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.
But I have never known a woodchuck to do battle that was not
forced upon him. In point of fact he is one of the most
home-loving, peaceful animals I have known. He is the original
home-body and if the market where he is forced to seek supplies is
not near enough to his home he moves the home nearer the market. In
that often lies his undoing. His safety is in the woodland border
or in the far pasture stone wall. There if he would content
himself with aromatic barks and wild pasture herbs he might dwell
unharmed of man, who is his chief enemy. But he loves the clover
field, and often his first move toward disaster is coming up from
the pasture wall and digging a burrow in the midst of the clover
where he soon has regular paths which take him from one rich clump
to another. After that he sniffs the kitchen garden, and the
descent to Avernus is easy. He moves in to the borders, finds a
crevice or digs a hole, and revels. Nor does he recognize the
place as Avernus--which it is bound to be sooner or later--but
spells it Olympus in very truth. Man may be the devastator of the
earth, and he certainly is so far as its wild life is concerned,
but as a producer of succulence in the kitchen garden he is a
deity before whom any woodchuck must fall down and worship.
For the woodchuck besides being the original home-body is without
doubt one of the founders of vegetarianism. Born in the desert
places, feeding on locust bark and wild honeysuckle, he added
inches to his girth when he learned that red clover which the
early settlers kindly brought with them had a nourishing quality
that defies competition. A woodchuck can get so fat on clover that
by November, when he retires for the year, he is as near a
complete globe as anything with feet and a face can ever be. The
convexity begins at his eyebrows above, at his chin beneath, and
though he has feet, they have the effect of being merely pinned on
to the lower hem of his garment, as those of a proper young lady
in our grandmother's day were supposed to be. The woodchuck can
get no fatter than that on garden truck, but he likes it better. I
doubt if Charles Dickens ever saw the animal, but when he created
Mr. Wardle's fat boy he might well have taken him for a model.
"D--n that boy," says Mr. Wardle, "he's asleep again." That was when
he had ceased eating, and so it is with the woodchuck. In the
early dawn when the dew is on the lettuce, he takes his toll of
the bed, seasoning it with a radish and a snip at a leaf or two
from the herb bed. But such are mere appetizers for the feast. The
next course is the peas. He can go down a row of peas that are
about to set their flat pods swelling to become fat pods and
eliminate everything but a stubble of tough butts that have been
shorn of their ladylike and smiling greenness. Pea vines in the
garden always seem such gentle ladies, clad in a fabric of soft,
semitransparent green, nodding and smiling, slender, tall and
sweet. But when the woodchuck romps back up the row nothing is to
be seen but the smile.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
I once heard a vigorous discussion amongst men who know the woods
and the ways of wild creatures, as to whether or not a woodchuck
can climb a tree. The discussion ended rather abruptly when one of
the party produced a photograph of a woodchuck a dozen feet up a
big pine sitting on a small stub of a limb, looking somewhat
exultant but also as if he wondered not only how he got so high
but how on earth he was ever to get down again. I myself would not
have believed a woodchuck could climb a tree of that size if I had
not seen the photograph, and I fear there are some doubters in the
party to this day. But whether or not a woodchuck can climb a big
pine he can go up a bean pole as far as a bean vine can climb, and
return with the bean vine inside. It takes but a few mornings for
a woodchuck who means to keep fat enough not to shame his tribe to
send a fleet of beans, that but now had everything set in living
green from main truck to keelson, scudding down the garden under
bare poles, a melancholy sight to the amateur truck farm
navigator. On peas and beans the woodchuck holds his own, and he
reckons as his own all that the garden contains. For all that you
find frequently one that has a special taste. My last year's most
intimate woodchuck climbed the bean poles and romped the rows of
early peas as I have described. These were his occupation, his
day's work, so to speak, and he went at them at the first blink of
dawn and got them off his mind. Then he retired to his burrow just
on the corner of the garden before either the sun or I got up, and
slept the dreamless sleep of one who has labored righteously and
fed well. I suspect him of letting out his belt a hole a day on
this plethora of protein that I had been coaxing up the bean poles
all the spring.
After that for the balance of the day Mr. Woodchuck was a
dilettante, sitting at his door in the sun and dreaming dreams of
artistic elegance in horticulture. I used to see him there about
10 A.M., wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic
temperament, batting a speculative eye at me meanwhile, but not in
any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing to resent. He
had absorbed the unearned increment and I had my original capital,
the bean poles, intact--and that's more than most of us realize
on small investments, nowadays. So I dare say he thought I had
nothing to feel grieved about. Later he would sally forth and
carry out his artistic dreams on my Hubbard squashes. I have never
had Hubbard squashes pruned into such artistic shapes as that
year. The squash vine is a great stragger if left to its own
devices.
