A WOODCHUCK IS WOOLLY. Who knows what he thinks? He hibernates in his underground lair, a groundhog by any other name, his tail not quite reaching his nose. He slumbers all winter there, living off his delicious fat reserves, and only leaves when he fails, at last, once more, to see his impressive shadow. He slumbers on. And on.

Outside, eventually, he dozes in the sun. He stalks vegetable matter of all flavors—shadbush, carrots, beanfields—killing more plants than he can possibly consume and often leaving the limp green carcasses where they fall or pulling them partway into his glorious earth hole like a dragon. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck . . . I mean, the stem. One naturalist thought of killing a woodchuck when it crossed his path. Gazing at the animal, he felt “a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw.” (That naturalist’s name was Henry David Thoreau.) What he didn’t know was that the woodchuck thought of seizing him too.

And once, says no one in particular—once, a man must have shot a weasel out of the blue. He examined the weasel and found the tail of a young woodchuck firmly lodged in its gut. The supperation . . . I mean, supposition . . . is that the weasel ambushed the woodchuck and tried to swallow him entire, but the woodchuck, some of him at least, curled up in the dark den of the weasel’s stomach, thinking it a burrow, not ultimately understanding or caring about the difference. Gradually, the animal dissolved, but his tail remained, a talisman of hoary resolve. I would have liked to have seen that weasel a few days or weeks before it was shot: just how bad was the constipation? Or did the weasel quickly digest all it could, bending its svelte body, trying to pass this golden fur, cleaning those beautiful stocky, subterranean bones?

I HAVE BEEN READING ABOUT WOODCHUCKS because I’ve been reading Thoreau. I startled a woodchuck in a sentence in Walden that startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. “Not that I was hungry then,” Henry pens about this creature that piques his delight, “except for that wildness which he represented.” Whenever I see a groundhog, those are my thoughts exactly. I’m not terribly hungry. Too, I’ve been reading about weasels via Annie Dillard, who read a ton of Thoreau, and I’ve been wondering: Why weasels, Annie? Is not a woodchuck a noble animal fit to emulate? Does not the groundhog also teach us “something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” So.

Weasels have it easy, man, at least as they’re portrayed. They are charismatic minifauna, all cunning, quick twitch, athleticism. They may be villains, but they’re romantic, or romanticized. Their shit smells to us, at least figuratively, of wild roses (in truth, it probably smells pretty meaty). I’ve seen them on riverbanks—they wash in and out of cobble and into willows like a wave with a mind of its own. They tunnel swiftly through snow following a scent. They are the stuff of children’s books, of fairy tales, though obviously they would gouge your eyes out and eat the gelatin if given the chance.

Woodchucks, meanwhile, are grounded, methodical, wary, vegetarian. They are sweet peas and wouldn’t hurt you unless cornered. They are described as “slow,” as “round”—one worries they have been made to suffer body dysmorphia. No one really considers the woodchuck, not even, I fear, Thoreau. In Walden, he writes little about them, though he does confess to tasting one. “My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks,” he quips. All because they raided his beanfield. Woodchucks are foils to our predatory and agrarian instincts. They are not our pinup animals, just humdrum “whistle-pigs,” rooting under our veritable garden sheds and trundling past the compost pile of the subconscious. They are second fiddle.

Not so! For with their sharp claws, they dig burrows up to sixty-six feet long. You know them by the heap of pale earth at their home’s entrance, the “porch” from which they survey and look proud, regal, in handsome, graduated fur, a paw tucked elegantly to their chest. There’s a rear burrow entrance, too, this one incognito, a clever escape route. A woodchuck’s eyes, ears, and nose are at the top of his boxy head so that he can rise like a periscope from the earth and see his enemies. Smell his beans. Or hers. Yum. Few noses twitch faster than a woodchuck’s. They also climb trees for greens—watch out. They give a shrill alarm whistle that, as with marmots, their close cousins, will scare the bejesus out of you, and then a series of low, warbling “chucks,” from whence they get their name. With their saber-like incisors, they gnaw on underground electrical lines—so badass—and by way of their burrowing can collapse driveways and brick walls, undermine foundations, and perhaps, whole civilizations. We will see.

Then there’s this fact: It’s weasels who adopt the burrows of woodchucks. When Annie Dillard dreams of curling up like a weasel in a den, “blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses” (“Could two live that way?” I would go with you, Annie), she’s really dreaming of the redoubts of groundhogs, of their ingenuity and prowess that enables others to live. They are a foundation.

Weasel out of that.

HENRY SORT OF MISSED HIS CHANCE. Annie too (though she did muskrats super well). But I am going for the groundhog’s butt. I will lunge for that sexy streak of a short tail and hold on, hold on through bramble and beanfields and Concord backyards, as he races home to his dirty porch. Down, with the woodchuck, is an equally good place to go. Down where the mind is rodential. The thing to do, in truth, is to stalk your vocation with a rapid mastication, to locate the most tender and live shoot, or sprout, and plug into that sappy pulse. This is yielding, not fighting, though it may be fighting the farmer’s yield. Discipline is the groundhog’s very essence, his nature, as is clear from his serious, fusspot countenance. But a woodchuck doesn’t get too “attached” to anything; a woodchuck lives as he’s meant to, whistling at every moment to the perfect freedom of the nonentity we imagine. His limitation is limitless.

Seize that, I say, and let it seize you. Why not let your mustelid flesh fall off in shreds, and let your fierce stoat bones grow stout and cloverful, your bowels loosening, over endless beanfields and woodlots, lightly thoughtful, from no height at all, from as high as woodchucks.