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"Been after them woodchucks ag'in," his father huskily suggested. "I guess so," said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed vaguely, and let his head sink forward. The father began a statement of his affairs. The mother said: "You don't want to go into that; we been all over it before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's come. But you want to be sure." The man did not answer directly.
I don't believe old Cap'd stay here; but maybe yer near enough to the house so they won't bother ye. An' now I guess the Paleface will go back to the settlement. I promised ma that I'd see that yer bed wuz all right, an' if ye sleep warrum an' dry an' hev plenty to ate ye'll take no harrum." "Now, bhoys, ye kin shoot all the Woodchucks yer a mind ter, fur they are a nuisance in the field.
When November came, and fur was prime, I carried down a half-bushel basket of heads and stuff from the fish market, and piled them up temptingly on the bank, above a little water path, in a lonely spot by the river. At the lower end of the path, where it came out of the water, I set a trap, my biggest one, with a famous grip for skunks and woodchucks.
Then I have to keep my personal books and write my longhand letters until after midnight and read up some more of the geology of the park and the times of intermission for the geysers and the altitudes of all the peaks and learn the personal names of all the geysers and woodchucks and " "That man wasn't right polite to me," said Maw in commenting upon some of this. "He told me he was busy.
One large bundle held their all bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
Here the future president sprouted potatoes in the dark and noisome cellar, while other boys, who cared nothing for the presidency, drowned out woodchucks and sucked eggs in open defiance of the pulpit and press of the country. And yet, what a quiet, peaceful, unostentatious home, with its little windows opening out upon the snow in winter and upon bare ground in summer. How peaceful it looks!
We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four. One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were doing up the breakfast work.
The Woodchucks, sometimes called Ground Hogs, though why any one should call them this is more than I can understand, belong to the Marmot branch of the Squirrel family, and wherever found they look much alike. "As you will notice, Johnny Chuck's coat is brownish-yellow, his feet are very dark brown, almost black. His head is dark brown with light gray on his cheeks.
Rabbits, woodchucks, chipmunks, wood-mice, they all kept out of his sight. His ignorance of the law of silence, the universal law of the wild, deprived him of many toothsome morsels. As for the many kinds of fungus which grew upon the mountain, he knew not which were edible and which poisonous.
Here we have them all graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after; the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones; the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for his feet which the Lord had provided.
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