Teale and the Tral continues

Trail Wood #7.09 by Earl Plato

The Trail of the Fox and Teale continues;
“Up the steep bank and over the stone wall beyond the brook, the fox has ascended with the greatest of ease. I scramble up slipping and floundering and leaving a wide trail of my own in the snow beside the precise line of its paw prints. At the top, endlessly winding, the tracks unroll across the rise and fall of Monument Pasture. They change directions in response to some sound or scent among the snow-covered grass clumps. Close to the stone mound of the hired man’s monument I see where the more recent tracks of a ruffed grouse have crossed those of the hunting fox.”
Writer’s note: Do you get the picture? I hope you do.
“Around one grass clump, a hundred feet away, the snow is trampled by a series of quick pounces, and here tiny drops of blood record that the fox has caught a meadow mouse. It is not long after this that the trail enters a tangled maze of wild raspberries and clumps of juniper. Here in a puzzling interlacing of two kinds of footprints I find tracks upon tracks crisscrossing, dodging, zigzagging with swift reversals of direction. What occurred here under cover of the darkness?”