The Heart of the Wild by S.L. Bensusan

If you left the lane for the footpath that passes along the wood-side, you could see the keeper's cottage in a large clearing away to the right. In the days that belong to this story it was a pretty place, thatched and creeper-covered, with a modest outhouse, one or two sheds, and some ground that had been reclaimed from the wood when the eighteenth century was still young. The flower-garden held half a dozen beehives, and there was a small paddock where a few pheasants were raised under domestic hens. In a corner of the paddock stood a useful ferret-hutch, standing a little above the ground, with sloping runs from the entrances to a little piece of the meadow round the hutch, fenced round with posts and wire-netting about a foot high. A large elm tree stood by the side of the enclosure, and one of its branches was used by the old keeper as his vermin larder. Here one saw stoats, weasels, hedgehogs, and sometimes a polecat, together with magpies, hawks, and, one regrets to add, an owl. As soon as the old man had trapped or shot one of his real or fancied enemies, its dead body was nailed to the branch and, in that corner of a southern county, traps were seldom idle or empty.

Some week or ten days before Hob was born, the room in the hutch where his mother slept was carefully cleaned, supplied with a new hay bed, and closed. Hob entered the world in complete darkness in company with four brothers and sisters. Not only was their room void of light, but their eyes were closed. Their mother fed and tended them very jealously. Had her sleeping-place been entered in the first month of their life, while they were sightless and helpless, their mother would have killed them, for that is ferret law. In those early days they were particularly ugly, and would squeak faintly as though to emphasise their distaste for their surroundings; but their mother found plenty of fresh milk or porridge waiting for her when she went out to eat in the apartment next her hut, together with odd luxuries in the shape of freshly killed mice or rats, or young game birds and chickens that had met an untimely death. So the babies were bound to thrive. One fine June morning the old keeper found them in the ferret's dining-room lapping milk by their mother's side. Thereupon he opened the part of the hutch that had been closed down so long, cleaned it thoroughly, and put in a fresh bed, so that Hob and his brethren returned to a clean home and proceeded to live their life in earnest. Within a week they were playing for the greater part of the day in the enclosure round their hutch, and this early exercise made them strong and active, so that none of the litter moped and pined and died, as baby ferrets will when they are badly housed and have no place for exercise. They still slept in their old room, but paid small heed to their mother, who, for her part, seemed to have lost the most of her care for them.