232 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



but there is plenty of evidence that he makes oc- 

 casional trips to the surface 



For instance, I find this entry in my diary for 

 February 23d: 



On snow-shoes this afternoon, across the golf-links, where a 

 weasel had preceded me, to the slope of mowing where the 

 toboggan-slide has been built. Here there were innumerable 

 squirrel tracks from tree to tree, and a woodchuck had come 

 out of his hole since yesterday, boring up through two feet of 

 snow by a six-inch tunnel. He had made a dirty yellowish 

 track for ten feet, and then gone down into a second bore, 

 evidently into the rear entrance of his house. He must have 

 crossed this path several times to track so much yellow earth 

 upon it, but there was not a single sign that he had taken a 

 step off the path. It was as if he had come up for exercise in 

 his dooryard, as my father, in bad weather, used to go out and 

 tramp back and forth on the veranda. 



You might suppose that he would have been lean 

 and hungry, and would naturally have gone after 

 some of those raspberry shoots above the snow near 

 by which the rabbits had been nibbling. But he 

 had not done so, and if you had seen him the chances 

 are he would not have appeared particularly emaci- 

 ated. The truth is, he was probably too fat when 

 he went to sleep! 



The boys still hunt woodchucks as they used to 

 do, for the chuck is their especial prey. Not long 

 ago I came upon a barn hung with more than a 

 hundred tails, the proud trophies of the chase for 

 three seasons of a boy not yet in long trousers. 

 Later I saw him and another boy, and a barking, 

 joyous, alert collie, starting off over a stone wall and 

 across a pasture after woodchucks. They were 



