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, h