The Marmot Drive

by John Hersey

  The brevity, concreteness, and intensity of the dentist’s speech was in such sharp contrast to the troublesome, unanswerable, still overarching why? of Pliny Forward’s last sentences that the crowd now suddenly burst into a racket of clapping and happy laughing, as if Dr. Fantigh had brought much-desired good news from afar.

  * * *

  —

  The memory of the rest of the caucus was confused in Hester’s mind. The rapid give and take of discussion, the intermittent instructions and warnings, the many mentions of names and places new to her, the swiftly mounting emotions of the crowd—all were blended in her recall with sensations of her own confusion and despair. She kept thinking that the facts she had heard about marmots, as the young biologist had called them, had fascinated her in exactly the same way as had Eben’s confidential and condescending lectures to her, back in the city, on new inventions in aviation, on the bowels of new instruments of war. It could have been, for all she knew, that the self-sharpening principle of the woodchucks’ dangerous incisors had only recently been contrived by ingenious scientists in secret laboratories of New England. She realized, with disappointment and then fear, the reach of her separation from natural things.

  Hester did remember, all too clearly, the final scene of recrimination, spite, and comic bad manners, just before the caucus ended; most of what led up to it was hazy in her recollection. She remembered passages of the intervening time, but she could not piece together the logic of the crescendo of anger against the Selectman, if logic there had been. She sensed that there must have been some background of feeling in the town about which she had still to know, something beyond the division of the citizenry over the location of a new school—though that, too, was an explicit factor in the ruction.

  After the dentist’s short report, Mr. Avered had spoken at some length about the tactics to be used in the drive. He had propped up on an easel a map of the hollow, and had described how the picket line of volunteers would, on the first day, dislodge the woodchucks from their homes and drive them along between the ledge and the canal until they had crossed Job’s Creek—a stream transecting the hollow, running down from springs on Thighbone Ledge to the canal. Plank bridges had been placed across this stream in recent days, and they would be withdrawn as soon as the animals were herded to the other side. Since the water-fearing woodchucks had never been known to cross either Job’s Creek or the canal, and because Thighbone Ledge beyond Job’s Creek was impossibly sheer for them to climb, there was virtually no likelihood of their trying to return to their community in the Bacon Meadows, once driven across the creek. They would probably burrow underground during that night and would have to be surfaced again the second morning. Then the picket line would drive the creatures forward into a long funnel of “rabbit-proof fence,” sunk under the ground as well as raised over it, at the constriction of the hollow four miles beyond Job’s Creek, known as the Lantern Flue. At its narrow end the funnel led into a corral of the same fencing, built, as the funnel had been, for this drive, on the edge of Judge Pitkin’s land. There the woodchucks would be destroyed; he did not say how.

  The Selectman had continued in detail, explaining the system of divisions, naming the captains, assigning known volunteers, and outlining the duties of each division at each stage of the drive. Here Hester’s attention had wandered, as it had used to wander when she had been taken, much too young, week after week, to the church on the wide avenue. The pew-backs there had been hard, like the seats here in the Grange; she had used to lean sideways against her mother, who on Sundays had always borne the ineffable scent of a nameless flower. She was aware now of Eben beside her, breathing a little hard: poor Eben!—embarrassed by his father’s absorption in the minutiae of his beloved project.

  How different Eben seemed in the city from here in Tunxis! Hester remembered how, when Mr. Avered had pointed out to her the previous afternoon a slender mourning dove in the high branches of a white pine near the homestead, she had suddenly thought of peanut-surfeited pigeons on befouled cornices above the sun-parched street across from the park in the city. Eben in the city was always congenial, and acquaintances took to him quickly, yet he was always, at last, alone like one of those birds on some high corner of sun-soaked, ordure-striped stone. She did not blame the city for that; on the contrary, she thought perhaps he had become practiced in loneliness as a child in this Tunxisful of defiant and separate identities. He had no intimacies but hers, and she was not sure that she was his friend. She remembered a conversation one evening when she and Eben were dining in a crowded restaurant in the far west side with the McCleods. Sam McCleod had gone to the same small New England college as Eben, and that night they began to talk about another classmate who lived in the city and whom all four of them knew, envied, and disliked.

