The Ridge was a long mound covered with laurel, pines and white oaks. Cranberry Swamp, on the other hand, was low, wet ground which bore a nearly impenetrable mass of greenery, largely made up of tall cedars, holly bushes and cat briars. Through the swamp flowed a little creek in whose deep eddies green waterweeds swung with the current, giving glimpses now and then of turtles and slender, watchful pike.
When Ben Slown first planned to come to the Pine Barrens, his friends gloomily shook their heads.
“The foxes and other varmints will drive you out,” they warned. “You won’t be able to raise a chicken. The coons and crows will eat your corn. The woodchucks will destroy your vegetables. There are critters enough in the Barrens to keep you from being lonely, but they won’t be the kind of neighbors you want.”
“You just watch me,” boasted the farmer, “I’ll fix the varmints.”
He was no sooner settled in his new place than he began to put traps and poison around the cleared ground. All the little creatures that still lived there, and the others which came out of the woods at night to marvel at the strange new things to be seen—mice, snakes, birds, rabbits, mink, muskrats, woodchucks, coons, possums, skunks, foxes, deer and a lot of others—all suffered the same ill-treatment. But most of all he feared and hated the foxes, for they were clever enough to give him a little trouble. One after another was destroyed, however, and the farmer was having everything his own way when all at once there was a newcomer on the Ridge.
This was a red fox, a beautiful creature several inches taller than any of the gray foxes that lived in the Barrens. She found the farmer’s poisoned baits, but instead of taking them she took a chicken, and that right before his face.
This was the first fowl a fox had taken from Ben Slown, and therefore he complained all the more loudly; so loudly indeed that the neighbors began to think the destruction of the red fox the only thing that interested him. Instead of asking about his health, whoever met him would say, “Well, Ben, have you caught that pesky fox yet?” or perhaps, “Say, Ben, that old red fox of yours is bothering me now. Why don’t you keep her at home?”