But a boy naturally likes to use his trap and his gun, especially on any animal, or bird, which his seniors represent to him as an outlaw. When the Old Squire set a bounty of five cents upon wood-chuck scalps, the desire to go on the war-path against the proscribed rodents at once took possession of us. A number of rusty fox-traps and mink-traps were brought forth from the wagon-house chamber, to be set at the entrances of the wood-chucks' holes. We covered the trenchers of the traps carefully over with loose dirt and attached the chain to stakes, driven into the ground a little to one side of the hole. In this way five chucks were trapped in the south field during the week. Halstead and I were in partnership trapping them, but Addison preferred to rely on the gun. It is next to impossible to kill a wood-chuck with shot so quickly that he will not, after being hit, succeed in running into his hole, and thus defeat the evidence that he is a dead wood-chuck. Addison, however, hit upon a stratagem for shooting them at short range. He could imitate their peculiar "whistle" quite cleverly, and having observed that when one wood-chuck whistles, all the others within hearing are apt to exhibit some little curiosity as to what is going on, he turned the circumstance to account. Going cautiously to a burrow, he would crouch down, and placing the muzzle of the gun so as to shoot into the hole, "whistle," as if some neighboring chuck had come along to prospect the premises. In almost every instance, when there was a chuck in the hole, it would immediately come up in sight, probably to greet, or repel its visitor. The instant it appeared, Addison would fire and nearly always kill the animal; for although often he could not secure it, he would carefully close up the hole with stones and earth, and if, after three days, the chuck did not dig out past the obstruction, he laid claim to the bounty. A roster, which he kept in notches on the garden gate, showed that he had shot fourteen wood-chucks. I remember that Theodora had something to say several times about our cruelty to the poor creatures; but we justified it on account of the damage which the wood-chucks were alleged to do to the grain, grass and beans. "Oh, Doad would let the wood-chucks eat up everything we plant!" Halse would say, sarcastically. "'Let them have it,' she would say. 'Don't hurt the poor little things!' That's just like girls. They don't have to plant and hoe, so they are very merciful and tender-hearted. But if they had to plough and work and plant and sow and hoe in the hot sun all day, to raise a crop, they'd sing a different tune when the plaguey wood-chucks came around and ate it up!" We thought Addison's stratagem a very bright one. That he could "whistle" the chuck out of his hole, and fetch him up to the very muzzle of the gun, was considered remarkably clever. But an incident which occurred a few days later rendered it forever unpopular.