There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame, When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name; Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came. His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam when the brown spring freshets flow; Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow; They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow. "Did ever you see such a skin?" quoth he; "there's nought in the world so fine -- Such fullness of fur as black as the night, such lustre, such size, such shine; It's life to a one-lunged man like me; it's London, it's women, it's wine. "The Moose-hides called it the devil-fox, and swore that no man could kill; That he who hunted it, soon or late, must surely suffer some ill; But I laughed at them and their old squaw-tales. Ha! Ha! I'm laughing still. "For look ye, the skin -- it's as smooth as sin, and black as the core of the Pit. By gun or by trap, whatever the hap, I swore I would capture it; By star and by star afield and afar, I hunted and would not quit. "For the devil-fox, it was swift and sly, and it seemed to fleer at me; I would wake in fright by the camp-fire light, hearing its evil glee; Into my dream its eyes would gleam, and its shadow would I see. "It sniffed and ran from the ptarmigan I had poisoned to excess; Unharmed it sped from my wrathful lead ('twas as if I shot by guess); Yet it came by night in the stark moonlight to mock at my weariness. "I tracked it up where the mountains hunch like the vertebrae of the world; I tracked it down to the death-still pits where the avalanche is hurled; From the glooms to the sacerdotal snows, where the carded clouds are curled. "From the vastitudes where the world protrudes through clouds like seas up-shoaled, I held its track till it led me back to the land I had left of old -- The land I had looted many moons. I was weary and sick and cold. "I was sick, soul-sick, of the futile chase, and there and then I swore The foul fiend fox might scathless go, for I would hunt no more; Then I rubbed mine eyes in a vast surprise -- it stood by my cabin door. "A rifle raised in the wraith-like gloom, and a vengeful shot that sped; A howl that would thrill a cream-faced corpse -- and the demon fox lay dead. . . . Yet there was never a sign of wound, and never a drop he bled. "So that was the end of the great black fox, and here is the prize I've won; And now for a drink to cheer me up -- I've mushed since the early sun; We'll drink a toast to the sorry ghost of the fox whose race is run." | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT? by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS SIXTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL PHILOMELA by JOHN CROWE RANSOM SONNET: 128 by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ST. AGNES' MORNING by MAXWELL ANDERSON THE ART OF PRESERVING HEALTH: BOOK 1. AIR by JOHN ARMSTRONG |