  “Wonder who’ll go to Cramp’s funeral when he dies,” McCleod had said. “D’you suppose enough people’ll show up to make it a proper funeral? D’you think they’ll be able to scrape up six pallbearers?”

  “When I die,” Hester had said, “I don’t want any pallbearers. I haven’t asked my friends to carry me while I’m alive, and I’m not going to ask them to when I’m dead.”

  “I don’t have six friends,” Peggy McCleod had said. “Who does?”

  “Cramp does,” McCleod had said.

  Peggy had answered, “Nonsense, he doesn’t have any friends. All he has is useful acquaintances. He has a system of mutual advantages, but no friends. Nobody has six real friends.”

  At last Eben had spoken. “It won’t take six people to carry me,” he had said. “I’m going to be cremated. So it doesn’t matter whether I have six friends or not.”

  But it did matter; that was what had made his utterance not mildly reckless and sophisticated, as he had seemed to mean it to be, but only mildly pathetic. The city was a frustrating place for Eben—and for Hester, too, since she was so much with him—because their life there consisted of a continuous search for intimacies, which had the maddening repetitive structure of a rondo, over and over and over: a series of explorations of a series of newly-met acquaintances, ending almost always in disappointment on one side or the other, as “attractiveness” was fragmented by familiarity into its too clearly seen elements; or ending, at any rate, in just happening not to meet again. In Tunxis there would almost never be new faces, there could almost never be new acquaintances; there must be a kind of stability of separateness and loneliness here, she thought, an atmosphere in which deep friendship might paradoxically be possible; though she was not at all sure—did the Selectman have any friends who were close and true?

  “You’ve all probably seen the paths woodchucks beat across the meadows to their feeding places,” the Selectman was saying. “Follow those paths whenever you can and wherever they run along the general direction of our drive….” Hester heard him warn that groundhogs would turn and fight fiercely against attackers far bigger than themselves, if pressed too closely; so they shouldn’t be rushed. The drivers should take their time, stand back and whistle and stamp, and maybe shout, until the animals moved of their own free wills. Baby chuckies, “in their innocent valor,” he said, were the meanest and quickest fighters of all, though of course they couldn’t inflict such severe bites as their parents. It was expected that the animals would take refuge stubbornly in stone walls, where there might be big enough cavities to house them, or under the vaulting roots of partly washed-out hemlocks in the hanging wood below Thighbone Ledge, and if they did, they could be driven out with the same insect-spray bombs that were to be used to dislodge them from their burrows in the first place. Experiments had been run with DDT bombs, he said, and it had been found that the animals hated the smell of the insecticide vapor and would invariably move away from it….

  The Selectman said the meeting was open for discussion.

  From the very first the questions addressed to the chair showed a rancor that was puzzling to Hester, who thought the t
ownspeople should be grateful to the Selectman and the others for the careful planning they had obviously done.

  “I’d like to ask the Selectman,” one man declared, “why in heaven’s name he picked this particular time of year for his piece of funnin’, if that’s what ’tis. He knows this stretch of summertime is one of the very wust times of the hull year—for folks that have to work outdoors, that is, and there’s still some of ’em, you know.”

  Polite as a basket of chips, the Selectman said, “Pliny, I think you’re the best one to answer that.”

  (Later Hester thought perhaps Mr. Avered’s passing this first question on to Pliny Forward was a disastrous mistake, since the young biologist had already roused the resentment of the crowd with his superior accent and his unsettling why?)

