CHAPTER III
THE HUNT FOR “COPY”
CHAPTER III
THE HUNT FOR “COPY”
There never was a bigger, fatter, flabbier woodchuck than old Tubby—among wild animals that I alone have known. Tubby is a fixture of the farm. He was here when we came, or else it was his father or his grandfather. He is fat and flabby and as broad as he is long, and broader when full of beans. He is very much of a tub. When he sits in the garden, he sits like a tub. When he runs, he runs like a tub. And he holds beans like a tub.
It is worth a few beans to see him run—a medley in motions: up and down and round and round, the spinning of a top and the hop of a saucepan on a hot stove with amazing progress forward. He knows which end of him is head and which tail; but from a distance I can see neither head nor tail, only sides, bulging, tubby sides spilling down the garden. One seldom does see the ends of a thing from a distance. Tubby has a head-end; and he has wits in that end. He also has a tail-end; and the disturbing conclusion one reaches with close study is that Tubby has wits also in this end. He is a beautifully capable thing in his way. A cutworm is not more capable—if there is anything so capable as a cutworm! Both are poems; old Tubby an epic poem—were I as capable as Tubby, and a Homer—
A full-sized woodchuck is twenty-two inches long; and I presume that Tubby is not more than twenty-two inches wide, though I have seen him wobbling out of the garden and carrying off as mere ballast a cabbage or two, and a watermelon, and a peck or two of beans, and all of the Swiss chard in the three rows. There are several bushels of chard in three such rows.
The way he can run with his load! His little black heels twinkling through the vines, his shapeless carcass flopping into his hole with me on top of him! Then I will hear a chuckling deep down among the hickory roots, a peculiar vegetarian chuckle quite unlike a carnivorous growl. And then I will sit down on the hole and chuckle, having lost for the moment my carnivorous growl. He is so bold, so impudent, so canny. The old scamp rather likes me. And I am a fairly good gardener, if I do say it myself.