Never Eat a Relative or an Old Groundhog

Never Eat a Relative or an Old Groundhog

 Wiggsey, a dog for all seasons, with friend

An old Groundhog, quite a fighter - but don't add him to the menu

No matter how old a guy gets, he never forgets his boyhood dog. Mine was Wiggsey, a big, gentle Chesapeake Bay retriever. That was back in the mid forties when, at suppertime, Wiggsey would always be under our table, thumping the chair legs and ours with the wag of his anticipating tail. He was on the alert for scraps that I’d toss under to him as I bent over to see him catch them with a snap of his jaws before they hit the floor. Near supper’s end he’d lick my offered plate so clean that (as my ten-year-old mind imagined) it made less work for Granny since she could place it right back on the shelf, clean as a whistle. Wiggsey had other fine under-table advantages; he was a handy, thick-coated portable napkin that I could reach down to wipe my hands on whenever we had ribs or fried chicken.

Besides being a domestic marvel, he was a terrific fighter. Let me take you back to a day just after Hitler and Tojo’s war, when Wiggsey executed a battle that dog owners dream about even today. I had mounted my bike from behind with a leap that would have made Tom Mix envious, and sped so fast through the garden path that the chicken house and corn crib were peripheral blurs. I entered the woods near our ancestral dump and burned weeds and grass as I slid to a stop. But even at full speed I trailed Wiggsey, who had beaten me to the deep woods. So, winded, I sat there for a while looking up at our hickory tree, just soaking up the sounds and smells of the woods. Then I saw him, a large squirrel, scampering from one branch to another. And there I was without my shotgun. Squirrel stew—Granny’s specialty—was a treat in those glory days of youth.

Surprisingly, he hadn’t seen me yet, so he flicked his tail and darted his head back and forth with quick, twitching movements. Then he descended head first and jumped effortlessly ahead thirty feet into the brush. He leaped up onto a sapling and started spinning around sideways, a gray blur of fur. He stopped and scratched his side ritualistically with his hind foot, and crouched absolutely motionless for a while, with his tail curled up like a question mark and his mid-section bent double.

When I moved my handlebars, snapping a twig, he jumped to another tree and skittered up into the leaves like a bullet. He leapt from high branch to high branch in his retreat and every time the branch would sag with his weight and spring back as he bounded off. The result was a frenzy of tremulous leaves, as he withdrew deeper and deeper into the woods until he disappeared from view. Even if Wiggsey could climb trees he’d never catch that beauty.

            Then I entered the deep woods and came upon a Wiggsey I hadn’t seen before. He was weaving back and forth with his tail in the air and emitting a ferocious growl that told me he meant business. Then I saw why. He had a huge, menacing groundhog up against the trunk of a dead chestnut tree. Then the battle began, with Wiggsey lunging in and the hog standing his ground with bared, snapping teeth and raking claws. The savage sounds of battle startled my senses—the hissing, snapping and grunting of the hog combined with Wiggsey’s snarling, growling and battering. I had no idea how violently my gentle, under-table napkin could fight. It was a long, furious encounter and I was amazed that a groundhog, considerably outweighed, could fight so valiantly, not giving in until Wiggsey pounced to deliver a crunching shake of death.

            A bloody yet jubilant Wiggsey, delighted with his conquest, circled and snapped at the dead warrior as, with effort, I lugged the carcass up to the house. And do you know that after skinning, gutting, and cutting him up, and after pleading my heart out with Granny, she finally agreed to bake him for dinner. And yet, regretfully, I must tell you gastronomically astute readers that I do not recommend the flesh of a large groundhog; if it’s ever offered to you, pass it by because, if my pallet is any judge, It’s the strongest taste of any wild game by far. We fed the remains of the meal to Wiggsey who, employing the practice of certain primitive tribes of ingesting the flesh of their defeated yet formidable enemies in order to take on their combative traits, ate gleefully the portions that we doled out to him over the next few days.

            Besides the woods themselves, I loved to play in the streams that crisscrossed through them. There were frogs aplenty living in the water and I had great fun trying to catch them. I’d sneak up to the stream and hear a sudden plop, and I’d know that I’d scared one of them from the bank or shore line. I’d watch the circle widen where he had entered and knew that he’d come up somewhere on the other side. And, sure enough, after a while when he ran out of air, if I looked closely I’d see those frog eyes and that frog nose emerge just where the water met the shore. Then, if I was quiet and quick enough, I could catch him, play with him for a while, and then let him leap off my palm back into the stream.

            One time, in one of the dammed-up areas of the stream, I caught an enormous bullfrog, one whose legs I knew would make good eating. But I must tell you to brace yourself for what happened when Granny placed the dressed legs into the sizzling lard of the frying pan. Well, those legs started quivering and twitching to beat the band, and within just a few seconds they hopped out onto the kitchen floor, one after the other. And as they hopped around Granny and I hopped after them. I had never seen Granny hop like that before, so, distracted by the spectacle, my heart really wasn’t into the chase. Pretty soon those legs found an open window and vaulted out through it, side by side. Granny and I looked at each other and then dashed out through the door after them. But do you know that we never did find those clever legs. Till this day I don’t know where they went, and if any of you concerned readers who might understand frogs could help me solve the mystery, I’d be extremely grateful.

            But you should know that I’ve learned to live with the distress of being outsmarted by that pair of disembodied legs, and recently I was telling my sister-in-law about eating squirrels, groundhogs, frog legs, and other exotic dishes. She listened with interest as I finished by making a remark about monkeys. And then, sensitive reader, she replied with a quip that I know you’d never make to a family member. In fact, my ears still smart from the audacity of her retort, one that reduced me to a sad and humble guy. What I said was: “I’d eat almost any animal but never a monkey because it would be like eating a relative.” Her reply was as quick as the twitch of a squirrel’s tail: “That’s right,” she said. “Yours!”