Animals: Buried Alive

Hardly one fox terrier owner in ten knows that the historic mission of his dog is to chase foxes down their holes and bring them out. Nowadays not one fox terrier in a hundred does his job. But fortnight ago at Farley, Iowa, Farmer Emmet Simon, hunting with his two terriers—Tuffy and her 5-year-old daughter Spotty—sent them into a fox’s den. Tuffy came out, but not Spotty. She had been trapped by a rolling stone.

Farmer Simon, who loves his Spotty, set to digging for her. When he found that the hole twisted & turned, then ducked into a limestone crevasse, he enlisted the help of eleven friends. For 260½ hours Emmet Simon and his crew worked in shifts like mine rescuers. They blasted and dug, encouraged during the first ten days by feeble, subterranean barking. By night bonfires lit their labor; by day they gulped neighbors’ sandwiches and coffee. When they had used their no sticks of dynamite, they blasted with loose black powder. On the eleventh day, just after lunch, a cheer went up from the 100 Farleyites who had gathered to watch. For Spotty’s spotted body had been reached, thinned by nearly half its previous weight, but still alive & sound.