The Hard Way

Connie and Wager, second farm, better earth.


Went out digging with Connie on Sunday. I don't like to hit any one farm too hard, so instead of going back to the farm I'd been digging on Friday with Char, we went to a piece of Pittman-Robertson land (about 2,500 acres) that I hadn't been to since May.

To say this land looked different can hardly do it justice -- everything was quite overgrown, as expected at this time of year, but the ground was also very hard and dry.

Mountain quickly found a hole she liked quite a lot. The entrance was very tight just a little way in, and then it jogged hard around a tight corner. The exit hole went straight down about four feet, and then it too got very tight at the bottom. We dug and barred to try to find a better entrance to this sette, but the ground was very hard, and the pipe was pretty deep, and neither Mountain nor Wager, Connie's dog, ever got in. After moving a very small amount of dirt for a lot of effort, we decided to see if we could find a better location.

But of course, all the settes were the same way. All the shallower settes seemed to be blank, while the deeper settes had drought-baked earth bunkering over their tops. The dogs found two more good settes they seemed to like, and while they got past the entrance, they never got too much farther due to pipe constrictions, and neither dog opened up to a full "gotcha-now" bay. Our efforts were not much improved by the fact that Wager is not very experienced yet, and Mountain seemed to be off her game as well, perhaps due to Friday's skunking.

I suggested to Connie that we pull out and try another farm, but of course just as we headed back, both dogs disappeared. The good news is that they had found in a rock-hard sette that was only about three feet deep. After about an hour of slamming the bar and the posthole digger into the concrete-colored ground, we finally got a soup-can sized hole in one end of the sette and a larger hole about two feet away, with the groundhog in between. The groundhog seemed to be tucked up inside a pocket, and the dogs had a lot of fun working it, but it was not going anywhere either. A bit more effort on our part, and we finally got it dispatched, but so far this day was the most effort for the least amount of quarry I have ever spent in the field.

We trundled back to the trucks (a bit of a hike now) and had a cold drink. It was about 3:15, and I asked Connie if she was up to digging until it got dark. She said she was, and so off we went to the farm we should have started this day on -- the one I had been digging on Friday.

Coming out of the truck, Connie saw two groundhogs sitting up in the cut-over bean field. Excellent! We went out to the nearest one, and to make a long story short, we dug two more holes and came away blank -- at the first hole because Wager's inexperience and a tight pipe let the groundhog dig in, and at the second hole because I managed to miss the chuck with the snare. Darkness alone ended the day.

That's how it goes sometimes; a lot of effort and not too much to show for it. The sad tally on this day was groundhogs five and humans one. Not a good thing, I suppose, but the dogs came away uninjured, and we got 100% more quarry than anyone sitting on their ass in front of a television set. Plus we got a little exercise, had a decent walk around while doing it, and had a few laughs as well.

Wildlife will humble you. The lowly groundhog den is evolution at work; a stronghold idea arising from a many millennia of predation by wolves, fox, cougar, dogs and man. In drought, when the ground is rock hard, the groundhog starts the poker card game with a full house. We may have gotten a groundhog for all of our efforts, but I have to say that I came away feeling soundly beaten by Mother Nature and Marmota Monax.

Better luck next time!



.Mountain pulls the only one of the day.
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