From Sept. 18 2010

The white clover on the lawn is always sweet, there’s a field of it I can approach from the brush and weed-filled hillside in which I can also hide whenever necessary.

And there’s a garden bed to which I might burrow at the end of that driveway, but I would have to fight through too many stones and chew through a layer of plastic and mulch before I’d arrive at the entangled roots of the spiny cucumbers, the lank green beans, and the prize of all, the lettuce-leaves, a pale green of the grape but with frilled edges when stunted as these are.

But the garden bed is in the middle of the yard of this detestable biped intruder, a damnable species of which we, the woodchuck folk, have no use, our numbers indifferently pruned by their various devices, their poisons, their steel traps, and their projectiles, whether bullets or arrows. They sick their wolves on our brethren, those compradors of the mammalian kingdom in cahoots with the bipeds, choosing provender and luxury over hardscrabble deprivation and liberty.

Still, to be fed those bales of lettuce in one of their cages is a temptation, the easy life of comestibles over the hard life of scavenging and burrowing, lacking the agility of our cousins the squirrels, or the mobility and power of our other cousins the beavers, those natural builders and occasional nemeses.

I live to see the day when we can usurp the biped’s place on earth, turn his cities into meadows, into nothing but miles of lettuce and clover, our descendants gigantic, reaching the tops of the apple-trees, eating the tenderest leaves in the tree-tops until they become colossi, our descendants nestled warmly in the burrows of their mothers.

The homeowner spots me, and yells indistinguishable sounds. In this grinding routine, I run into the brush, leaving the ripened white clover to be mowed by this most unsympathetic and inarticulate creature. Who can make out what he mouths, all bipeds deprived of the universal language of the beasts?

Blessed by youth and agility, I dodge the stones the biped throws. I do not envy my older heavier brethren, who would struggle, waddle back to the woods or their burrow. They perish from laziness or self-satisfaction, gassed or smoked from their holes. Of them, I am oddly unsympathetic. You’d think it would be otherwise, that of my elders I’d be more caring.

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The clouds return after a spell of sunshine, the breeze shifts, passing through my window until the air cools. The noise of the refrigerator recalls the buzz of cicadas unhatched in heat-waves. When the buzzing ceases I am returned to fall. And then the sun returns.