Blackie and Son first edition - 1912
After I had read Frances Pitt's Scotty (see my Blog of 23 December 2024), I looked the author up online for further information about her. I read that she had published another book on a fox, exactly twenty years' earlier. She was then only 24 and it was her first book - Tommy White-Tag, clearly based around her own experiences of taking care of, and raising, wild animals..
The story starts with two rabbit catchers digging out an earth where they thought a dog fox was hiding. In fact, it contains five small cubs, three of which are mangled and torn almost out of recognition by one of the men's terrier. Two survive - two little things, like rather large, dark-brown kittens - blind too, like kittens before they reach the "nine-days-old" stage - lay there, kicking feebly and giving curious squeaky grunts. One of the men, Jim Rogers, wraps them in a red-and-yellow handkerchief and puts them in one of the capacious pockets in his corduroy jacket. He takes the cubs to the local big farm house (the family have at least two servants) - on the way one of the cubs dies - and hands the surviving cub over to Master Tom Brown, whose parents allow him to keep the fox. The next chapters feel very much based on the author's own experiences. A mother cat, whose kittens have just been 'dealt with' , takes over the nurturing of the cub. Tom's father suggests a name for the fox cub - Tommy White-Tag...
The book is clearly written for youngsters, but it is no worse for that. We follow the simple story of the young cub growing up within a family setting, which includes not only the devoted cat but the house dog, Jim and, later, Jewel - a large fat puppy, marked on its round white back with patches of black, and on its head with black and tan. In fact, it is a foxhound puppy! Then the 'mother' cat goes missing - she had been shot at by the rabbit catcher - and goes to live with another family. Tommy White-Tag is bereft, but not downcast enough to stop him escaping one night from the outside farmyard area. There is an atmospheric description of his first moments in the great world:
White-Tag hurried forward: he knew not why nor whither he was going; but freedom, precious freedom, was his, and so onward, onward, away from prison, away from the house, from his friends and companions, from an easy life and abundance of food - forward along a fence side, through briers and mud, dirt that splashed on his white chest, under great trees, through more bushes, more briers, more mud, and onwards still to a life of hardships, of hunting and being hunted, of many dangers from many things, but also of liberty.
If I was a pre-teenager with even a modicum of imagination, I would have lapped that up! The last 50 pages of this short book describes how the young fox copes with his new environment; learning by his mistakes and well as his successes. He is warned off one earth by a much larger pale, sandy-coloured fox; he learns how to trap voles and rabbits; he raids hen houses; and, twice, he has to flee from the local Hunt. Chapter XI Great Hunt, is particularly well written - giving the mind-set and experience of both the hunters and the hunted. White-Tag, fortuitously, saves a small, dark vixen, when the Hunt alters its course to pursue him instead. Frances Pitt describes the change from the early galloping fox to the exhausted animal: He is a very different object now from the fox who started forth from the holly fence an hour and a half ago. His tongue hangs out, his brush drags on the ground, he is clogged and laden with mud, he quivers in every limb; but he is yet confident of defeating his pursuers...Which he does, of course. He successfully makes for the farmhouse where he was reared and hides in the very kennel he had escaped from. The boy Tom, just home from school, realising what was happening, closes the doors and Tommy White-Tag lives to fight another day.
Not only that, but in the last Chapter, headed Family Affairs, Tommy has linked up with the small vixen, Mrs Darkie, again and they are parents to two offspring: Never were two cubs so tenderly brought up in the way they should go...their mother was an exceptionally clever fox, while White-Tag, in addition to his natural talent, had valuable experience of human beings, acquired by living among them... So White-Tag and Darkie "lived happily ever after", and reared many litters of cubs, raiding the hen pens for many a mile round the old home. Hounds searched for them several times, but they were never found. They had learnt some way of making themselves scarce.
A youngster's tale? Yes, but enjoyable for all that.
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