CHAPTER XI
THE WAY OF A WOODCHUCK
The memory of my first glimpse of a woodchuck always reminds me of an old story which needs to be retold that it may point my moral even though it does not adorn my tale.
A minister, supplying for a time in a country parish, took a pleasant path through the fields to the church of a Sunday morning just before the service. There he found a boy digging most furiously in the sandy ground.
"My lad," said the minister, in kindly reproof, "you ought not to do this on Sunday morning unless it is a labor of necessity."
"I don't know nuthin' about necessity," replied the boy without stopping for a moment, "but I've got to get this woodchuck. The minister's comin' to dinner."
Nobody has ever told whether the boy-and after him the minister-got the woodchuck or not, but there is at least an even chance that he did not, for a woodchuck in sandy ground will move on into it, taking his hole with him, at a rate that has defied more than one industrious pursuer. Just how he breathes while this is going on is more than I know, for he fills the passage behind him with the debris of his digging, but he evidently does find air enough, for after tiring out the excavating hunter and waiting a reasonable time he digs up and out and proceeds to the deglutition of kitchen gardens with an artistic thoroughness that has been his since days of the Pilgrim Fathers, and I will not undertake to say how long before that. I do not doubt that the first Indian that ever planted corn and beans and "iskooter-squashes" said the same things about the woodchuck that I do, in his own language; and I believe that the woodchuck then, as he does now, just wrinkled his stubby black nose and retired to his burrow to sleep upon it while the garden digested.
No one to look casually at the woodchuck would think he was hard to get, but he is. The first time I ever glimpsed one I learned that. The woodchuck was eating second-crop clover in a hayfield that had been mown about three weeks before. A little cocker spaniel and I were strolling in the field when suddenly we heard a squeal that was shrill enough to be a whistle and a fuzzy brown blur streaked for the stone wall, followed by another. The cocker spaniel had decided, like that boy, that he had got to get the woodchuck. I fancy he thought he had him when they came together about five feet outside the crevice in the wall for which the woodchuck had made his fuzzy bee line, but as a matter of fact the woodchuck got the first grip. His long yellow incisors met in the cocker's shoulder and that worthy gave forth a yelp of pain and indignation as the battle began with that strange hold.
I wish I might describe the Homeric conflict that followed, but it was too full of action for anyone to grasp the details. A furry pinwheel revolved in varying planes, smearing the stubble with gore and filling the air with cries of mingled pain and defiance, for what seemed to an astounded and perturbed small boy a good part of the afternoon. Most of the gore and all the cries came from the dog, for the woodchuck fought in grim silence, though no whit more pluckily than his opponent. In the end the dog won, but he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces him to do battle.