Chapter IV: Part 4

He had one rather exciting experience during this period. One day, just as he was finishing a very enjoyable meal of venison tenderloin, he heard the tramp of snow-shoes on the crust, and in a moment more that same land-looker came pacing down a section line and halted squarely in front of him. Now there are trappers who say that a Canada lynx is a fool and a coward, that he will run from a small dog, and that he makes his living entirely by preying on animals that are weaker and more poorly armed than he. I admit, of course, that the majority of lynxes do not go ramming around the woods with chips on their shoulders, looking for hunters armed with bowie-knives and repeating rifles. You wouldn't, either--not as long as there were rabbits to be had for the stalking. But on this occasion the Kitten's conduct certainly savored of recklessness, if not of real bravery. Being entirely unacquainted with the land-looking profession, he naturally supposed that the man had come for his deer. And he didn't propose to let him have it. He considered that that venison belonged to him, and he took his stand on the carcass, laid his ears back, showed his white teeth, made his eyes blaze, and spit and growled and snarled defiantly. The land-looker didn't quite know what to do. His section line lay straight across the deer's body, and he did not want to leave it for fear of confusing his reckoning, but the Kitten, though only half grown, looked uncommonly business-like. He had no gun, nor even a revolver, for he was hunting for pine, not fresh meat. He had left his half-axe in camp, and when he felt in his pocket for his jack-knife it was not there. Then he looked about for a club. He had been told that lynxes always had very thin skulls, and that a light blow on the back of the head was enough to kill the biggest and fiercest of them, let alone a kitten. But he couldn't even find a stick that would answer his purpose.

"Well," he said, when they had stared at each other a minute or two longer without coming to any understanding, "I suppose if you won't turn out for me, I'll have to turn out for you"; and he made a careful circuit at a respectful distance, picked up his line again, and went on his way.

The winter dragged on very slowly, with many ups and downs, but it was gone at last. Summer was easier, if only because he was not obliged to use up any of his vitality in keeping warm. Sometimes, indeed, he was really too warm for comfort, so he presently changed his coat and put on a thinner one. People like to talk about the coolness of the deep woods, but the truth is that there isn't any place much hotter and stuffier than a dense growth of timber, where the wind never comes, and where the air is heavy and still. And then there are the windfalls and the old burnings, where the sun beats fiercely down among the fallen trees till the blackened soil is hot as a city pavement, and where dead trunks and half-burned logs lie thrown together in the wildest confusion--places which are almost impassable for men, and which even the land-lookers avoid whenever they can, but which a cat will thread as readily as the locomotive follows the rails. These were the localities which the Kitten was most fond of frequenting, and here his youth slipped rapidly away. He was fast becoming an adult lynx.

The summer passed, and half the autumn; the first snow came and went, and again the Kitten put on his winter coat of gray, with the white underneath, and the dark trimmings up and down his legs and along his back. What with his mustachios, and his whiskers, and the tassels on his ears, he was a very presentable young lynx. It would be many years before he could hope to be as large and powerful as his father, but, nevertheless, he was making remarkably good progress. And the time was at hand when he would need both his good looks and his muscle.

Since his mother had left him he had seen only two or three lynxes, and those were all much older and larger than he, and not well suited to be his companions. But history repeats itself. One Indian-summer afternoon he was tramping along the northern bank of the Glimmerglass, just as his father had done two years before, and as he rounded a bend in the path he came face to face with someone who was enough like him to have been his twin sister. And they did as his parents had done, stood still for a minute or two and looked at each other as if they had just found out what they were made for. After all, life is something more than hustling for a living, even in the woods.

