Mr. Fox flattened his body against the ground and lay very still, his ears pricked. He waited a long time, but he heard nothing more.

"It must have been a field-mouse," he told himself, "or some other small animal."

He crept a little further out of the hole. . then further still. He was almost right out in the open now. He took a last careful look around. The wood was murky and very still. Somewhere in the sky the moon was shining.

Just then, his sharp night-eyes caught a glint of something bright behind a tree not far away. It was a small silver speck of moonlight shining on a polished surface. Mr. Fox lay still, watching it. What on earth was it? Now it was moving. It was coming up and up. . Great heavens! It was the barrel of a gun! Quick as a whip, Mr. Fox jumped back into his hole and at that same instant the entire wood seemed to explode around him. Bang-bang! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!

The smoke from the three guns floated upward in the night air. Boggis and Bunce and Bean came out from behind their trees and walked towards the hole.

"Did we get him?" said Bean.

One of them shone a flashlight on the hole, and there on the ground, in the circle of light, half in and half out of the hole, lay the poor tattered bloodstained remains of … a fox's tail. Bean picked it up. "We got the tail but we missed the fox," he said, tossing the thing away.

"Dang and blast!" said Boggis. "We shot too late. We should have let fly the moment he poked his head out."

"He won't be poking it out again in a hurry," Bunce said.

Bean pulled a flask from his pocket and took a swig of cider. Then he said, "It'll take three days at least before he gets hungry enough to come out again. I'm not sitting around here waiting for that. Let's dig him out."

"Ah," said Boggis. "Now you're talking sense. We can dig him out in a couple of hours. We know he's there."