  “There are two reasons,” the pale young man said. “One is that in midsummer the marmots are widest awake and spryest; we can move them faster then than at any other time. The second is the more important reason. Marmots belong to the order of rodents, and almost all rodents have a very queer trait that shows up now and again: When they gather in close-packed communities that are perhaps a little too big—rodent cities, almost—there comes a time when they get restless, a mob feeling of the fidgets spreads through the whole city, the rodents want to get out and go somewhere else. In some cases, all of them do move; in others, part of the colony moves; and in still others—and this is often true of marmots—they just seem to go through the heebie-jeebies and stay where they are. You’ve all heard how lemmings migrate, sometimes with such hysterical impetus that the whole pack walks straight into the sea and drowns. Rat towns move this way, and sometimes end up in locations less favorable than the ones they have left, so far as food and comfort are concerned. I personally think it was because of this trait of rodents that the Pied Piper of Hamelin had the success he did. At any rate, a number of us who appreciate this phenomenon have been watching the marmot colony in Thighbone Hollow very closely for several seasons. You’ve heard how they started wandering three years ago. Real fidgets set in last summer, and came back even stronger this spring. We’re convinced that now is the time to push the marmots, as their own instincts might never be quite strong enough to do, out of a situation that gives them the willies.” The young man paused, then added, “As a matter of fact, this trait isn’t confined to marmots: don’t we see it sometimes in ourselves? Haven’t you ever had the feeling we all ought to clear out?”

  “Got it right now!” a woman cried from the audience. Her shout was arched, it was a joke; the humor was nasty, and the crowd emitted the storm-laugh again.

  Apparently the guffaws roused the man named Sessions, who had been laugh-tossed earlier in the evening, and now he was up again, saying, “I want to repeat what I asked before: Are you proposin’, Mr. Selectman, that we use taxpayers’ money to help an individual property owner?”

  This time an intense silence followed the question, for now people seemed to want an answer to the question they had ridiculed before.

  “The taxpayers’ money isn’t being used for this,” Mr. Avered said, a note of querulousness barely audible in his voice. “All we’ve asked for is volunteers.”

  “What about those plank bridges? What about all that fencin’?”

  “Mr. Leaming, Senior, contributed the fence posts and planks, and I paid for the wire mesh myself, as it happens, because I’ve been wanting for ten years to see this chore done with. There are about a dozen young men who helped plant the fence, and I’ve already thanked them in writing.”

  “What’s old man Leaming up to, lettin’ loose all that lumber?” asked a man who did not choose to stand. “Tryin’ to influence the Selectman’s office when it comes to locatin’ the school?”

  “I resent that,” shouted a white-haired, crimson-faced man, evidently Mr. Leaming, Senior, who stood up to cry out his three heartfelt words and then sat down again.

  “Why’n’t you just trap the creatures?” asked a sober-faced man in a black suit, with a strong tone of resentment. “Trappin’ seemed to suit our forefathers. My father and his father kept our land spandy clean with traps, and so should I, if I’d’ve tended to the fields and hadn’t a-gone into my present occupation.”

  “Traps won’t work with so many, Enos,” the Selectman said. “We couldn’t buy and service that many traps. Leave a groundhog in a trap for half an hour and he’ll gnaw his foot off. I’ll tell you one thing, too, Enos, though maybe you know it already: A groundhog is a lot more economical about such things than other animals, muskrats, for instance; where a muskrat’ll leave two or three inches of his leg above the jaws of the trap, your groundhog’ll trim himself off right at the steel, neat as a burnt-out candle.”

  “Trappin’ was good enough for our forefathers,” the man named Enos said in heavy reproach as he sat down.

  “There’s a modern way!” exclaimed an excited young man who had been on his feet raising his hand school-fashion for some time. “You back a car up at midday, when woodchucks are always to home, then run a hose down from the exhaust into the burrow, block off both ends of the burrow, and start your motor—that’s all! It’s a gas chamber! That ought to do the job thorough and easy.”

  “Are you going to back your beautiful Chevvy with the fenders taken off it up into the bay on Romeo’s acres, Eustace Thrall?” the Selectman asked. “You ever been up there? And what about the ones in the woods?”

  The excited young man flushed and sat down.

