by John Hersey
Even with the palpable landscape before her, its folds and recesses coming into view under the lightening sky and giving her, by the exposition at last of clear details, a testimony of reality, nevertheless she had for a moment after Mr. Avered left an uneasy feeling that perhaps she was daydreaming. Perhaps she was at her desk in the city daydreaming. Her situation—sitting on a New England stone wall waiting to take part in what the biologist at the caucus had called a “marmot drive”—was too unfamiliar, up to now too frightening and too marvelously beautiful, to partake of any reality she had previously experienced. To keep hold of the conviction that she was awake and reasonable, she tried to think what she actually knew and believed about what she was doing.
* * *
—
There were folding wooden double seats in the “speechin’ room” of the Grange for about two hundred people, and not only were all of the chairs filled; people were standing around the walls and in the doorway to the hall. The outdoor night was warm; here blood and breath and village envy increased the heat. There was a pitcher of icewater on the felted table on the platform, but the six glistening people in straight chairs behind the table looked to Hester as if they thirsted for more than water—for recognition, for lenity, for something they could call love. In the hot light of high bare bulbs their faces looked hard—hard yet painfully yearning; even the Selectman’s face looked oaken and awful. What a setting for “pure democracy”!—for that was how Eben had once characterized the regular town meetings of Tunxis. Here the governed villagers sat face to face with others of themselves, their own begrudgingly chosen governors, in a glaring clarity of overhead light.
The Selectman opened the meeting, speaking gravely and anxiously. “We all know why we’re here,” he said. “The creatures over in Thighbone Hollow are getting too froward and destructive, and we’ve come to a situation where we’ve plain got to clean them out. I don’t know how many of you folks have actually run across one of the groundhogs from the hollow lately, but if you have, you know they’re uncommon big and ferocious. I hefted one, about a fortnight since, and he was somewhere around the weight of the Swanson baby, which as you know is a healthy boy child more than a year old.”
For a few moments Hester entertained a picture of this unknown Swanson baby as a malevolent beast of the forest, and she lost the thread of the chairman’s remarks.
“…In June this summer,” he was saying when she rejoined him, “groundhogs took every leaf off of Alenam Rust’s acreage—that was beets and early lettuce transplants, wasn’t it, Alenam?—which is three miles from the hollow and hasn’t a burrow anywhere around it; Alenam’s looked into that. So you can see they’re bold and don’t mind a hike. We used to think they were lazy—ha! Anyhow, tonight we want to let some who’ve studied this thing tell you what we’re up against, and then we’ll have a discussion, and then tomorrow morning we’ll get after them.”
The first expert put forward by the Selectman, to tell how the problem had come up, was Anak Welch, a huge man, appreciably more than six and a half feet tall, whose forehead seemed incandescent, so close was it to a lightbulb hanging over him; a giant who looked as if parts of him were still growing and burl-like would never stop: his prognathous jaw, his hands like the beginnings of wings, his great ears that lent much, along with his persistent stoop, to his air of monstrous humility—for who, Hester thought, is as humble as a hearer? His voice was even, courteous, and low, and it commanded closer attention in the crowded, stifling hall than had the sharper note of the Selectman’s.
The huge man mildly said that the trouble had begun, in his opinion, during the last century, when the railroad had been put in, by-passing Tunxis and running round through Whigtown and Treehampstead. When the canal had come through in ’twenty-two, the village had thought it was “goin’ to turn into a little star or a wheel on the map of the state”—be a real center. It was just after that, he said, when the potash works, the two tanneries, the clock factory, the spoke works, the carding mill, and the mincing-knife factory had settled in Tunxis. “We were goin’ places! Yes, sirree!” But then in ’forty-seven, because of the way Beggar’s Mountain up north of town lined up with Thighbone Ledge, the railroad people decided they had to go round to the west and miss Tunxis. “Our biggest ’numeration was in ’fifty-two; we lost twenty-three men in the Civil War, and that was a terrible loss for a little hamlet; and we’ve been dyin’ on the bush ever since. D’you know the way sweet honeysuckle gets on a tree that’s let itself get weak and overwhelms it and kills it by-and-by? That’s what’s beginning, in my opinion, with these woodchucks. They calculate that Tunxis is on the wane, that’s the way I see it, and they’re movin’ in on us, they’d be glad to nudge us out altogether. We’ve got to tend to ’em early in the game and show ’em we have a mind to stay here, if we do. I, for one, do.