But just then something else happened, and another ruling passion came into play--the old instinct of the chase, which neither of them could very long forget. A faint "Quack, quack, quack," came up from the lake, and they crept to the edge of the bank, side by side, and looked down. Above them the trees stood dreamily motionless in the mellow sunshine. Below was a steep slope of ten or fifteen feet; beyond it a tiny strip of sandy beach, and then the quiet water. A squadron of ducks, on their way from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf, had taken stop-over checks for the Glimmerglass; and now they came loitering along through the dead bulrushes, murmuring gently, in soft, mild voices, of delicious minnows and snails, and pausing a moment now and then to put their heads under and dabble in the mud for some particularly choice morsel. The lynxes crouched and waited, while their stubby tails twitched nervously, their long, narrow pupils grew still narrower, and their paws fumbled about among the dry pine-needles, feeling for the very best footing for the flying leap. The ducks came on, still prattling pleasantly over their own private affairs. Closer and closer they swam, without a thought of death waiting for them at the top of the bank, and suddenly four splendid sets of muscles jerked like bowstrings, four long hind-legs straightened with a mighty thrust and shove, and two big gray creatures shot out from the brink and came sailing down through the air with their heads up, their tails on end, their eyes blazing, and their forepaws stretched out to grab the nearest unhappy duck. The flock broke up with frightened cries and a wonderful whirring of wings, and in a moment more they were far away and going like the very wind.

But two of its members stayed behind, and presently the lynxes waded out on the beach and sat down to eat their supper together. They talked as much over that meal as the ducks had over theirs, but the lynx language is very different from that of the water-fowl. Instead of soft, gentle murmurings there were low growls and snarls as the long, white claws and teeth tore the warm red flesh from the bones. It could hardly have been a pleasant conversation to anyone but themselves, but I suppose they enjoyed it as much as the choicest repartee. In truth they had good reason to be satisfied and contented with themselves and each other, and with what they had just done, for not every flying leap is so successful, and not every duck is as plump and juicy as the two that they were discussing. So they talked on in angry, threatening tones, that sounded like quarrelling, but that really meant only a fierce, savage kind of pleasure; and when the meal was ended, and the very last shred of duck-flesh had disappeared, they washed their faces, and purred, and lay still a while to visit and get acquainted.

There were many other meetings during the weeks that followed--some under as pleasant circumstances as the first, and some not. Perhaps the best were those of the clear, sharp days of early winter, when the sky was blue, and the sunshine was bright, and a thin carpet of fine, dry snow covered the floor of the forest. It was cold, of course; but they were young and strong and healthy, and their fur was thick and warm, like the garments of a Canadian girl. The keen air set the live blood leaping and dancing, and they frisked and frolicked, and romped and played, and rolled each other over and over in the snow, and were as wildly and deliciously happy as it is ever given to two animals to be.

It was too good to last long without some kind of an interruption, and one glorious winter evening, when the full moon was flooding the woods with the white light that brings a touch of madness, a third young lynx came upon the scene. And then there was trouble. The Kitten's new friend sat back in the bushes and looked on, while he and his rival squatted face to face in the snow and sassed each other to the utmost limits of the lynx vocabulary, their voices rising and falling in a hideous duet, and their eyes gleaming and glowing with a pale, yellow-green fire. Presently there was a rush, and the fur began to fly. The snow flew, too; and the woods rang and rang again with yelling and caterwauling, and spitting and swearing, and all manner of abuse. The rabbits heard it, and trembled; and the partridges, down in the cedar swamp, glanced furtively over their shoulders and were glad it was no nearer. They bit and scratched and clawed like two little devils, and the onlooker in the bushes must have felt a thrill of pride over the strenuous way in which they strove for her favors. First one was on top, and then the other. Now our Kitten had his rival by the ears, and now by the tail. One minute heads, legs, and bodies were all mixed up in such a snarl that it seemed as if they could never be untangled, and the next they backed off just long enough to catch their breath, and then flew at each other's throats more savagely than ever. It was really more difficult than you would suppose for either of them to get a good hold of the other, partly because their fur was so thick, and partly because Nature had purposely made their skins very loose, with an eye to just such performances as this. But they managed to do a good deal of damage, nevertheless; and in the end the pretender was thoroughly whipped, and fled away in disgrace down the long, snowy aisles of the forest, howling as he went, while the Kitten turned slowly and painfully to the one who was at the bottom of all this unpleasantness. His ears were slit; one eye was shut, and the lid of the other hung very low; he limped badly with his right hind-leg, and many were the wounds and scratches along his breast and sides. But he didn't care. He had won his spurs.