  Then, from somewhere outside the hall and close to it, through the windows at Hester’s right, came a shrill and penetrating whistle.

  Pliny Forward struggled to his feet on the platform as if the sound had dizzied him. “Did you hear that?” he said tensely to the crowd. “That was a marmot’s shriek, that was the alarm I was talking about. But it’s strange! I never heard one at night before.”

  “Mebbe none never hearn you at night afore,” shouted the woman who had had a success with her previous quip, now vulgarizing her speech; but this time no one laughed, no one at all.

  “Do you suppose they know what we’re doing?” the Selectman asked Pliny Forward. A smile showed that he, too, meant to be humorous, but his eyes were not enlivened by his joke; he seemed wan.

  There was a long silence in the hall; the crowd was appalled. Finally the Selectman faced the audience and said, “Now that we’ve heard from the opposition…”

  A sudden, surprising roar of laughter arose, as the crowd’s ridiculous tensions—its fear, its fear of fear, its hatred of fear, the understanding it must have had that fear had been, in those moments, unwarranted but ineluctably epidemic in the hall—were suddenly released. It was possible, too, Hester thought later, that the crowd was unconsciously laughing over the ambiguity, perhaps itself unconscious, in what the Selectman had said, for his “opposition” could be understood as of either woodchucks or townspeople. For a few minutes, at any rate, the latter sort was abated by the whistling episode, and perfunctory talk of tactics ensued.

  But anger, like a hungry dog coming back to the scene of an unforgotten feast, soon returned. Hester, who had been daydreaming again, could not be sure what smell of a new repast attracted it back to the hall. She had picked up a note of cruelty in what Eben’s father had said about trapped animals gnawing themselves free, and that had made her think of a time when she had been driving with Eben in Florida, during the vacation they had shared there, and they had passed a runover cat on the road, and Eben had said, “Once in ’forty-seven I drove to Springfield and I killed twelve cats on the road,” and she had said, flaring up, “Pleased every time, I’ll bet,” and he had said, with comic-book finality, “Pow! Pow! Pow!”

  By the time a sense of renewed tension brought her interest back into the Grange Hall, Hester gathered that the school issue had come into play.

  “When are we going to have a decision?” Mr. Sessions asked.

  “We�
��re here to talk about Thighbone Hollow,” the Selectman said. “Can’t we dispose of one problem at a time?”

  “With due respect,” Mr. Sessions said, in a voice raucous with a want of respect, “I don’t see how we can. All our problems in this town are tied in together. My attitude on Thighbone Hollow depends on your attitude on the school—specially since the Leaming boy is mixed up in this groundhog business. No, you can’t take things one by one here in Tunxis, Mr. Selectman.”

  Several people stood at once and poured out their cross-purposed sentences without waiting for recognition by the Selectman: a woman do-gooder saying in hectic presidential tones that the school was badly needed, there would be double sessions in another year, the hot-lunch program was imperiled; Mr. Leaming, Senior, tempting apoplexy with his still outraged protests that his son had nothing to do with the school issue, “in fact, he’s dead set against me on the whereabouts of the schoolhouse”; the man named Enos, saying that when he was a boy, he’d walked four miles to school in the snowdrifts, and he couldn’t see why we needed all these buses and moving-picture machines and frills nowadays; and others and still others, in a compulsive outpouring of anger that frightened Hester. There seemed to be no continuity, no progression; yet steadily there was built up a triangle of heat and hate—the Leaming faction against the Johnnycake Meadow crowd, and both, with bitterest force, against the symbol of authority, the Selectman. By a roundabout course, amid the fury, Mr. Leaming, Senior, who had seemed to be closely co-operative with the Selectman on Thighbone Hollow, came to be abusive toward him on the school issue. The Selectman gave him firm answers. Mr. Leaming blushed dangerously between shouts. The Selectman offered the worst provocation: He kept his temper. Mr. Leaming, who seemed to have mislaid his temper several seasons back, occasionally stammered, as if he were rooting around in the corners of his mind in search of his lost self-control.