It was September 9, 2006, a calm, slightly cloudy day. The shallow, mile-wide Susquehanna quietly divided the heavily populated West Shore communities paralleling the river from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital city on the far bank. But here, a dozen miles west in Cumberland County, there were not many people. Just mildly rolling farm country, occasional woodlots, and here and there a prosperous looking farmhouse and outbuildings. In the middle of a large, dark-green alfalfa field, a splotch of orange made a distinct contrast. It was a man in our Game Commission’s required hunter safety color.

His name was Dana Calhoun, and he had just lowered his Leica laser rangefinder and scrooched into a prone shooting position behind his rifle. It rested on a set of crossed sticks, the bottom ends of which had nails protruding from them to prevent slippage when shoved into the ground.


            “About three twenty-five,” he muttered. A few seconds’ calculation told him how many clicks he should add to his 200-yard zero and he twisted them on, shoved a cartridge into the rifle’s chamber and closed the bolt. A slight adjustment eased the reticle onto his target. Several deep breaths calmed his breathing. It wasn’t an unusually long shot but he didn’t want to miss it. Truth was, he never liked to miss, but this shot was special.
            His target was facing to Dana’s right, the bottom half of its body concealed by alfalfa. He moved the dot onto its head, halfway between eye and ear. It bumped slightly from his heartbeat, but the dot was small enough that most of the head was visible around it, sharp and clear in the 24X Leupold. He held half a breath, concentrated, and his trigger finger tightened imperceptibly. Almost no pressure was needed. The chuck’s slamming into the ground seemed simultaneous with the muzzleblast, though Dana knew it had to have taken at least a splintered second for his bullet to cover the three-plus football fields between him and his target.
            Dana sighed, lowered the toe of the rifle’s butt to the ground, opened the bolt and pocketed the empty. He wondered if he should set it aside, mark it somehow so he could recognize it later…or just reload it with all the others.
            For that cartridge seemed special now. It had just made chuck kill 5000 for him.
            I don’t have any idea how many varmint shooters have killed 5000 chucks. I doubt there are many. Obviously, some have killed a lot, but probably, like me, they didn’t keep detailed records, so we’ll never really know. The legendary chuck shooter C.S. Landis of Wilmington, DE, who was for almost half a century gunwriter for Rod & Gun in Canada and who wrote a big book on woodchuck hunting, did much of his shooting north of the border where there were great numbers of chucks. He was said to have killed more than 10,000 in his lifetime. Maybe he did, but I don’t know if he actually kept records or not, or if that was his publisher’s estimate. Charley and I were good friends for a dozen years prior to his death in the early ‘60s, but he never mentioned anything about this and I never thought to ask him.
            September of ’06 was more than forty years after Dana Calhoun killed his first chuck. That happened on May 30, 1965, to be exact. He’d been a teenager then, wandering along the bank of the Raystown Branch of the Juniata, not far from his home in Everett. The scoped rifle he carried was a little bolt action Winchester Model 72, its tubular magazine filled with Super-X long rifle hollow points, and the chuck – everyone called them groundhogs then – suddenly appeared from its hole among a willow’s roots, only a tenth as far from him as today’s target. But his bullet’s point of impact was almost identical, and the result was just as final. And at that moment, symbolically at least, a chuck hunter was born.
            Over the years, it might be said that chuck hunting made Dana a gun nut. His constant desire for longer range efficiency led him to a Marlin .22 WMR, a Kimber .22 Hornet, a Browning .243, and a No. 1 Ruger .220 Swift, among others. Most of these have disappeared, leaving three custom built favorites. All are built on blueprinted Remington 40X actions. One is a 6mm Rem with a 6.5-20X Leupold, another is a .220 Swift topped by a Bausch & Lomb 6-24X, and the third is a development of Outdoor Life gunwriter Jim Carmichel and the late RCBS honcho Fred Huntington, the .22 CHeetah. It wears a 24X Leupold. All three have fiberglass stocks, 2-oz. Jewell triggers, and heavy 27-inch stainless steel barrels, the newest a Krieger, the others from Hart and Shilen. When I talked to Dana an hour before this was written, he’d just shot the smallest group he’d ever fired in his life. Three shots from the Krieger-barreled CHeetah went into a tiny ragged hole – at 300 yards! Luck? Undoubtedly some. But no matter how lucky anyone is, to get a group like this requires good equipment to start with and a pretty good shooter to touch ‘em off.
            These guns were built by the nationally recognized benchrest gunsmith and competitor, Clarence Hammonds of Red Lion, PA. Obviously, when Dana decided he was going to get serious about chuck-popping, he went for unsurpassed equipment and ‘smithing. He’s also quick to credit Hammonds for countless tips on the best techniques for precision shooting and reloading.

