“You see it was this way.  Before she came to live on the Anderson Farm she used to have a burrow over on the other side of the Ridge, where the people went in for a good deal of trapping and snaring.  One day someone set a steel trap just in front of her burrow.  Of course she put her foot into it at the first chance.  It was terrible.  You know the grip of those steel jaws, for I’ve seen you trying to open them.  She was game, however—­they’re always game, these woodchucks.  Instead of squealing and hopping about and losing her wits and using up her strength, she just popped back into her hole and dragged the trap in with her as far as it would go.  That was not very far, of course, because the man who set it had chained it to a stump outside.  But she thought it better, in such a trouble, to be out of range of unsympathetic eyes.  There in the hole she tugged and wrenched at the cruel biting thing till even her obstinacy had to acknowledge that it was impossible to pull herself free.  Then she tried blocking up the hole behind her, thinking perhaps that the trap, on finding itself thus imprisoned in the burrow, would get frightened and let go its hold.  Disappointed in this hope, she decided to adopt heroic measures.  With magnificent nerve she calmly set to work and gnawed off the foot which had been so idiotic as to get itself caught.  She would have nothing more to do with the fool thing.  She just left it there in the trap, with her compliments, for the man—­a poor little, crumpled, black-skinned paw, with a fringe of short brownish fur about the wrist, like a fur-lined gauntlet.”

The Babe shuddered, but heroically refrained from interrupting.

“Of course the stump soon healed up,” continued Uncle Andy, “but she always found the absence of that paw most inconvenient, especially when she was digging burrows.  She used to find herself digging them on the bias, and coming out where she did not at all expect to.

“But to return to Young Grumpy.  While he was yet very young his three-legged mother, who had seen him and his brothers and sisters eating grass quite comfortably, decided that they were big enough to look out for themselves.  She refused to nurse them any more.  Then she turned them all out of the burrow.  When they came presently scurrying back again, hoping it was all an unhappy joke, she nipped them most unfeelingly.  Their father snored.  There was no help in that quarter.  They scurried dejectedly forth again.

“Outside, in the short pasture grass and scattered ox-eye daisies, they looked at each other suspiciously, and each felt that somehow it was the other fellow’s fault.  Aggrieved and miserable, they went rambling off, each his own way, to face alone what Fate might have in store for him.  And Young Grumpy, looking up from a melancholy but consoling feast which he was making on a mushroom, found himself alone in the world.