woodchucks

Garden antics update by Gabriela Stanciu. Perhaps this could also be titled, One Thing I Did on My Summer Vacation.

So how this all started was my mom had a giant woodchuck in her garden, and we were trying to trap it. My Grandfather said do you have any skunks around here, and my mom said no I haven’t seen any up here and I have lived up here for 17 years. So we put a banana in the trap for bait. The first couple nights we didn’t catch it. On the third night we put a melon rind in the trap. The next morning me and my mom go out to see if anything was in the trap and something was but it wasn’t a woodchuck. Guess what it was–a skunk!!!!!!!!!!! So I ran up to get my dad. He said he would be right down from his cabin so I ran back down. My mom called our friend who knows a lot about animals and he said to put a blanket over the cage and then let it out so you don’t get sprayed. Me and my grandfather were looking at Youtube to see what to do. We were going crazy because we didn’t want to get sprayed and also we didn’t want to catch a skunk. We wanted to catch a woodchuck. So then my dad came down. He got a long pole, unlatched the doors, and then opened them up. It took the skunk a little while before it went out, but it finally did, and we put the cage in a different spot.

Augueries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death…

–– William Blake

Photo by Molly S.

The air was cool this morning when I reached over and turned on the light. It was a little after four, and with the windows and screen door wide open the room had cooled overnight from the day’s heat. I woke thinking of the woodchuck I’d seen in my garden the day before, a long flashing swatch of him running alongside my onion bed. Earlier that day, from the balcony, I’d seen the woodchuck on the huge rock pile across the small field. The animal lay on his variation of a rock balcony–my neighbor across the buckwheat–preening itself. I could see the lushness of its pelt, brown and russet and red, before it turned, amazingly quick despite its size, and disappeared down the rock pile.

The creature’s been in my hoop house, eating tomatoes, these luscious beauties on my forty or so plants finally ripening after a late planting and a summer of rain. As I lay there, I imagined this impressively large animal gnawing away at my fruit, strewing the paths with partially chewed golden and red tomatoes, its head swiveling around, a little jumpy for the sound of my footfalls, its dark eyes shining in the early light.

While I lay there, the Dutch novel I’d been reading, The Twin, got mixed up in my thinking of the woodchuck, so I was riding along the dykes and looking through a window on a Dutch dairy farm. In and out of this spell loomed the wild creature with its glistening white teeth and shaggy pelt–the fur that, on some fearful level, I longed to touch. In the end, I picked up my book and read for a while before getting up to work.

My tomatoes? Or the woodchuck’s tomatoes? A year ago, the fierce gardener in me would have risen up in rake-welding fury. Now, I’m thinking to pick what I can, and perhaps not so bitterly begrudge this rampaging feast. Likely, the woodchuck wishes I would pull up stakes and head out for new territory. As I wish for him.

There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

–– Maxine Kumin “Woodchucks”

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

The Very Unexpected Experience

My Woodchuck Companion