The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

If my skeptic found no fiddler crabs along her seashore, found nothing of interest smaller and more thing-like than color and fresh air, it may be that she did not understand how to look for crabs and things.

To go to the seashore for one June, to the mountains for a second, to the farm for a third, is not a good way to study the out-of-doors. A better way is to spend all three Junes at this shore or upon this same farm. It is when one abides upon the farm, indeed, the year around, through several Junes, that one discovers the woodchucks. The clover is too high in June. As one of twelve, June is a very good month to be out of doors; but as a season for nature study,—no single month, not even June, is satisfactory.

It takes time and patience and close watching to discover woodchucks. This means a limited territory; one can easily have too much ground to cultivate. I know a man who owns five hundred acres of Jersey pine barrens, and who can hardly till enough of it to pay taxes, whereas a friend of mine here near Boston is quietly getting rich on three acres and a half.

My skeptic had too many acres. She went to the seashore one summer, then to the mountains, then to a farm, and now she doubts the existence of crabs and woodchucks. Well she may. She might almost doubt the reality of the mountains and shore, to say nothing of the farm. One can scarcely come to believe in a mountain in the course of a mere June. The trouble is one of size. As well try to make friends with a crowded street. Crabs and woodchucks live in little holes. You must hunt for the holes; you must wait until the woodchucks come out.

For more than five years now I have been hunting holes here on the farm, and it is astonishing the number I have discovered. I doubt if driving past you would see anything extraordinary in this small farm of mine,—a steep, tree-grown ridge, with a house at the top, a patch of garden, a bit of meadow, a piece of woods, a stream, a few old apple trees, a rather sterile, stony field. But live here as I do, mow and dig and trim and chop as I do, know all the paths, the stumps, the stone heaps, the tree holes, earth holes,—there simply is no end of holes, and they are all inhabited.

By actual count there are forty-six woodchuck holes on these fourteen acres. Now forty-six woodchuck holes are a good many holes, but I have been these five years counting them. Only two of them are in the open, and visible from the road. Driving past, I say, you might actually think I had no woodchucks at all!

You should stop all summer and milk for me some morning. Throughout the early part of the season I had left the kitchen with my milk-pail rather late,—a little after five o’clock. One morning in September I stepped out of the door a little before five, and there in the clover close to the stoop sat a fine old woodchuck. I stood still and watched him. He was not expecting me yet, for he knew my comings out and goings in. He was up to his eyes in the clover, and he neither saw nor heard me.

Here about the kitchen door he had fed since the clover started, and I had not known it. He had timed his breakfast so as to be through by five o’clock,—before I came out. Had I been a boarder, with no cow to milk, perhaps I never should have known it. But after that morning I saw him frequently. I took pains to get up with him. Just over the edge of the lawn, about five feet down the wooded slope, was his burrow, which was one of the latest of the forty-six holes to be discovered.