The story of the Kitten is told, for he was a kitten no longer.

POINTERS FROM A PORCUPINE QUILL

HE wasn't handsome--the original owner of this quill--and I can't say that he was very smart. He was only a slow-witted, homely old porky who once lived by the Glimmerglass. But in spite of his slow wits and his homeliness a great many things happened to him in the course of his life.

He was born in a hollow hemlock log, on a wild April morning, when the north wind was whipping the lake with snow, and when winter seemed to have come back for a season. The Glimmerglass was neither glimmering nor glassy that morning, but he and his mother were snug and warm in their wooden nest, and they cared little for the storm that was raging outside.

It has been said by some that porcupines lay eggs, the hard, smooth shells of which are furnished by a kind and thoughtful Providence for the protection of the mothers from their prickly offspring until the latter have fairly begun their independent existence. Other people say that two babies invariably arrive at once, and that one of them is always dead before it is born. But when my Porcupine discovered America he had neither a shell on his back nor a dead twin brother by his side. Neither was he prickly. He was covered all over with soft, furry, dark-brown hair. If you had searched carefully along the middle of his back you might possibly have found the points of the first quills, just peeping through the skin; but as yet the thick fur hid them from sight and touch unless you knew just where and how to look for them.

He was a very large baby, larger even than a new-born bear cub, and no doubt his mother felt a justifiable pride in his size and his general peartness. She was certainly very careful of him and very anxious for his safety, for she kept him out of sight, and no one ever saw him during those first days and weeks of his babyhood. She did not propose to have any lynxes or wild-cats or other ill-disposed neighbors fondling him until his quills were grown. After that they might give him as many love-pats as they pleased.

He grew rapidly, as all porcupine babies do. Long hairs, tipped with yellowish-white, came out through the dense fur, and by and by the quills began to show. His teeth were lengthening, too, as his mother very well knew, and between the sharp things in his mouth and those on his back and sides he was fast becoming a very formidable nursling. Before he was two months old she was forced to wean him, but by that time he was quite able to travel down to the beach and feast on the tender lily-pads and arrow-head leaves that grew in the shallow water, within easy reach from fallen and half-submerged tree-trunks.

One June day, as he and his mother were fishing for lily-pads, each of them out on the end of a big log, a boy came down the steep bank that rose almost from the water's edge. He wasn't a very attractive boy. His clothes were dirty and torn--and so was his face. His hat was gone, and his hair had not seen a comb for weeks. The mosquitoes and black-flies and no-see-'ems had bitten him until his skin was covered with blotches and his eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly see. And worst of all, he looked as if he were dying of starvation. There was almost nothing left of him but skin and bones, and his clothing hung upon him as it would on a framework of sticks. If the Porcupine could have philosophized about it he would probably have said that this was the wrong time of year for starving; and from his point of view he would have been right. June, in the woods, is the season of plenty for everybody but man. Man thinks he must have wheat-flour, and that doesn't grow on pines or maple-trees, nor yet in the tamarack swamp. But was there any wild, fierce glare in the boy's eyes, such a light of hunger as the story-books tell us is to be seen in the eyes of the wolf and the lynx when they have not eaten for days and days, and when the snow lies deep in the forest, and famine comes stalking through the trees? I don't think so. He was too weak and miserable to do any glaring, and his stomach was aching so hard from eating green gooseberries that he could scarcely think of anything else.

But his face brightened a very little when he saw the old she-porcupine, and he picked up a heavy stick and waded out beside her log. She clacked her teeth together angrily as he approached; but he paid no attention, so she drew herself into a ball, with her head down and her nose covered by her forepaws. Reaching across her back and down on each side was a belt or girdle of quills, the largest and heaviest on her whole body, which could be erected at will, and now they stood as straight as young spruce-trees. Their tips were dark-brown, but the rest of their length was nearly white, and when you looked at her from behind she seemed to have a pointed white ruffle, edged with black, tied around the middle of her body. But the boy wasn't thinking about ruffles, and he didn't care what she did with her quills. He gave her such a thrust with his stick that she had to grab at the log with both hands to keep from being shoved into the water. That left her nose unprotected, and he brought the stick down across it once, twice, three times. Then he picked her up by one foot, very gingerly, and carried her off; and our Porky never saw his mother again.

