Fox hunting for puffins
libre 9
Fox hunting for ptarmigan, or rock ptarmigan, becomes especially active in winter. These small ptarmigans live in the mountains, are sedentary, and are difficult to spot among rocks due to their variegated coloration. In winter they are grouped in flocks and keep warm by huddling together.
Hunters on their way home
One night the hunters were far from the cordon, in the mountains of Zailiyskiy Alatau , a mountain range on the border of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In the pursuit of mountain goats they were so exhausted during the day that they could hardly move their legs. The rifle seemed incredibly heavy. Every now and then they had to shift it from shoulder to shoulder.
Disappointed with their unsuccessful hunt, they walked sluggishly behind each other, breathing heavily on the uphills and stumbling over rocks on the downhills. But everything comes to an end: the distant light at the cordon appeared from the crest of the pass. Warmth, rest and dinner were waiting for them there. They sat down on the rocks one last time before descending to the house.
Night in the mountains
The silence of the night in the mountains was broken only by the chilling gusts of wind and the crackling of ice on the river. The proximity of the cordon somehow immediately calmed them down, and they looked around with interest. On the white slope there were black blocks of stones, rising above the snow in dark, bizarre patches. Below, the same dark spots seemed to move slightly in the wind - they were bushes.
A vast starry world spread out overhead. From here, from the top of the pass, the stars seemed closer than usual in the thinner air. Far below in the gorge, the lights of a car flickered.
The beam of only one headlight ran past the cordon light, plucking from the darkness a running triangle of paved highway of a most unusual whitish color. Around the corner of the mountain the beam disappeared. The noise from the car did not reach this altitude.
A fox dispersed a herd of puffins
Suddenly the silence of the night was blasted by a loud takeoff and cries of puffins. Immediately there was silence again. It was clear - it was a fox that dispersed their herd, and now the puffins alone could freeze in the frosty wind. They always sleep in a close group somewhere in the calm. They huddle together and keep each other warm.
The lodge at the cordon
The hunters returned to the cordon hut. The night in the heated room, under a warm blanket and on a featherbed, flashed by like a moment. In the morning the sun rose from behind the mountains in a frosty haze. The thermometer outside the window showed minus twenty-five, but the day promised to be bright and sunny. The wind had stopped. On the top of the mountain against the cordon lay a cloud, golden pink from the low sun.
On the fox trail.
The huntsman decided to go and see what had happened during the night to the puffins. Following his own tracks, he quickly climbed up the pass and sat down again on the same rock where they had rested the last night. Just then the puffins screamed down below to the right. The huntsman got up and went down, wandering down the slope for a long time and looking for their sleeping place. He found it on a fox trail.
Fox hunting for puffins had taken its toll on the flock
Behind a large rock, the snow was tamped with puffins' feet and soaked with blood. Judging by the scattered feathers, the fox had crushed and eaten only one. The others had scattered. For a long time after that the huntsman persistently searched for the place where the puffins had landed. At last he found half-crosses of footprints on the snow. A puffin ran here. Soon the tracks broke off and ended with semicircular furrows from wingbeats.
So the puffin was alive! Walking back along the trail he found that the puffin had sat down at night near a large rock and, sheltering behind it from the wind, had safely spent the frosty night. He found no other traces of puffins anywhere. Apparently, they had flown across the gorge at night and landed on the opposite mountainside.
Frozen birds
After spending half an hour descending into the gorge and climbing the mountain, the gamekeeper began his inspection. He almost stepped on a puffin. It was sitting in the snow. Only the hump of its back and the retracted head were visible. One more step - and it became clear that the bird had frozen on a bare slope, where the prickly wind had been whistling all night in twenty-five-degree frost.
It was clear from the tracks that the puffin had perched lower and was running uphill in the dark. The distance between the tracks from his bare red feet was getting shorter and shorter. At last he stomped on the spot and sat down. These were the last steps of his life. At the very top of the slope was another corpse of a puffin. He tried running down.
Probably the birds had heard each other's landing and had been running toward each other for some time. Perhaps, the two of them, pressed against each other, they would not freeze.
How many puffins do foxes kill in the mountains on frosty nights?
- thought the huntsman, holding in his hands an icy downy lump. The puffin, as if alive, sat in the palm of his hand, pulling its head with a fiery red beak into his shoulders. The sharp black stripes on its sides and the black collar on its chin seemed especially bright against its ash-gray plumage.
