“Then I shall have to travel on and try to find them,” said Winkie. “But first I must get something to eat.”
This was easy for the woodchuck girl. She did not have to go to the store, nor yet wait for a meal to be cooked or a table set. Eating was very easy for her.
All she had to do was to look about for some grass or something green growing, and for some bark to gnaw. Winkie did not really care as much about bark as did Toto the beaver, for ground-hogs live mainly on clover, grass, and other soft plants. But when a woodchuck is hungry, as Winkie was, it will eat almost anything in the vegetable line.
“I’d like to find some turnips, carrots, or cabbage,” she thought to herself, for woodchucks are very fond of these, and that is one reason why farmers do not like woodchucks. “But I don’t see any around here,” went on Winkie.
Indeed there was no garden near the woods, and after eating what she could find in the forest and on the edge of it, Winkie started off to look for more adventures.
Of course, she really didn’t especially look for them, nor did she know she was going to have them, but adventures happened to her, and some of them were not very pleasant.
The woods were washed clean by the storm, and now the day was warm and sunny. The birds sang, many animals scurried here and there between the trees and under the bushes, and Winkie was one of them.
Now and then she would hear some large animal moving in the bushes, and at such times Winkie would crouch down and hide, for she feared a wolf, a fox or a dog might be coming after her.
“I shouldn’t mind meeting Don, or even Tum Tum, the jolly elephant, he told about,” thought Winkie. “But I don’t want to meet any strange dogs.”
Don, however, was far away, as was Tum Tum. So Winkie had to wander along by herself. All day she roamed through the woods, now and then stopping to give a sort of whistle, which is one way woodchucks have of talking. Again she would also chatter her teeth with a rattling sound, as owls clatter their beaks. This is another way woodchucks have of speaking to one another.