“We humans think we’re pretty high-soarin’, with our combustion engines and electric radios and now jimmyin’ open the almighty secret itself, splittin’ God to make explosions, but what we forget is that we’re still part of the woodlot where it grows rank and wild. We’re in it just as much as the volunteer hemlocks on the edge of Johnnycake Meadow and the black snakes on the lip of the Sessions quarry. We can’t afford to get absent-minded and forget that.”
“Stick to the subject, Anak!” a bass voice called out, and a gust of soft, refreshing laughter ran across the hall like a brief puff of northerly breeze in a hay meadow on a cloudless summer day.
The giant grinned. “You folks know me too well,” he said. It had been about seventeen years ago, he went on, just before Parson Churnstick died and the First Church was abandoned, when the men who worked the fields up toward Thighbone Ledge—old Mr. Manross, Romeo Bacon, and Frank Cherevoy were three he named—had begun to have bad trouble with groundhogs. They would put poison in all the burrows they could find and fill the mouths of the holes and set traps and shoot the creatures and do everything within their gifts, yet still they would lose their crops. They could grow nothing but sour weeds, and that was no way to farm. There was a bay in one of Romeo Bacon’s meadows, the big man said, with woodlots of chestnut, hemlock, and hickory on three sides of it, and the animals seemed to be gathering in that area—“buildin’ a village ’cross from ours, you might say. You remember Romeo got to be a case, about that time, and I think maybe the woodchucks had somethin’ to do with it, and old Mr. Manross died, and Frank Cherevoy moved away to the other side of Hartford—maybe he wanted to get those big insurance companies between him and Tunxis.” So for the next ten years, and all through the war, nothing was done about the woodchucks in the hollow. The Bacon meadows come up strongly in clover, and that just made the situation worse.
“By the time young John Leaming bought his track of land up there four years ago—without walkin’ over it careful enough, if you’ll pardon me sayin’ so, John—they’d really got themselves dug in, both in the old bay on Romeo’s acreage and in the woods and right up to the ledge itself. These weren’t fat old field chuckies. These were forest groundhogs, lean creatures, active as squirrels. They were pretty fierce, and some were tougher’n a hair halter, as George Challenge’s German police dog found out to its sorrow and doom. Some of ’em were turnin’ black—young Pliny Forward’ll tell you about the scientific side of all this; I’m no intellectual, as you folks know, and the only college I ever studied at was Doin’ It College. All I know is that these creatures were an everlastin’ bother. They were on the increase, too, faster’n the hordes of India. Nobody’s ever counted ’em, of course, but that time Mrs. Tuller went up there for an experiment and gave ’em a concert on the bull fiddle, the folks who were with her said at least two hundred groundhogs stood up on their mounds and listened to the music. Never heard nothin’ about none of the creatures clappin’ when the pieces were over and done, but that’s neither here nor there, is it, Mrs. Tuller?
“We first talked here in the town about tryin’ to
control those creatures I’d say ten years ago, but we’d learned from Exodus not to covet our neighbor’s ox nor his ass—nor his troubles neither. So let old Romeo and Mr. Manross and Frank Cherevoy holler till their gills broke open, nobody’d listen—except Matthew Avered, I’ll say that for him, even if he’s a Republican and I ain’t. By and by-large, over the years, the colony of groundhogs was just a curiosity for professors and a dandy excuse for young folks who were sparkin’ to get ’emselves up into the woodlots. It wasn’t but three years ago, when the creatures begun to wayfare such great distances, that the town got in a fever about them. It’s too bad about Frank Cherevoy’s beanrows, but when they get into mine! That’s different! Well, the next thing we knew, we’d put Matthew Avered in the Selectman’s office on a split vote, and he’d been cogitatin’ about those creatures all along, and so here we are on a hot night, and that’s about all the history I can give you at the present sittin’.”
