“You’re a funny beast,” said Nibble, right out loud. “I’m going to ask Doctor Muskrat about you.” Someone slept right on. So off Nibble set for the pond among the cattails. And all the breakfast he found along the way was some coarse grass, very dry and wind-whipped, and the dry brown seed heads of yarrow. And that wasn’t much after the wonderful breakfast Tommy had given him.
Everything was all changed. The cattails were drifted waist deep in snow, and the pond was all ice, so he could walk right up to Doctor Muskrat’s house in the middle of it. He thumped No answer. He thumped again, and then he danced as hard as he could on top of it. He was having a very busy time, all by himself, when he heard Doctor Muskrat’s gruff voice calling, “Who’s that? What do you think you’re trying to do, anyway?”
Nibble flashed about and saw the doctor’s tousled head poking from a hole among the cattails. “Good morning,” he said politely, “I was just looking for your front door.”
“Well, you’ll find it here, over this warm spring—the one spot in the pond that doesn’t freeze shut, so I always have a place to come for a breath of fresh air.” The old doctor was puffing as he made his way through the crusty hillocks between the bulrush stems. “Duck me, but it’s Nibble! Dear, dear! What did you want? You aren’t ill?” And he was all ready to dive back after one of his famous roots.
“No, indeed, but you know everything,” Nibble began confidently. “Won’t you please tell me who’s asleep in my home hole and won’t wake up?” And he told all about it.
“Hm!” Doctor Muskrat wriggled his nose thoughtfully, much as any nice old gentleman will when his spectacles are pulled too far down on it. “It sounds to me—it most certainly sounds to me like that fat old bluffer, Snoof Woodchuck.”
Nibble’s ears pricked. “Does he bite?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh, no,” Doctor Muskrat reassured him. “He’s a harmless old crank, and a strict vegetarian, though the garter snakes say he’s a snappish fellow before he completely wakes up in the spring. Who wouldn’t be, with their perpetual whispering and squirming? He lets it out that he’s a kind of hermit, and sits meditating in his hole, with his eye on the weather, but I’ve always suspected he was snoozing. On the day after the first February moon casts her shadow, he pretends to come out and deliver his opinion. Though I never knew any one who really saw him.”
Even People know the story. They call it Groundhog Day. And “Groundhog” is just a rude nickname for the woodchuck. Though how any one but the woodsfolk came to hear about it is a mystery.
“I’ll bet you a sassafras root,” went on the doctor contemptuously, “that lazy old skeezicks never wakes up a day before Tad Coon.”