A Day of Holes

I broke myself on the first hole. It looked like an easy thing -- a one eye'd place with a collapsed pipe only four feet away - clearly an old exit.

Right. It's always the easy ones that break you.

The dogs could not get in past the first foot or so, as the pipe hooked hard to the right as it narrowed. And that's the way the damn thing went every three feet, even as it went deeper and deeper.

The dogs could never get in deep enough for me to box them, and so it was push a stick in and guess where I could, and dig four feet and bar for the pipe where I could not.

In the end, it was groundhog One and human Zero, and a near heart attack from digging solo in the sun.

No matter. This was a new farm -- or a new piece of an old farm I do not hunt much. In any case, it was mostly new land, and so having gotten wobbly from the heat on the first hole, I ditched the tools in the soy and took the leashes and dogs and explored to see what we could find.

I found a number of good holes, but not quite as many as I had hoped, as it appears that these field floods in early spring, and that the water table is high all year long. Not too great a surprise I suppose -- the Potomac River is near by.



At the edge of a soy field, the presence of moss reveals the water table.
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