There was a brief rattle of applause, and as it died down, the voice of a man who had stood up near the back of the hall shouted, “Mr. Selectman!”
“Mr. Sessions has the floor,” Mr. Avered said.
“I just wanted to ask,” the man named Sessions said, “what the Selectman is tryin’ to pull off here. Looks to me like he’s advocatin’ the use of taxpayers’ money to help an individual property owner—to help young Leaming clear the pests out of his lots. Is that it, Mr. Selectman?”
For some reason, this question, which had been earnestly uttered, was greeted with laughter all around. This gust was different from the earlier easy laughter during the big man’s speech. This puff had force in it; this wind was harnessed to a storm.
Probably because of the laughter, the Selectman did (in retrospect it seemed) the wrong thing—he ignored the question and left Mr. Sessions dawdling on his feet, to sit down, eventually, turning his head from side to side, angrily scrutinizing his fellow citizens’ attitudes. “Our next speaker,” Mr. Avered blandly announced, “is a young man this town is rightly proud of, Mr. Pliny Forward. As you know, he walked off with all the brass-plated honors at Harvard College this last graduation. His strong point is biology, and because he got interested in this situation up in Thighbone Hollow some years back, he did his thesis on the groundhog, about which there’d previously been very little understanding in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where this particular college is seated. So you see he knows what’s what! He’s helped us no end with the planning for the cleanout, and we thought it would be time well spent if he told us a little about the animals we’re contending with. Mr. Forward, come forward!”
A pale young man wearing green plastic-rimmed glasses stepped to the podium and said in a shaking and startlingly cultured baritone, “Let us, to begin with, be accurate. The animal under consideration is a member of the marmot family. Our activity tomorrow and Sunday will be a marmot drive. Let us be exact.” For a moment Pliny Forward seemed to sag under the weight of his knowledge; he appeared to be fainting. Then he straightened up as if he had been watered just in time.
“Arctomys monax,” he managed to say. “ ‘The bear-mouse monk,’ the fellow’s called. And what more do we need in the way of description?”
The young biologist paused again, drooped again; Hester had for a moment the idea that since no more description was needed, he would give no more, but would subside and perhaps even expire then and there, he looked so feeble. She suffered a short panic for him; but again he revived.
“What we do need,” he said tremorously, “is to understand how the marmots in Thighbone Hollow differ from the ordinary field marmots in this part of the world. I’ll try to express the difference by ringing a change on the common names we use. We call the species woodchucks. Some think this may come from an Indian word, others think it comes from combining ‘wood’ with the diminutive once used for pigs in some farming districts in England, in Devonshire, for instance: woodland ‘chuckles’—forest piggies. We also call field marmots by another name, groundhogs. Now, to see the difference between our animals in Thighbone Hollow and other Connecticut marmots, we must think of the local animals, not as being like little piggies or fat, idle hogs, but as the counterparts of wild boars.”
Paler than ever, pouring off sweat, Pliny Forward nevertheless looked and sounded stronger now, for he was obviously on known and loved ground, forgetful of his environment and audience. “Let me cite you some actual differences between our local marmots and the common run in New England. To begin with, ours are bigger than their neighbors. Common woodchucks in Connecticut grow to about two feet in length, counting their tails, while the full-grown animals in Thighbone Hollow average twenty-eight or thirty inches. The ordinary ones become ludicrously fat, especially in the fall just before they crawl away to hibernate. Ours sleep less of the winter away, and they’re leaner and stronger; after all, they go several miles to eat. Ours have unusually thick skins and heavy skulls. I’ve skinned some and tanning the hides with hickory bark made leather a quarter inch thick. Their crowns are practically petrified.
“And take the matter of color. We biologists are taught that the standard ‘characters’ of the marmot are these: ‘Supra fusco cinereus’ ”—the young man chanted like a priest—“ ‘subtus subrufus, capite, cauda, pedibusque fuscis, naso et…’ ”
Someone in the hall let out a two-note whistle of admiration-derision.
