When the owl is on the wing the fox is on the paw,
It's down into the farmyard to pay his friends a call,
He'll grab the old drake by the back or maybe a fat old hen,
Or even take a new-born lamb from its mother in the pen.

Most times he hunts through hunger but sometimes its just for fun,
But he is never hunting when the farmer's got his gun,
He'll sit there in the leafy copse and mingle red with green,
His nerves are of the toughest steel and all his wits are keen.

He's woken by a distant sound all on an Autumn morn,
His ears are cocked aloof as he hears yon huntsman's horn,
He's thinking of his vixen and the cubs as she must mind,
He'll have to draw yon pack away afore they make a find.

So its up to break his cover and toward the fields so green,
And out into the open where he knows he can be seen,
He hears twelve couple speaking and the huntsman sound a view,
And the weary feeling in his bones tells him his reign is through.

Now when Charlie hunted rabbits and his partridge and his hares,
He went out all on his own, he never went in pairs,
He didn't need no horses nor no pack of wild hounds too,
'Cause of hunting, Mr. Huntsman, he knows twice as much as you.

Now Charlie he was six year old afore he fell to hounds,
And hundreds were the times he'd killed while on his farmyard rounds,
But though his mask and brush have gone, in a trophy room to lay,
Don't ever forget the fifty times that Charlie got away.