By GERALD S. HAWKINS

By GERALD S. HAWKINS

Rappahannock News Contributing Writer

When I first came to the Blue Ridge, I didn’t want to get involved in the Woodchuck War.

That animal, disaffectionately called a groundhog by farmers and others, is in the category of “vermin," and hunting is permitted every day of the year without respite.

Very few people speak up for woodchuck rights. It is true that their burrows aerify the hardpan soil, and provide escape hatches for the red fox when chased by the hounds, but these good points are far outweighed by the bad.

Those holes in a pasture can break the leg of a horse or a human, and in a hayfield are a positive danger for a tractor. Of course, woodchucks do look cute when they pause over the tall grass.

As an Englishman I presumed that nature would take care of itself, that there would be a compromise in which the activities of woodchucks ■ would be kept in balance.

As it turned out, I was wrong. It was the woodchucks that struck the first blow, and I was drawn into the war as a matter of selfdefense.

The first incident involved the ; loss of a juicy impatiens plant that disappeared overnight from a tub on the verandah where my wife, Julia, ; had planted it the week before, a good 10 feet above the ground. We quickly identified the muddy paw prints from the book as marmota rrnmax, the polite scientific name for the critter. We traced the tracks across the floor of the verandah, down the rough fieldstones of the foundation wall to the grass below. Then other plants disappeared. Like it or not, those woodchucks had declared war on us.

My first weapon was a singledoor, gravity-operated, “Havahart” trap. It was clearly labeled on the outside, but ’chucks don’t read, and they walked in one after the other for the crunchy lettuce bait.

I’ve mentioned earlier (Rappa