noon
One of these cubs -- as we believed -- came back to the pen under singular circumstances eight or nine months later . Having no use either for the old boards , or for the ground on which the pen stood , it was not taken away , but remained there throughout the autumn and following winter . One day in April we heard two hounds baying , and as it proved , they were out hunting on their own account and had started a fox . We heard them from noon till near four in the afternoon , when Ellen , who was in the kitchen at one of the back windows , saw them , and , at a distance of twenty rods or less in advance of them , a small fox , coming at speed across the field , heading toward the west barn . Addison and I were working up fire-wood in the yard at the time , and Ellen ran out to tell us what she had seen . We now heard the hounds close behind the barn , and getting the gun , ran out there . The fox , hard pressed evidently , had run straight to that old pen and taken refuge in it , through a hole in the top where the covering boards were off .