SEVEN

EIGHT

ONE: Fox

ONE

1

ONE: Fox!

ONE: Fox!

ONE

When the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., went into the wholesale raising of silver foxes for a world market, its two partners brought to the enterprise a comfortable working capital and an uncomfortable ignorance of the brain-reactions of a fox.

They had visited the National Exhibition of silver foxes. They had spent days at successful fox farms, studying every detail of management and memorising the rigid diet-charts. They had committed to memory every fact and hint in Bulletin No. 1151 of the United States Department of Agriculture—issued for the help of novice breeders of silver foxes.

They had mastered each and every available scrap of exact information concerning the physical welfare of captive silver foxes. But, for lack of half a lifetime’s close application to the theme, their knowledge of fox mentality and fox nature was nil.

2Now one may raise chickens or hogs or even cattle, without taking greatly into account the inner workings of such animals’ brains. But no man yet has made a success of raising foxes or their fifth cousin, the collie, without spending more time in studying out the mental than the physical beast.

2

On the kitchen wall of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., was the printed dietary of silver foxes. On the one library shelf of the kennel was all the available literature on silver fox breeding, from government pamphlets to a three-volume monograph. In the four-acre space within the kennel enclosure were thirty model runways, twenty by twenty feet; each equipped with a model shelter-house and ten of them further fitted out with model brood nests.

In twenty-four of these thirty model runways 

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