Perhaps we had best follow her up and see what finally became of her. Half a mile from the scene of the murder the boy came upon a woman and a little girl. I sha'n't try to describe them, except to say that they were even worse off than he. Perhaps you read in the papers, some years ago, about the woman and the two children who were lost for several weeks in the woods of northern Michigan.

"I've got a porky," said the boy.

He dropped his burden on the ground, and they all stood around and looked at it. They were hungry--oh, so hungry!--but for some reason they did not seem very eager to begin. An old porcupine with her clothes on is not the most attractive of feasts, and they had no knife with which to skin her, no salt to season the meat, no fire to cook it, and no matches with which to start one. Rubbing two sticks together is a very good way of starting a fire when you are in a book, but it doesn't work very well in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp. And yet, somehow or other--I don't know how, and I don't want to--they ate that porcupine. And it did them good. When the searchers found them, a week or two later, the woman and the boy were dead, but the little girl was still alive, and for all I know she is living to this day.

Let us return to the Glimmerglass. The young Porcupine ought to have mourned deeply for his mother, but I grieve to say that he did nothing of the kind. I doubt if he was even very lonesome. His brain was smaller, smoother, and less corrugated than yours is supposed to be; its wrinkles were few and not very deep; and it may be that the bump of filial affection was quite polished, or even that there wasn't any such bump at all. Anyhow, he got along very well without her, dispensing with her much more easily than the woman and the boy and girl could have. He watched stolidly while the boy killed her and carried her off, and a little later he was eating lily-pads again.

As far as his future prospects were concerned, he had little reason for worrying. He knew pretty well how to take care of himself, for that is a kind of knowledge which comes early to young porcupines. Really, there wasn't much to learn. His quills would protect him from most of his enemies, if not from all of them; and, what was still better, he need never suffer from a scarcity of food. Of all the animals in the woods the porcupine is probably the safest from starvation, for he can eat anything from the soft green leaves of the water-plants to the bark and the small twigs of the tallest hemlock. Summer and winter, his storehouse is always full. The young lions may lack, and suffer hunger, and seek their meat from God; but the young porky has only to climb a tree and set his teeth at work. All the woods are his huckleberry.

And, by the way, our Porcupine's teeth were a great institution, especially the front ones, and were well worthy of a somewhat detailed description. They were long and sharp and yellow, and there were two in the upper jaw and two in the lower, with a wide gap on each side between them and the molars. They kept right on growing as long as he lived, and there is no telling how far they would have gone if there had been nothing to stop them. Fortunately, he did a great deal of eating and chewing, and the constant friction kept them worn down, and at the same time served to sharpen them. Like a beaver's, they were formed of thin shells of hard enamel in front, backed up by softer pulp behind; and of course the soft parts wore away first, and left the enamel projecting in sharp, chisel-like edges that could gnaw crumbs from a hickory axe-handle.

The next few months were pleasant ones, with plenty to eat, and nothing to do but keep his jaws going. By and by the leaves began to fall, and whenever the Porky walked abroad they rustled around him like silk skirts going down the aisle of a church. A little later the beechnuts came down from the sky, and he feasted more luxuriously than ever. His four yellow chisels tore the brown shells open, his molars ground the sweet kernels into meal, and he ate and ate till his short legs could hardly keep his fat little belly off the ground.

Then came the first light snow, and his feet left tracks which bore a faint resemblance to a baby's--that is, if your imagination was sufficiently vigorous. The snow grew deeper and deeper, and after a while he had to fairly plough his way from the hollow log to the tree where he took his meals. It was hard work, for his clumsy legs were not made for wading, and at every step he had to lift and drag himself forward, and then let his body drop while he shifted his feet. A porcupine's feet will not go of themselves, the way other animals' do. They have to be picked up one at a time and lifted forward as far as they can reach--not very far at the best, for they are fastened to the ends of very short legs. It almost seems as if he could run faster if he could drop them off and leave them behind. One evening, when the snow was beginning to freeze again after a thawing day, he lay down to rest for a few minutes; and when he started on, some of his quills were fast in the hardening crust and had to be left behind. But no matter how difficult the walk might be, there was always a good square meal at the end of it, and he pushed valiantly on till he reached his dinner-table.