While we’re giving credit, this is a good time to mention the most necessary person in this equation, Dana’s understanding wife Kathy. For no matter how good the premium barrels are, nor how good a gunsmith Hammonds is, there are other top quality barrelmakers, other great gunsmiths. Even other good riflemen. But that rifleman has to have a wife who doesn’t complain when countless home-cooked dinners get cold because her husband wanted to get “just one more shot,” who listens when he comes home enthused about sorting an almost invisible chuck out of a shady fencerow a quarter mile away and killing it with his first shot, who…
            Maybe it’s hard for her to understand why killing a woodchuck – or a thousand of them – can be important in the Universe’s big scheme of things. Maybe it’s impossible for any woman to understand how it might be. But if she understands that somehow it’s important to her man, that’s enough. After all, there are countless worse things he could be doing.
            Dana is also grateful to his father, Paul, who taught him to use guns safely and took him hunting from the time he was 12 years old…and at 88 still encourages him. It would be great if more fathers did likewise.
            Dana does all his chuck shooting with his own handloads, using dies Hammonds has made for him and match quality hollow point bullets. Some shooters claim that such bullets don’t kill as well as varmint bullets, but obviously Dana hasn’t had any trouble with them. (Maybe that’s because so many of his kills are head-shots.) His barrels have tight chamber necks, which require neck turning. Cases then last indefinitely, possibly because he doesn’t try for the last foot second of velocity, so pressures are reasonable. Loading is done during the wintertime, when chucks are underground and he’s not rushed for time.
            Practically all of Dana’s 5000 kills were made in Cumberland County, PA. That in itself is unusual, for this county isn’t especially known for an abundance of chucks. But in a continuing effort begun decades ago, Dana has made a real effort to become acquainted with landowners. He explains his interest and goals to them, assures them of his safe gun handling and proves it by his actions, even lets them try a few shots with his rifle if they care to; after all, such impressive equipment attracts attention, even of non-shooters. This has paid off, opening thousands of acres of farmland to Dana, not only to chuck hunting, but even for whitetails in deer season. Dana’s approach should be tried by more hunters. It’s only simple courtesy, but the results can be great. And a lot of new friends can be made.
            I’ve been shooting chucks since I was a young teenager (which wasn’t yesterday!), first with a .22 – by coincidence, another M72 Winchester, like Dana’s – then with scoped high-velocity centerfires after World War II. But unlike Dana I never kept records of my hits. For him, a confirmed kill is either a dead chuck on the ground or abundant visible evidence that one has been mortally wounded, even if it drags into its hole. Dana doesn’t count those that were hit but got back underground and in his judgment could have survived. This doesn’t mean his records are 100 percent accurate (nobody’s are) but they’re close.
            So Dana’s total is 5000. That might seem unreasonably high, if you just look at the number. But remember – they were taken over forty years, which means an average of 125 per year, or per summer, actually, which means June through September, for shooting them earlier means killing a lot of pregnant females – something no varmint hunter wants to do. In the long run that would put him out of business. There are 122 days in those four months, so if Dana hunted every day he would have averaged almost exactly one chuck per day. Of course, he couldn’t hunt every day – no wife is that understanding – so suppose he got out every third day. Then he’d have had to average three kills per day. Now the 5000 total doesn’t seem so out of reach.

We should mention though, that one summer Dana killed 356 chucks. That was a very good year            .
            There were several other interesting occurrences.
            Eight times Dana killed two chucks with one shot, and once, three. That’s the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently when shooting prairie dogs, but rarely with chucks. In fact, I’ve never known anyone else to get multiple kills with a single shot. Asked how he happened to do it, Dana explained that they were youngsters clumped atop the flat dirt pile in front of a main hole; he wasn’t deliberately trying to get several, so I guess their time was just up.
            The most chucks Dana ever got in one day was 28, 16 of them within a little more than an hour.
            On one occasion Dana killed 50 chucks in a soybean field within two days.

When Dana stopped by my home recently, he brought along his most memorable trophy from 2006. No, it wasn’t his 5000th chuck. But it was a woodchuck – mounted. Dana calls him “Chuckie.” I never heard of anyone getting a chuck mounted – no even ol’ Charlie Landis – and this is certainly the only one that Dana ever had done. But his reason for doing it is simple. Chuckie, shown in a nearby photo, is the biggest darn woodchuck I’ve ever seen. It’s the biggest Dana has ever seen, maybe the biggest anyone has ever seen. It weighed 20 pounds when killed – actually weighed on an accurate scale, not guestimated. If that doesn’t impress you, you haven’t weighed many chucks.
            I’ve weighed a lot of them. For a number of summers I carried a spring scale in the Jeep and weighed every one that I or anyone with me killed. That scale wasn’t as accurate as the grocery store scale where Dana weighed his, but it was within a few ounces of being right – close enough for my purposes back then. I just wanted to get an idea of chuck weights in general. And I found that most Pennsylvania chucks went 8 to 10 pounds in mid-summer. Occasionally I’d get one of 12 or 13 pounds – one memorable evening I killed a 12 ½ and a 14 pounder – and on rare occasions one would weigh 15 pounds. And once – once in sixty-some summers of chuck hunting – I got a 16 pounder. That was a monster to my eyes. And to think that Dana killed one that weighed twenty-five percent more…that seems impossible. But there he is, in all his glory, so fat his head perches on his shoulders like an afterthought – and even in death he’s still chomping on a mouthful of clover. I’d have got him mounted too.
            So 2006 brought Dana his 5000th kill and his biggest chuck ever, which means it’ll be long remembered. But it’s over, and the 2007 season has started. And Dana is out there again. Still counting.