Pliny Forward’s head turned slowly in the direction of the sound. “Whoever made that noise,” he said, the color of life suffusing his cheeks for the first time, “will be useful tomorrow and the next day. We usually hear that noise used as the mating call of the not yet fully adult male of the North American Homo sap., but its second note will be extremely useful in our pursuit of Arctomys monax, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. But to get back to color: The coat of the normal groundhog is a grizzly or yellowish gray, blackish-brownish on the back, crown, and tail, and rusty on the underbelly, whereas—this is eerie to me—a very large proportion of our animals in Thighbone Hollow are in what we call ‘the melanistic phase,’ which occurs only now and then among common eastern marmots. This means they are black or blackish all over.
“Now, about that whistle. Most of you probably think woodchucks are silent, but they’re not. When they’re terrified or furious, they’ll do one of two things—chatter their teeth together, so they sound like dangerous little chopping machines, or else give out intermittent, high, shrill whistles, warning their fellows. Connecticut marmots don’t have many occasions to use their alert call, but our local ones seem to have developed these shrieks to an unusual degree. In this, as in other ways, our woodchucks tend to be close to the Rocky Mountain marmots. We’ve found that by imitating the marmots’ whistle, we can alarm them and drive them along overground; and a little later we’ll demonstrate the sound.
“Why did this pack of abnormally wild marmots pick on Tunxis? From what I hear, some of our ancestors—not so far back, either: Parson Churnstick would be one—would have said we were being punished for horrible things we townspeople had done or even thought in our heads. On the other hand, we’ve got some people right here in this hall who think we’re all good and they—the marmots—are all bad, and that they are after us, as the evil always hunger to cannibalize the good. I try to be a scientist. I can only say that Mr. Welch must have been partly right when he put the beginnings of this thing a great many years ago—perhaps, as he said, about when the railroad came through the county. For one thing, most of the natural enemies of these creatures were stamped out about then—wildcats, foxes, eagles, big serpents, and even weasels. And I think Mr. Welch may have been right about the animals sensing the sapping of the vitality of our village, its gradual decadence. Marmots can see, they have eyes: the church in the hollow has been empty a long, long time, the mills on the canal smoke no more, the meadows up near the ledge haven’t been tended for more than ten years. But even that’s too simple. Why did clover come up so richly in t
he hollow? There must be complicated reasons for this visitation that I, in spite of all my education you people like to laugh at, don’t understand. Maybe some of you older people are wiser and know the real reasons. I leave them to you.”
Pliny Forward, who in these last sentences had grown rather bold and forceful in manner, sat down, and at first the mysteries he had webbed in his clumsy, callow way, and in his urbane university accent, lay like a shroud over a spiritless audience; then the people stirred and a few clapped rather angrily.
The Selectman stepped to the podium and said, “Dr. James Fantigh, our dentist, who has plugged up holes in most of our heads, has kindly agreed to highlight the main point of interest of these wicked animals we have heard about—their chinchoppers.” (In the early morning, on the stone wall under the pink sky, thinking back, Hester remembered the way the Selectman had gleaned that one small word, “wicked,” from young Forward’s speech. She wondered vaguely whether Mr. Avered’s unnecessarily pulling that word out had any meaning: whether it helped account for the Selectman’s longstanding interest in the woodchucks in the hollow; whether, in key with Pliny Forward’s blacks and whites, he saw evil in the beasts but not in himself—or the other way round; whether the light of this small word, in some refracted way, could illumine those long, staring abstractions of his.)
“My report,” Dr. Fantigh, a tidy man with hair parted in the middle, read verbatim from a filing card, “will be brief. The animal in question has upper and lower pairs of incisors, no canines, ten upper molars, and eight lowers. I have examined specimens brought to my office by Mr. Forward. The jaws are articulated in the vertical plane and have no sidewise motion. The incisors are like chisels, strong, narrow, and wedge-shaped, with enamel on the anterior surfaces only, so that by a constant wearing away of the posterior surfaces the teeth are kept filed to a very sharp edge. No caries was observed. If my patients”—the dentist looked up for the first time—“had teeth as sound as these, I’d be a poorer but happier man than at the present time.” He returned to his written words. “In summary, these teeth are dangerous. My professional advice is—keep away from them.”