Yesterday, son Ted and his daughter, Zoe, were visiting when, out the back window, Ted saw some baby woodchucks on the ramp leading up to the utility shed. Their burrow is under the ramp, and they were on top, four of them, playing like kittens in a pantry basket.
Three of them played. One was stretched out on the ramp in a patch of sunlight, absorbing the warmth.
The more raucous pups were wrestling with each other, tumbling over one another's chubby, furry bodies, grabbing each other by the jowls, knocking each other down.
Until I saw this display, I confess, I'd always thought of woodchucks as mindless, vegetarian creatures whose only role in life was to forage. My opinion was formed, in part, by the behavior of my father, Archie Campbell, to woodchucks in our garden.
Archie, who was no vegetarian, planted about a half acre garden every spring with a vast assortment of food-bearing plants, from celery to blue hubbard squash. In the early years, another half acre was planted in potatoes. There is nothing like the smell of fresh earth opened by a potato fork with which you uproot a cluster of fully ripe spuds unless it is the succulent fragrance of green peas just as you snap open the pod.
In any case, Archie may have planted the garden because of the woodchucks. Not that he wanted to feed them. But it gave him an opportunity to pursue another of his obsessions -- hunting, or its necessary companion, marksmanship.
Every night, Archie would arrive home from work at 5:15 p.m., change his clothes, take the 30/30 Winchester rifle out of the closet and go down to a grassy driveway that led from our road to the garden. There, camouflaged by the tall weeds, he would wait.
Then there would be an explosion and a couple of minutes later, Archie would return to the house, where the smells of beef and potatoes and gravy would waft from the kitchen. Our mother would serve dinner and the marksman would consume, rarely a vegetable on his plate, as I recall.
Somewhere on the edge of the garden, a dead woodchuck would have already been buried.