Part VI. THE GAME

Chapter 19. Woodchuck Hunting

Here is game of the open pastures. Here is game that can live under a farmer's barn, raid his garden season after season and live high, despite the best efforts of the landowner to lay him by the heels. Woodchuck hunting is all things to all outdoorsmen. It has many of the elements of long range big game shooting, such as mule deer and elk in the more open western mountains. At times the ranges at which he is taken are more in keeping with the whitetail deer ranges of eastern and northern hunting.

You can hunt him with a .22 rim fire, taking out in stalking what your rifle lacks in killing power and flat trajectory. You can utilize a long range sniping outfit costing around $5.00 and the woodchuck will match its accuracy and range in every particular.

Once, when I was living in the mountains of western Wash­ington, I spent the spare time at two summers hunting wood­chuck with handguns. Mind you, these were the famed rock-chucks, the ideal target of long range riflemen. We stalked them among the rocks near timberline, the hunting being pleasant breaks  in our fishing  excursions  to those high Alpine lakes.

"Whistlers," we called them. But by any name, they were woodchuck—always willing and able to play the game accord­ing to the rules you yourself made. Hunt them with handguns, .22 rifles or long range sniping rifles, they always turn in a good performance.

Just recently a chuck hunter from Colorado told me that unless you could take them consistently at two and three hun­dred yards, your bag would be mighty slim in the Rockies where he hunted. A steelhead angler from the Middle West, fishing the same riffle on the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon, said, "Shucks, I hunt whistle pigs back home with a shotgun along the edge of my hay fields.” His eyes lit up with the memory. "Sporting targets they are, too."

What type of game is this which occupies such a wide variety of habitat, and is hunted in so many different ways? If he exemplifies the type of shooting associated with long range big game hunting, how is it people knock him rolling with a shotgun or handgun?

The hunting to which he is subjected is part of the answer. The type of territory in which he is found is also a considera­tion. A New England woodchuck, which has had his wits sharpened by constant sniping through several seasons, is a very skeptical creature. He is not the woodchuck of midwestern hay-fields that allows himself to be taken with a shotgun. Dumb woodchuck just do not grow up in New England meadows. Somebody picks them off before their distrust of movement way out there at one and two hundred yards has solidified into a permanent livable philosophy.

Let's take a look at such a wise, suspicious woodchuck, grown fat on the clover of his hillside home grounds. First thing you notice is his chunkiness. Lift one and you will be surprised at his weight. Here is a nice sized target. You wonder how it is possible to miss him at reasonable ranges.

His color is a grizzly-brown, though a jet black chuck is not too uncommon. Generally, however, his coat is that grizzly-brown which blends in well with just about any background from young spring clover to the copper tarnish of August stubble fields.

His dens and burrows are easily located by sight, and, it must be added, by their odors as well. He prefers well drained ground for his diggings, and once this is found, he usually digs a very intricate burrow with two or more entrances. Here, dur­ing the cold winter months, "the hunger time" as the Indians call it, he will snooze away the cold stormy days, snug in his burrow, living off that fat which has accumulated on his ample frame during spring and summer.

At one time woodchuck were considered more a forest animal in the eastern part of his range. He fed on the tender bark and roots of various kinds. But now he finds it much more to the point living close to cultivated fields where he can do his raid­ing without too much effort.

Best shooting time is late evening and early morning when he is more apt to be caught actively foraging well away from his den.

During early spring, when he first emerges from hibernation, he is a trifle less cautious than he will be later, affording a bit more short range snapshooting.

Is off-hand snapshooting a hard field position for you to master? If so, do as I know one woodchuck hunter near Klamath Falls Oregon does; he hunts rockchuck with hid deer rifle, tak­ing no shots except from an off-hand position. He also had trouble with his off-hand position while big game hunting. He was missing too many of those big, old, gray-faced muley bucks in the Gearhart Mountains, so he turned to off-season wood­chuck shooting with this specific problem in mind.

How well he solved it was exemplified one day in late autumn when I met him on a deer hunting trip. I stood beside him that day when another hunter spooked a mule deer buck out of a jackpine thicket. It came crashing out on a dead run, getting into the clear with about four jumps before this hunter sent it end over end with a neck shot. Range? Seventy-five yards. But don't let that short distance detract from the accuracy of the shot, or the downright shooting skill required to make it.

Later, around my campfire that night we talked of hunting. Not deer, but woodchuck hunting. This hunter said that he fired five hundred handloads at rockchuck each summer, at ranges from fifty to two hundred yards. He averaged around one hundred fifty chucks each season. On the lava beds where he picked them off, it was either a clean killing hit or miss, be­cause a touch was sufficient to blow them up with his 270 Winchester, using 100 grain bullets.

While all this shooting was done off-hand, a day's hunt gave him just about every type shot in the book, from running to standing. It reminded me very much of the type shooting Art Richardson and I obtained while hunting ground squirrel. (Chapter 1, Plinking With A Purpose).

Off-hand field shooting comprises at least ninety per cent of all deer and elk shooting. And this hunter spent his off-season shooting time polishing his technique for the type of shot he would normally get when hunting mule deer in the Gearharts.

He would ease along through the lava buttes, watching for rockchuck sunning themselves on the ledges, or feeding on the sparse grass and browse. Of course there were elements of mule deer hunting in this other than that all important off-hand shooting. Both place a premium on quiet going. The type of shot he got was directly tied in with his ability as a still-hunter and stalker. Whether those rockchuck would be scurrying for their dens in the rimrocks, or waiting out the shot depended on how he hunted, the skill he brought to the stalking.

Woodchuck hunting is not alone an excellent place to de­velop off-hand shooting skills. Most woodchuck shooting has a lot in common with long range big game shooting. Taking woodchuck during the latter part of summer, when they have had their wits sharpened by constant gunning for several months, is definitely not a short range affair. It is tied in directly with open range, big game hunting. Here is no underslung target to be taken off-hand at fifty to a hundred yards.

Heavily hunted woodchuck (and ground squirrel) will spook at unbelievable distances. Shooting them is a superb test of marksmanship. You must be able to dope wind; you must be able to read and know the effect of mirage shimmering between you and your intended target. Above all, your sight picture and range picture must be on the button for a clean kill. (Chapter 3, Sight Picture Is Not Enough).

All this adds up to long range elk shooting, mountain hunt­ing and mule deer hunting in the breaks and rimrocks of west­ern mountains. No one is prepared for long range big game hunting unless he has spent several summer sessions, either with woodchuck or its west coast understudy, ground squirrel. Such shooting rounds out your ability as a big game shot.

Woodchuck is a wonderful game animal in his own right, but a rifleman gets more pleasure out of his woodchuck hunting when he is shaping up his hunting skills toward the ultimate end of going big game hunting.