Amos’s Diary: Wednesday, September 23, 1903
First real cold snap of the fall, and the creek smelled like wet leaves this morning. Martha called me off the woodpile before noon on account of a fox. Not in the field this time. In the henhouse.
She heard the hens start before daylight, a squall that died too quick to be a dog. I went out with the lantern and found the wire peeled back off the northeast corner, the way it always is when a fox has worked it a night or two. Took her six biddies. Left the rooster settin on the top rail like he had won somethin, which a rooster will do every time.
I spent the forenoon patchin the hole and the afternoon settin traps along the run from the briar patch. A fox dont come to a henhouse once and quit. He has wrote the address down in his head and he will be back before the week is out. I told the boys what I know about it.
“A fox aint a thief so much as a bookkeeper,” I said to the oldest one when he asked why I set three traps instead of one. “He keeps a account of every hen you got, and he dont forget a single one that aint locked up.”
The middle boy wanted to put out a bitch in heat or some foolishness he picked up at the mill. I told him to save his notions.
“You dont catch a fox by outsmartin him, you catch him by knowin where he’s already decided to walk,” I said. “He’s done the thinkin. You just set the steel where his foot has gotta be.”
Martha made a onion pie for supper and put the biddies she saved in the smokehouse, though there was only four now and one of them a runt she had been fattenin for Sunday. She did not carry on about it. Around here you dont cry over a hen you cry over the jar that aint full come February. A hen you can raise back. A empty cellar you cannot.
Set the traps with hay over the pans and went to bed with the moon up. A man sleeps better when the work is waitin out in the dark than when he is waitin on it. I will walk the line at first light and see what the fox has decided to be.
