* * * * * I saw him last fall sitting up like a little post in the Half-Moon Lot where the blind blue gentian grows. Every once in a while he would drop down and begin to nibble again, only to stop and sit up stiff and straight on sentry duty. For the gray, grizzled woodchuck is as wary as he is fat. Watchfulness is the price of his life. Once I spied him far out in a clover-patch, nibbling away at the pink sweet blossoms as I passed along the road. At the bar-way a chipmunk leaped into the wall with a sharp squeak. Without even stopping to raise his head, Mr. Woodchuck scuttled through the clover, and dived into his burrow. It was a bit of animal team-work such as takes place when a 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 pain. They would whirl in circles, and roll over and over in the clinches; but always the old chuck would be found with his squat figure on its legs at the end of each round. His thick grizzled coat was more of a protection, too, than the thin skin of the short-haired terrier. At last both of them were tired out. As if by agreement, both drew back and lay down, panting and watching each other's every movement like two boxers. Finally, the woodchuck, who was nearer the brook, began to drag himself along until he reached the edge of the water. Then he lowered his head, still watching his opponent, and sucked in deep, cool, satisfying drinks.