One day Albert caught a baby woodchuck. The mother woodchuck had a fine burrow in the pasture. The entrance was among the roots of some bushes. The roots grew close around the entrance, so that a dog or other enemy could not easily make the entrance any larger and get in.
The woodchucks weire safe so long as they stayed inside their hole. But even baby woodchucks need sunshine. So the mother woodchuck brought her little ones out into the sunlight when they were no larger than rats.
If the mother woodchuck saw anybody coming, she warned her babies by giving several low, short whistles. Then she ran to her hole. The little ones all ran after her as fast as their short legs would carry them.
The day Albert caught one of the babies they were a long way from the hole. When they saw Albert and Scamp, the dog, coming, they all ran toward the hole. But they were not quick enough. Scamp was about to grab one of the babies when Albert caught the helpless little animal up from the ground.
Albert took the little woodchuck to the house to show it to Aunt Mary. Albert wanted to keep him for a pet.
Aunt Mary was afraid the baby was too young to leave his mother. She did not know how they could feed him.
But Aunt Mary was kind-hearted. She got some milk, and Albert took a teaspoonful of it and put it to the little woodchuck’s mouth. The baby woodchuck put his paws on each side of the spoon, just as a little girl or boy holds a glass. He drank all the milk Albert gave him. He was always hungry.
For a while Albert fed his pet with a spoon, but it was not long before the little woodchuck was drinking out of a bowl as a kitten does.
The baby pet was named Brownie, because he had lived in the earth as the brownies do. Aunt Mary made Brownie a bed in a box behind the stove in the kitchen. Brownie liked to lie under the stove; it was warm and cozy there.
When Brownie was hungry, he came out and looked for his saucer of milk. If he could not find it, he found Aunt Mary, and caught hold of her skirt with his teeth. He would not let go till she got the milk. When she went to get it, he let her drag him along the floor.
It was not very long before Brownie began to want other food besides milk. He was very fond of fresh green clover, lettuce and cabbage leaves, carrots, and turnips. He liked ripe pears and sweet apples, but one little nibble of a sour apple was enough. Indeed, he soon learned to know a sweet apple from a sour one by smelling it.
When Brownie grew older, he found a home in the woodpile near the kitchen door. It was the best hiding place he could find. Of course, if he had been in the pasture he would have hidden in holes among the rocks. But there were no rocks near the house, so the woodpile was the next best home.
But there never was a woodchuck that had a softer bed than the one that Brownie made in that woodpile. Woodchucks in the woods and fields line their nests with grass and leaves, because that is the best bedding they can get.
This little woodchuck could get softer bedding than leaves and grass. Aunt Mary kept missing her dust cloths. Sometimes she missed a handkerchief. Once some old stockings she had hung behind the stove were not there when she went to look for them.
Late in the summer when Albert began to get wood from the middle of the pile, he found the dust cloths, the handkerchiefs, and the stockings. Brownie had made his bed of them.
When Brownie was very young, he liked Aunt Mary’s kitten. They played together like two kittens while they were small, and until Tiger began to hunt field mice and birds. But the little woodchuck was always afraid of Scamp. When he saw the dog coming, he ran and hid in his nest in the middle of the woodpile.
After a while Brownie learned to climb a tree. There was a small evergreen tree near the kitchen door. Sometimes when Brownie wanted to get away from Scamp, he climbed up among the low branches. Once when Scamp kept barking at him, he got up about ten feet high.
As long as Brownie was a baby woodchuck, he was a friendly little fellow. He would come for food when Albert called, “Brownie! Brownie! Oh, Brownie!” But when he became older, he was not so tame as he had been. He stayed in the woodpile more and more, and came out for food only at night when no one was around.
One day when Albert went to give him some carrots, Brownie was nowhere to be seen. It was nearly time for woodchucks to go to sleep for the winter. He had probably run away back to the pasture where he was born.
But that did not matter very much to Albert, for he was going away himself. His mother was well enough to come back home. He could not take his pet to the city, for there were no woodpiles, or clover fields near his home.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — By the Roadside (Dunn and Troxell)/A Woodchuck Pet. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.