194 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
fox or a deer uses a far-away crow or a jay as a picket, 
and dashes away at its warning of the coming of an 
enemy. 
Soon afterwards I was on my way to a spring down 
in the pasture. As I passed near a stone wall half 
hidden in a tangle of chokecherries and bittersweet, 
there was a piercing whistle, followed by a scrambling 
and a scuffling as the woodchuck dived down among 
the stones, and I understood why, below Mason and 
Dixon’s Line, he is always called the ‘“‘whistlepig.” 
It is a good name, for he whistles, and he is certainly 
like a little pig in that he eats and eats and eats 
until he seems mostly quivering paunch. According 
to the farmers of Connecticut, he eats to get strength 
enough to dig, and then digs to get an appetite to 
eat, and so passes his life in a vicious circle of eating 
and digging and digging and eating. In spite of his 
unwieldy weight, the woodchuck is a bitter, brave 
fighter when fight he must. 
I once watched a bull-terrier named Paddy tackle 
a big chuck near a shallow brook. Round and round 
the dog circled, trying for the fatal throat-hold. 
Round and round whirled the brave old chuck, 
chattering with his great chisel-like teeth, which 
could bite through dog-hide and dog-flesh and bone 
just as easily as they gnawed through stolen apples. 
Every once in a while Paddy would clinch, but the 
woodchuck saved himself every time by hunching 
his neck down between his round shoulders and 
punishing the dog so terribly with his sharp teeth 
that the latter would at last retreat, yelping with 
