many of them and upon investigation I found that the trees were very
loose in the ground. At first I thought that planting operations and
heaving of the ground by frost in the spring might be the cause, but in
testing the looseness of one of these trees, I found that I could pull
it out of the ground easily. There I saw what appeared to be the marks
of an axe. I was completely convinced that I had personal enemies who
went around nights chopping off the roots of my trees, for I knew that
most of my neighbors were completely out of sympathy with my tree
cultivation. In fact, farmers living in that section of the country were
always poking fun at my nut tree plantings and orchard work, for their
idea of what was proper on a farm was a treeless field of plowed ground.
As I thought of all these things, I pulled up many other trees; in fact,
there were dozens that were chopped off so that they could be completely
pulled out. Others still had one or two roots clinging to the main
trunk and these I carefully replanted so that they would continue to
live and grow.

Not long after the tragic day on which I found all these ravaged trees,
I noticed, winding in and out close to the young orchard trees, the
mounds which pocket gophers make when they tunnel under the ground. I
followed some of these by digging into them with a shovel, and
discovered that they led to the roots of trees, the very trees that had
been chopped off and killed. My enemies were not human after all.

Sending for a pamphlet from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, I
studied the material given about pocket gophers and their habits. I then
began their systematic eradication, using about twelve steel muskrat
traps. I succeeded in trapping, in one season, over thirty of them, at a
time when they were so prolific and their holes so numerous that I could
not drive a horse through the orchard without danger of breaking one of