The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

But he was wound up.

“Any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother has no soul. And any man who can’t share his beans with his brother doesn’t deserve a soul. If I were as low-down and as lazy as you, I would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, I would.” And all the time I was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him. Suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar, among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which I should have heard, had I been able to understand.

But I have much to learn. And so has Pup, our Scotch-Irish terrier. Time and time again Pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over himself for his hole. Once or twice they have come to blows at the mouth of the burrow, and Pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear, but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. He came off with a deep experience lately, and a greatly enhanced respect for woodchucks. But he is of stubborn stock. So is Tubby of stubborn stock. Pup knows that here is an enemy of the people, and that he must get him. He knows that Tubby is all hair and hide and bowels. He now knows that Tubby is deeper than he is broad, which makes him pretty deep.

The new light began to dawn on Pup when Tubby moved up from the woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. The impudence, the audacity of the thing stood Pup’s hair on end, and he took to the blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would happen.

Tubby’s raiding hour was about five in the afternoon. At that hour the shadows of the ice-house and the barn lay wide across the mowing-field—the proper time and color for things to happen. And there in the close-cut field, as if he had come up out of a burrow, sat old Tubby, looking as big as a bear!

Pup stole softly out to meet him, moving over till he was between the chuck and the ice-house hole. It was a deliberate act and one of complete abandon. Things must this time be finished. And what a perfect bit of strategy it was! Hugging the ground when the chuck rose high on his haunches to reconnoiter, Pup would “freeze” till Tubby dropped down and went to feeding, then, gliding like a snake forward, he would flatten behind a stone or a tuft of grass, and work forward and wait.

The ground rose slightly to Pup’s disadvantage, and he was maneuvering to avoid the uphill rush when Tubby heard something off in the woods and turned with a dash for his hole. It was head-on and terrific! And the utter shock of it, the moral shock, was more terrific! Neither knew for an instant just what had happened; the suddenness, the precision, the amazing boldness and quality of the attack putting Pup almost out of action. But it was precisely the jar old Tubby needed. Every flabby fiber of him was fight. The stub feet snapped into action; the chunk of a body shot forward, ramming Pup amidships, sending him to the bottom of the slope, Tubby slashing like a pirate with his terrible incisors.

But the touch of those long teeth brought Pup short about. He likes the taste of pain. He is a son of battle. And in a moment like this he is possessed of more than common powers of body and soul. The fur flew; the grass flew; but there was scarcely a sound as the two fighters tumbled and tossed a single black-brown body like a ball of pain. They sprang apart and together again, whirled and dived and dodged as they closed, each trying for a hold which neither dared allow. But Pup got plenty of hair, choking, slippery hair, and leathery hide by the mouthful, while the twisting, snapping woodchuck cut holes in Pup’s thin skin with teeth which would punch holes in sheet steel.

And Tubby was fighting with his head as well as with teeth and toes. He was cooler than Pup. He had a single-track mind, and it ran straight to his burrow. The head-work was perfectly clear; the whole powerful play going forward with the nicest calculation, mad as it appeared to be in the wild rough-and-tumble. There was method in Tubby’s madness. He was fighting true to plan. But Pup was fighting to kill, and he lost his head. It was to win his hole, and life, and the pursuit of happiness on these ancestral acres that the woodchuck was fighting; and, as the two laid about them and rolled over and over, they kept rolling nearer and nearer to the ice-house and a burrow under the corner.

Over and over, right and left, they lunged when the woodchuck, sent spinning from Pup’s foreleg, came up with the dog chopping at his stub nose, but, giving him all four of his mailed feet instead, he bounded from the face of the dog, and, with a lightning somersault, landed plop in his burrow, Pup raking the hair from the vanishing haunch.