makes a good fertilizer. I thought it was a

makes a good fertilizer.

I thought it was a good idea. The woodchucks did too A What to our nose was unbearable, to theirs was like Chanel Number 5. They pushed the empty bottles out for a refill.

The next weapon was household bleach.. . I dropped the open bottles deep inside, and covered over the holes with large stones. At first I thought I had succeeded, because in some places the stones were pushed aside, and in others an escape tunnel was dug. It looked as though the occupants had taken off to find a better hole. But again I was wrong. After a week or two the empty bleach bottles would be pushed out at the entrance, just like the ammonia bottles had been.

The woodchucks were still winning, in fact they increased their attacks, turning from the garden to the house itself. Our farmhouse has concrete supports, but the gaps are filled in with a wall made of fieldstones, cemented together by clay — a tried and true method, adobe, used by the American Indians centuries ago. What happened was that the ’chucks attacked the clay filling. Whether they were simply trying to move in under the house, or whether it was pure cussedness I don’t know, but overnight, it seems, we were faced with nothing but a pile of loose stones which could fall at any time and expose the supports of the house.

Now I had no choice but to take the hard advice of my neighbors — “Hit them with smoke bombs!”

I declared a war zone, reaching out in a circle 150 yards from the house. Sooner or later, I figured, those woodchucks would get the message.

Smoke bombs are a bit like the 4th of July, you light the green fuse, cover the hole and retire immediately. If there’s an escape hole, you cover that too, but the woodchuck stays down, unperturbed by the sulfurous fumes, and it stays down for good.

For a few weeks I thought I had really scored. The holes stayed covered over, and the few woodchucks that remained were all out there in