The Long Sleep

PRESSING the damp wad of pale moss and leaf mulch against a mould-scarred feldspar rock on the sagging old stone wall, the Woodchuck drove his curved incisors deeper, cutting with a dull crackle through a brown maple leaf and serrating a last year’s twig of alder.

Over the pad that was to mattress his winter-long sleep, his dilated nostrils wheezed laboriously, emitting faint clouds in the cold, clear wintry air. He was tired, and a dull ache ran under the thick brown coat from his shoulders to the base of his sagging tail. For several seconds he stood there, body elevated, his black-padded, nail-curved paws widespread. Like a youngster peering into a bakery window, he stood, looking forlornly through round brown eyes over unattainable things — over clover, juiceless, brown, and jejune, running away with the frosted gentle slope to the brook deep in azure anger and crystal, rock-churned clarity.

Then, securing his strong foreclaws in the pustulelike surface of the rock, he drew himself slowly up, gathering in his flank wuth a weary, deep-throated groan. From there his tired eyes surveyed once again the bleak barrenness before him: the denuded elm on the far slope, the rough-barked aged oak in soldierly command over a silent platoon of young white pines, and a venerable old maple, tenaciously fostering a few russetbrown badges of three-fingered leaves. In spite of his thick coat he felt the cold, blowing strongly from the north, making flat spots on his rump like a whirlwind in a field of ripening grain.

He was about to start down, lowering his cryptogamic bedding, when a new odor, faintly pungent, stirred his delicate olfactory lobes — an odor that caused him to turn his head sharply, nostrils quivering, and filter it with mounting fear. Though he bore proudly the distinguished name of Marmota monax, he was nevertheless in great fear of fire. His tired round eyes stared into the north with a new glow, and his jowls pulsated in a rapid sucking sound, straining the pine-scented wind with infinite care.

For perhaps five minutes he crouched there, his hind quarters wearily flattened, his clover-leaf ears rigidly erect, weighing the increasing acridity of the fire. Then, quite exhausted, he turned slowly and extended one paw carefully over the edge, picking his way down to the ground. Every step sent darting pains through his foreshoulders, and his paws were numb to the cold, hard surface. Already the danger was a distant thing, filtering with dull insistence into a brain no longer responsive to great exertion. With slow care he walked down the slope, picking his way among the drooping, fuzzy stalks of hawkweed and the tentacular clumps of hardhack. And presently he reached his own run, a trodden narrow pathway connecting the clover patch with his burrow in the lee of the blackberry-crowned ledge.

Bracing himself against his weariness, he stood quite still, looking back along the colorless run, seeing for one forlorn moment the luscious stalks of clover alive with pink round blossoms and busy, humming bees. And while he remembered, a single large snowflake dropped with infinite gentleness on the bridge of his stubby nose. And then another and another followed, and he turned into the run and began to climb the slope, slowly, dragging his bushy short tail. The wind had veered to the northeast, the leaden sky had dropped. He did not miss the acrid taint of the fire, nor sense relief that the thickening snow was blanketing his most terrible foe. The wind whistled softly in his mossy pad, ruffling the edges, playing in the pale greenery of its soft dampness. Snow gathered there, like seed pearls, and along the beaten run.

It was snowing heavily when he reached the young butternut, its resplendent foliage long since denuded, where his path veered more to the west on the final shale-bedded climb to the base of the ledge. With laborious, patient toil he crept slowly upward, placing his aching forepaws so as to avoid the sharper bits of laminated rock. And presently, quite exhausted, he reached the entrance to his snug subterrane. Already the snow lay in thin, spotless ermine, concealing the rugged blackness of his ledgy roofing.

As he stood there, braced against the fatiguing results of his exertion, a hostile odor assailed his nostrils. He turned his head slowly until his tired eyes dimly focused the rapid approach of a man. Over the wall he had so laboriously traversed, a tall figure leaped. At any other time that odor would have brought him to soldierly attention, his eyes sternly ‘front.’ And the visual command would have wheeled and plunged him into the protection of his burrow. But now, with senile reaction, he watched the intruder hurry across the slope; watched him with hazy, disinterested curiosity, unaware that the faint odor of smoke came from the man’s clothes and that the hands swinging vigorously at his sides were cracked and blistered from the fire; watched him, vaguely, as he disappeared with heavy, rapid stride into the swirling snow.

For the first time he released the mossy pad, laying it close to the earthen entrance with extreme gentleness, and began to work his jaws, smoothing out the stiff dryness with his rough thin tongue. His stance, on the very edge of his long sleep, was decidedly dejected. The wide straddle of his short legs, the depressive hang of his bushy tail, the wan lustre of his round brown eyes, were a far cry from the fiery, spirited, vigorous creature of a few short weeks before.

He turned slowly, now, and looked back into the driving snow. Already his run was no more, and the patch of clover a distant blurred reality. There was no odor but the faint sweetness of evergreen, no sound but the gentle plush of the snow and the low whine of the wind, and no sensation save the numbing cold and an excruciatingly painful weariness. With strange reluctance he turned back, gathered in his damp, snow-padded cryptogam, and slowly entered his burrow.

The fresh bedding chafed the sides, folding back, gouging fine silt from the walls. Fighting, shoving, urging his rapidly waning energy, he pushed onward, curving with the burrow, going gradually deeper — down and down, until, with exhausted relief, he entered the enlarged chamber at the end of the hole. There he dropped the mossy pad, poked it feebly with his cold nose, tugged at it twice with an unsteady forepaw, and sank down upon it, flattened, his legs undrawn.

Several seconds later the Woodchuck stirred, rolled slowly into a tight ball, drawing his hind legs close to his belly, his forelegs astride the nose buried in his groin. His eyes closed, his breathing softened. Pain and weariness drained slowly from his shoulders, ran down his thickly furred sides.

Outside, the snow fell softly, building an enormous stalagmite at the entrance. Presently it closed out the light and the whining wind and the bitter cold. And the Woodchuck, free of pain and weariness, began his long sleep.