shot so quickly that he will not, after being hit, succeed in running
into his hole, and thus defeat the evidence that he is a dead
wood-chuck. Addison, however, hit upon a stratagem for shooting them at
short range. He could imitate their peculiar "whistle" quite cleverly,
and having observed that when one wood-chuck whistles, all the others
within hearing are apt to exhibit some little curiosity as to what is
going on, he turned the circumstance to account. Going cautiously to a
burrow, he would crouch down, and placing the muzzle of the gun so as to
shoot into the hole, "whistle," as if some neighboring chuck had come
along to prospect the premises. In almost every instance, when there was
a chuck in the hole, it would immediately come up in sight, probably to
greet, or repel its visitor. The instant it appeared, Addison would fire
and nearly always kill the animal; for although often he could not
secure it, he would carefully close up the hole with stones and earth,
and if, after three days, the chuck did not dig out past the
obstruction, he laid claim to the bounty. A roster, which he kept in
notches on the garden gate, showed that he had shot fourteen
wood-chucks.

I remember that Theodora had something to say several times about our
cruelty to the poor creatures; but we justified it on account of the
damage which the wood-chucks were alleged to do to the grain, grass and
beans.

"Oh, Doad would let the wood-chucks eat up everything we plant!" Halse
would say, sarcastically. "'Let them have it,' she would say. 'Don't
hurt the poor little things!' That's just like girls. They don't have to
plant and hoe, so they are very merciful and tender-hearted. But if they
had to plough and work and plant and sow and hoe in the hot sun all day,
to raise a crop, they'd sing a different tune when the plaguey
wood-chucks came around and ate it up!"

We thought Addison's stratagem a very bright one. That he could
"whistle" the chuck out of his hole, and fetch him up to the very muzzle
of the gun, was considered remarkably clever. But an incident which
occurred a few days later rendered it forever unpopular.

Catherine Edwards had come over to go raspberrying, and Theodora, Ellen
and Wealthy set off with her after school for the south field. They had
to go around the clover piece, and as they passed it, Kate espied a
wood-chuck, which, when it heard them, instead of disappearing in its
burrow hard by, ran around in so peculiar