Someone had been calling “Yoohoo!” for hours when the blind woodchuck finally sat up in her burrow. She went from groggy to enraged in a matter of seconds and was about to start screaming as her cousin Shirley poked her head into the burrow.
“Are you still asleep? I thought you’d be up by now.”
“I’m hibernating!” the blind woodchuck shouted. “Why doesn’t anyone respect my natural circadian body instincts to slow down my metabolic rest for 5 months and then awake refreshed in the spring?
“It’s the middle of June,” Shirley said pointedly, “I think you slept through your alarm.”
Two frenzied balls of fur suddenly dropped into the burrow, streaking through the tunnel and slamming into the wall. They bounced to the ground, stunned, while tiny cartoon birds circled over their heads.
“The meadow is possessed!” the two chipmunks squeaked in unison. “It’s a sign! It’s like crop circles, only with fruit.”
“Calm down, you ridiculous gerbils.” The woodchuck was not a fan of chipmunks. “Chip, what’s going on?”
“He’s Chip, I’m Dale. Say our names!” said the one with the stripe running from tip to tail. The other chipmunk had an identical stripe and the two were indistinguishable. Their names were not actually Chip and Dale, but they had accepted the hard reality of being adorable anthropomorphic Disney characters.
“The crop circles are real! I saw Disclosure Day!”
The woodchuck shook her head; last summer she had seen the platypus stomping around in the field, giggling as it flattened giant circles in the prairie grass with its flat tail. It seemed to be having a lot of fun.
The chipmunks scampered up to the surface and began running toward the trees. The woodchuck caught up to Shirley, who had been following the over excited pair. “What the hell are they chattering about?”
The foursome stopped at the edge of the forest. A large tree with heavy limbs reached out toward them from beneath the forest canopy. Under the branches, there was a dark pile that looked like a freshly dug grave and the spatter zone circled the trunk, reaching several feet in every direction. An ominous moan whistled through the leaves, and with a sudden gust of wind, the branches launched their bloody ammo.
The woodchucks screamed as the tree pelted them with the ripe berries that exploded upon contact with their heads. The chipmunks had taken cover in the back fur of the two groundhogs when a very large mulberry smacked Chip and/or Dale in the head, and the animal slumped to the ground. Shirley scooped up the tiny body and the three retreated to the safety of the open meadow.
“It’s mulberry time already?!” wondered the blind woodchuck. “I really did oversleep.”
The woodland creatures had a complicated relationship with mulberries. They were sweet and tart and delicious and could be scooped up off the ground and eaten by the handful; much easier than cicadas, who were almost as stupid but could fly. But the tree seemed indignant they were snacking on her reproductive seeds and had been known to aim a payload right at whichever guilty animal had the reddest snout. It was paintball with juice and the tree was the only one with the gun.
“Chip, are you okay?” sobbed Chip over the limp body in Shirley’s arms.
“I’M DALE, you idiot, you’re Chip. Did you see what was under the tree?”
“It just looked like a pile of delicious berries,” mumbled the groundhog, her mouth full of the few on the ground that had bounced their way.
“It wasn’t just a pile!” Dale was near hysteria now. He drew Shirley’s ear toward him and whispered, “There was something written in it.”
After Dale had breathed into a paper bag to stop hyperventilating, the four animals crept closer to the edge of the forest. They were far enough away to avoid pelting but close enough to see that the chipmunk was right: the letter H was visible within the pile of crushed, bloody berries. As they watched, mesmerized, another vertical line appeared, followed by three short horizontal ones.
“HE! It says HE!” shouted Chip.
“Who is HE?” wondered Shirley. “Does it mean Man is in the Forest?”
There was a moment of panic where they passed around the paper bag to get everyone’s breathing under control.
Minutes passed as they stared at the pile of maroon debris, trying to figure out what the message meant. The woodchuck was eating the last of the dropped mulberries when Shirley shouted, “Wait! It’s starting again!”
Another vertical line, then a quick horizontal one.
“Ohmygod, we’re in HEL,” moaned the chipmunks.
“That is one opinionated pile of fruit,” commented the woodchuck. “Shirley, what’s going on?”
“I’m starting to wonder if it’s some kind of message of protest—that Mother Nature is chastising the world for how badly the earth has been polluted and abused. This feels like a witchy prophecy and you know how humans love supernatural signs.”
“Yes, remember when that spider was writing in a web and saved a pig? It’s just like that,” said Chip.
“I think it’s a little more complicated than Charlotte’s Web, although that was a really good book; this message seems a little more foreboding. Maybe all the plants and trees are joining together to protest data centers and the destruction of national parks. I hear the algae population is doing something fun in DC.”
“IT’S STARTING AGAIN!” shrieked the chipmunks.
One more vertical line slowly emerged, and the four animals cheered. “It’s gonna be HELLO!” gasped Shirley.” “We are witnessing the first actual communication between the land and the creatures who walk the earth—they are pleading with us to live in harmony because we are all share the same space and are dependent upon each other for survival.”
“No, I’m pretty sure we’re still in HELL,” argued the woodchuck. “It’s just completed the word.”
“Maybe it’s both?” The woodchucks looked at the two tiny chipmunks, the most vulnerable of the creatures in the meadow. “We are in HELL . . .” started Chip, and Dale finished the sentence: “. . . but if we say HELLO, maybe we could work together to fix it.”
The four animals looked at each other in a moment of pure honesty and understanding, when a small, formerly green head popped out of the pile of mushy fruit and gasped, “It’s HELP, you idiots, I’m trapped under these stupid berries! Someone get me out!”
It took the strength of two woodchucks and both chipmunks to overcome the suction of the swampy pile of fermenting fruit to pull Steve the iguana, now a bright red, to terra firma.
“Woah, I didn’t know you could change to that color,” joked the woodchuck. “You look like Lucy and Ethel after they crushed the grapes in that episode . . .”
“Don’t be mean,” hushed Shirley. “He’s had a rough day.” Chip and Dale scampered to support the lizard as he staggered away to sleep off the trauma of being buried alive; he was also very drunk after subsisting on prison cell wine for hours.
“Okay, so it wasn’t a message from the earth,” mused Shirley as they walked back to the burrow. “But maybe we should pretend it was. You know we can’t keep going on like this.”
“You’re probably right, but I’m too tired to think about this now. I’m going to take a nap.”
The blind woodchuck ducked into her quiet, dark burrow, where news of the all the bad things happening never quite reached. From above, she heard Shirley say, “At some point, you’re going to have to wake up. We all are.”
• • •
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Steve was both.”
E.B. White (maybe)
• • •
The woodchuck has a new burrow! You can still hang around here with the other woodland animals, but the iguana and the platypus have moved over to Substack, where they hope to reach millions of new readers and possibly amass a fortune in cicadas! Look for her at The Blind Woodchuck on Substack.
• • •
The original And to Think That I Wanted a Mulberry Tree can be found at this link:
theblindwoodchuck.com 