new scent sent a strange tingling fear along their spines, and made their nerves thrill with excitement. Instinctively they feared the scent that all foxes had feared since the dawn of history. This was their natural heritage of wisdom handed down through countless generations of foxes. Finally the Father Fox discovered the man's axe hidden away in the woodpile, and he and the four little foxes climbed up the woodpile and smelled the axe carefully. This was a very important scent that the Father Fox wished the little foxes to note very carefully, for it would give them the smell of traps, or iron, one of the most dangerous scents to foxes.
When they had fully examined the place where the man had been, the two old foxes drove the small foxes from the place with great ferocity, nipping them and hustling them away in great seeming alarm, and the entire fox family raced back to the den in the spruces as though the devil were after them.
A few days later on Father Fox found an old steel trap which had been left out all
