When I place a trap in one entrance to his burrow, he uses the other opening; if I put another trap here, he promptly digs a passage around it; if I block this with chunks of rock, he undermines the stones and patiently moves to a new house farther along the ridge; and, if I set traps for him here, he changes house again. It is a wide wooded ridge around the garden, and honeycombed with woodchuck holes. By and by he is back in his favorite house under the hickory—when the spiders have hung the doors with signs that the traps are gone.
But it happened once that I forgot the traps. Wood-earth and bits of bark and dead leaves washed down till the wicked gins were covered, and Tubby, coming back after weeks off on the ridge, tumbled into one of the traps and got his thick fat fist fast. I heard him making a dreadful racket, and rushed up with a club in my thick fat fist.
Old Tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. I don’t believe that I was ever looked at by a woodchuck before. Stolid, sullen, defiant, there was much more of the puzzled, of the world-old wonder in the eyes gazing steadily into mine, as to what this situation and this moment meant. The snarled body was all fight and fear, but the blinking eyes sought mine for an answer to the riddle that I have asked of God. And all that I could answer was, “You fat-head!” And he said, “Fat-head yourself!” if ever a woodchuck spoke, and spoke the truth. “Fat-head, to set this rotten thing here and forget it!”
It was a rotten thing to do. Somehow he made me feel as if I had trapped one of my neighbors. He saw how I was feeling, and took advantage of me.
“Whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “Whose ancestors were here first, yours or mine? You didn’t even come over in the Mayflower. But I came here in Noah’s Ark.”
“I know it. But keep quiet,” I begged him, “and stop looking at me that way.”
“What way?” he asked.
“Why, so much like my brother!” I exclaimed.
“But I am your brother,” he retorted, “though I am ashamed to say it.”
“Don’t say it, then,” I begged.