It will start from the corn hill where it is produced and go down
the row fifteen feet, then climb a corn stalk, leap to the fence
six feet away and eventually hang a row of Hubbard squashes around
a neighbor's pet pear tree. The woodchuck stopped all that. He
began early in the summer on the vine tips and worked inward well
up to the stump at each meal. The vines were husky and had more
latent buds than I had believed possible. Every time the woodchuck
cut them back they started something in a new place for his
incisive pruning shears. Some people trim evergreens on their
lawns into grotesque shapes. My woodchuck invented that sort of
thing all over again on Hubbard squash vines. After some weeks I
had a new and strange race of decorative plants that, like
Katisha's left elbow, people came miles to see. But they did not
produce squashes. Dilettantism doesn't.
In the end, of course, like the small boy at whose house the
minister was to take dinner, I had to get the woodchuck, after
which the garden was more productive if not so picturesque and
romantic.
The full-grown woodchuck rarely leaves the burrow except to
forage. That done he spends some time usually just at the entrance
sunning himself. But most of the time, day and night, he is
within, presumably asleep half the summer long. The young
woodchucks at this time of year are more often seen abroad, for
the parents send them forth upon the world to earn their own
living at a rather tender age. They roam the fields and thickets
and do not seem especially afraid of man, scuttling into the
underbrush perhaps with their whistling squeal, but just as likely
to sit back on their haunches and offer to fight. The mortality
among them at this time must be great. Foxes pick them up and feed
them to their own young. Hawks and owls do the same and dogs find
them an easy prey. But enough get by such dangers to dig burrows
in the fall and next spring move up to somebody's garden patch,
there to absorb feasts and defy fates until the outraged
householder stalks forth and deals death amid the ruins of his
hopes. The woodchuck sitting by his burrow in the far pasture is a
friendly little chap, whom I wish well. I would not harm a hair of
him. But the woodchuck that has adopted suburban life is a menace
of whom I am forced to say in the words of Cato of old "Delenda
est Carthago."
The forefathers found the woodchuck here, probably in the first
spring garden which they planted over the graves of the dead in
Plymouth, saw how much he had eaten and promptly named him, his
name meaning "little pig of the woods." Chuck or chuckie is a word
of their time, and I dare say now, meaning "little pig." The idea
is again expressed in the rather less polite form of "ground hog"
and the hereabouts at least, little known "Maryland marmot" is a
third. Scientifically he is known as Arctomys monax, being a
rodent and classed with the marmots, very close relatives of the
squirrels. Perhaps it is through this family affinity that he is
able to climb my bean poles.
The woodchuck has one other distinguishing characteristic which
deserves reference, that is his ability as a sleeper. As a home
body he is great. As an absorber of garden truck he is greater.
But when the sun of October swings low in the south and he has
become so fat that he seems to roll to and from his burrow on
castors is when he shows his most surprising characteristic. Mr.
Wardle's fat boy with all his fame never slept as the woodchuck
then prepares to sleep, however well he matched his eating. The
first chill wind sets him to dragging dry leaves and grass down
into the snuggest chamber of his burrow and there a little later
he tucks his nose in between his little black-gloved forepaws and
goes to sleep. When the woodchuck is leaner he goes to sleep by
drowsily sitting upright, his head drooping lower and lower until
he finally rolls into a round ball and falls on his side. But in
late October the woodchuck is so nearly round with obesity that he
cannot roll up and I fancy him just withdrawing his nose and his
toes a little farther into himself, and going to sleep in that
attitude with a sigh of content. The woodchuck's chief fame seems
to rest on this trait, his ability to go to sleep before cold
weather and not wake up again until the spring has again brought
out the green things for his delectation. To be sure tradition has
it that the ground hog comes to the mouth of his burrow on
Candlemas Day and looks for his shadow that he may figure out how
much longer he may sleep. But that I take to be a mere literary
furnishing, like the chuck part of the animal's name, brought from
England with the pioneers and adapted to use in this country.
Probably it is said in England of the dormouse, which also sleeps
winters, as does the woodchuck, though I believe lightly compared
with our animal. The woodchuck is far too sound a sleeper to wake
up on a February day, whatever the inducements.
That matter is no more to be taken seriously than is the old-time
Yankee query--
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck,
If a woodchuck would chuck wood?
which seems to me to emphasize the whole popular conception of the
animal. Of all the common New England animals he is the one taken
least seriously. Even if he does eat up all our summer garden we
are apt to grin as we bear it; or if we do go out and "get" him,
we do it with a forgiving, pitying smile.