a gun! Quick as a whip, Mr Fox jumped back into his hole and at that same instant the entire wood seemed to explode around him. Bang-bang! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!
The smoke from the three guns floated upward in the night air. Boggis and Bunce and Bean came out from behind their trees and walked towards the hole.
'Did we get him?' said Bean.
One of them shone a flashlight on the hole, and there on the ground, in the circle of light, half in and half out of the hole, lay the poor tattered bloodstained remains of... a fox's tail. Bean picked it up. 'We got the tail but we missed the fox,' he said, tossing the thing away.
'Dang and blast!' said Boggis. 'We shot too late. We should have let fly the moment he poked his head out.'
'He won't be poking it out again in a hurry,' Bunce said.
Bean pulled a flask from his pocket and took a swig of cider. Then he said, 'It'll take three days at least before he gets hungry enough to come out again. I'm not sitting around here waiting for that. Let's dig him out.'
'Ah,' said Boggis. 'Now you're talking sense. We can dig him out in a couple of hours. We know he's there.'
'I reckon there's a whole family of them down that hole,' Bunce said.
'Then we'll have the lot,' said Bean. 'Get the shovels!'
4
The Terrible Shovels
Down the hole, Mrs Fox was tenderly licking the stump of Mr Fox's tail to stop the bleeding. 'It was the finest tail for miles around,' she said between licks.
'It hurts,' said Mr Fox.
'I know it does, sweetheart. But it'll soon get better.'
'And it will soon grow again, Dad,' said one of the Small Foxes.
'It will never grow again,' said Mr Fox. 'I shall be tail-less for the rest of my life.' He looked very glum.
There was no food for the foxes that night, and soon the children dozed off. Then Mrs Fox dozed off. But Mr Fox couldn't sleep because of the pain in the stump of his tail. 'Well,' he thought, 'I suppose I'm lucky to be alive at all. And now they've found our hole, we're going to have to move out as soon as possible. We'll never get any peace if we... What was that?' He turned his head sharply and listened. The noise he heard now was the most frightening noise a fox can ever hear - the scrape-scrape-scraping of shovels digging into the soil.
'Wake up!' he shouted. 'They're digging us out!'
Mrs Fox was wide awake in one second. She sat up, quivering all over. 'Are you sure that's it?' she whispered.
'I'm positive! Listen!'
'They'll kill my children!' cried Mrs Fox.
'Never!' said Mr Fox.