Humor

A Whistle-Pig Love Story

One whistle-pig is enough, thank you

Photo by abdullah ali on Unsplash

Our younger daughter calls groundhogs “whistle-pigs”, which is just one of their many names: groundhogs, woodchucks, whistle-pigs, land-beavers, wuchak (Native American Algonquian), or Marmota monax if you must. They are marmots, relatives of squirrels, if you believe Wikipedia.

She (our daughter) recently sent us a video of the whistle-pig presently living under her porch, which reminded me of a relative who lived under our shed back when our daughter was barely larger than a whistle-pig.

A relative of her whistle-pig, not a relative of ours. We’ve had relatives live in our garage, which sounds awful but we had gussied it up as a bedroom, small living room, and slightly cramped bathroom. It was quite nice, actually.

The shed was not so nice, being one of those prebuilt jobs that the fencing guy up by the highway sold. We used it to store lawnmowers and rakes and stuff like that. That’s no place for distressed relatives to be accommodated.

No place for a whistle-pig either, what with the gasoline smells from the gas mower. We wouldn’t have had that smelly thing if the battery mower was strong enough to cut taller grass or wet grass. But it wasn’t. That’s nothing to do with the whistle-pig: I didn’t accidentally run her over with a mower if that’s what you were thinking.

No, this whistle-pig lived under the shed. I could see where she’d dug to get under, but we only ever saw her in person from the kitchen window when she ventured out to eat our marigolds. Having the marigolds eaten by a whistle-pig distressed my wife, but we are not murderous creatures.

My wife read somewhere that human hair would convince a whistle-pig to move somewhere with better ambiance, so I contributed what I could from my hairbrush, and my wife added a more substantial amount from her own and I stuffed all that down the hole at the shed but the whistle-pig stayed put.

Maybe we should have gone without shampoo for a few weeks, I don’t know.

I’m not sure what the whistle-pig ate when the marigolds were eaten up, but she was a plump little thing. I was talking about that with our neighbor Mike who said he also had a woodchuck-groundhog-whistle-pig in his yard. I wondered if we might be sharing one marmot, but he said no, because his whistle-pig was male and ours was female. I asked how he knew that and he said because he’d seen his sniffing up ours. I wasn’t sure that was conclusive evidence because dogs sniff each other regardless of sex, but it turned out that he was probably right because our whistle-pig had babies soon after.

I approached Mike and told him that his whistle-pig was a Dad. Mike shrugged. I explained to him about the marigolds, suggesting that this might be akin to when my wife was pregnant and I had to go out in a snowstorm because she needed Ben & Jerry’s NOW. Mike shrugged again and I suggested that maybe he ought to kick in for some replacement marigolds. I felt Mike was financially responsible because whistle-pigs do not have checking accounts.

Mike disavowed any responsibility. What a jerk.

Meanwhile, my wife was upset by the baby chucks even though they were very cute. Her fear was that we’d soon be overrun by whistle-pigs and she’d lose all her flowers. I checked and learned that the babies high-tail it out of there around the end of August — kids grow up so darn fast!

And sure enough, they did and Mom disappeared soon after. We hoped she’d just tired of me stuffing hair down her burrow and not come to harm, but we never saw her again.

I still feel that Mike owes us some marigolds.

Hey! If you like Medium, you could sign up as a member by using my referral link! If you do that, I get a boatload of money! Well, a dinghy-load. A tiny dinghy will pull up to my dock every month and cross my palms with silver. Neat, right?

More of my posts:

[embed]Lists - Anthony Lawrence - Medium Lists by Anthony Lawrence on Mediumpcunix.medium.com