Old Tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. I don’t believe that I was ever looked at by a woodchuck before. Stolid, sullen, defiant, there was much more of the puzzled, of the world-old wonder in the eyes gazing steadily into mine, as to what this situation and this moment meant. The snarled body was all fight and fear, but the blinking eyes sought mine for an answer to the riddle that I have asked of God. And all that I could answer was, “You fat-head!” And he said, “Fat-head yourself!” if ever a woodchuck spoke, and spoke the truth. “Fat-head, to set this rotten thing here and forget it!” It was a rotten thing to do. Somehow he made me feel as if I had trapped one of my neighbors. He saw how I was feeling, and took advantage of me. “Whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “Whose ancestors were here first, yours or mine? You didn’t even come over in the Mayflower. But I came here in Noah’s Ark.” “I know it. But keep quiet,” I begged him, “and stop looking at me that way.” “What way?” he asked. “Why, so much like my brother!” I exclaimed. “But I am your brother,” he retorted, “though I am ashamed to say it.” “Don’t say it, then,” I begged. But he was wound up. “Any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother has no soul. And any man who can’t share his beans with his brother doesn’t deserve a soul. If I were as low-down and as lazy as you, I would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, I would.” And all the time I was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him. Suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar, among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which I should have heard, had I been able to understand. But I have much to learn. And so has Pup, our Scotch-Irish terrier. Time and time again Pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over himself for his hole. Once or twice they have come to blows at the mouth of the burrow, and Pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear, but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. He came off with a deep experience lately, and a greatly enhanced respect for woodchucks. But he is of stubborn stock. So is Tubby of stubborn stock. Pup knows that here is an enemy of the people, and that he must get him. He knows that Tubby is all hair and hide and bowels. He now knows that Tubby is deeper than he is broad, which makes him pretty deep. The new light began to dawn on Pup when Tubby moved up from the woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. The impudence, the audacity of the thing stood Pup’s hair on end, and he took to the blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would happen.