The end of Edwin Teale's Tracking

That February 23rd at Trail Wood - Teale and the Fox

“Circling around and coming back on the Mulberry Meadow side of the wall, I pick up the trail again. For long stretches of its twisting, looping progress, I notice how the fox has thrust its nose into almost every grass clump. It has made sudden stops. It has turned aside in quick detours. Once it circled around and around and then pushed part way into a snow-covered mound of juniper. Twice its leaps into the middle of grass clumps appear to have yielded it other mice.
Reading this story written in tracks in the snow, I descend the slope of Monument Pasture to the brook - in and out among the prickly maze of barberry tangle, under a wild apple tree, beside a wall, from stone to stone across the stream. Beyond I see the fox’s trail ascending a snow-covered rock and a snow-covered log and then - with prints bunched together, recording a series of leaps - mounting a high embankment to disappear on neighbor’s land.
How many miles farther had its feet carried it before the dawn has come?”