Sometimes he stayed in the same tree for several days at a time, quenching his thirst with snow, and sleeping in a crotch.

He was not by any means the only porcupine in the woods around the Glimmerglass, although weeks sometimes passed without his seeing any of his relations. At other times there were from one to half a dozen porkies in the trees close by, and when they happened to feel like it they would call back and forth to each other in queer, harsh, and often querulous voices.

One afternoon, when he and another porcupine were occupying trees next each other, two land-lookers came along and camped for the night between them. Earlier in the day the men had crossed the trail of a pack of wolves, and they talked of it as they cut their firewood, and, with all the skill of the _voyageurs_ of old, cooked their scanty supper, and made their bed of balsam boughs. The half-breed was much afraid that they would have visitors before morning, but the white man only laughed at the idea.

The meal was hardly finished when they lay down between their blankets--the white man to sleep, and the half-breed to listen, listen, listen for the coming of the wolves. Beyond the camp-fire's little circle of ruddy light, vague shadows moved mysteriously, as if living things were prowling about among the trees and only waiting for him to fall asleep. Yet there was no wolf-howl to be heard, nor anything else to break the silence of the winter night, save possibly the dropping of a dead branch, or the splitting open of a tree-trunk, torn apart by the frost. And by and by, in spite of himself, the half-breed's eyelids began to droop.

But somebody else was awake--awake, and tempted with a great temptation. The porcupine--not ours, but the other one--had caught the fragrance of coffee and bacon. Here were new odors--different from anything that had ever before tickled his nostrils--strange, but indescribably delicious. He waited till the land-lookers were snoring, and then he started down the tree. Half-way to the ground he encountered the cloud of smoke that rose from the camp-fire. Here was another new odor, but with nothing pleasant about it. It stung his nostrils and made his eyes smart, and he scrambled up again as fast as he could go, his claws and quills rattling on the bark. The half-breed woke with a start. He had heard something--he was sure he had--the wolves were coming, and he gave the white man a punch in the ribs.

"Wake up, wake up, m'shoor!" he whispered, excitedly. "The wolves are coming. I can hear them on the snow."

The white man was up in a twinkling, but by that time the porcupine hod settled himself in a crotch, out of reach of the smoke, and the woods were silent again. The two listened with all their ears, but there was not a sound to be heard.

"You must have been dreaming, Louis."

The half-breed insisted that he had really heard the patter of the wolves' feet on the snow-crust, but the timber cruiser laughed at him, and lay down to sleep again. An hour later the performance was repeated, and this time the white man was angry.

"Don't you wake me up again, Louis. You're so rattled you don't know what you're doing."

Louis was silenced, but not convinced, and he did not let himself go to sleep again. The fire was dying down, and little by little the smoke-cloud grew thinner and thinner until it disappeared entirely. Then the half-breed heard the same sound once more, but from the tree overhead, and not from across the snow. He waited and watched, and presently a dark-brown animal, two or three feet in length and about the shape of an egg, came scrambling cautiously down the trunk. The porky reached the ground in safety, and searched among the tin plates and the knives and forks until he found a piece of bacon rind; but he got just one taste of it, and then Louis hit him over the head with a club. Next morning the land-lookers had porcupine soup for breakfast, and they told me afterward that it was very good indeed.

Our Porky had seen it all. He waited till the men had tramped away through the woods, with their packs on their backs and their snow-shoes on their feet, and then he, too, came down from his tree on a tour of investigation. His friend's skin lay on the snow not very far away--if you had pulled the quills and the longer hairs out of it, it would have made the pelt which the old fur-traders sometimes sold under the name of "spring beaver"--but he paid no attention to it. The bacon rind was what interested him most, and he chewed and gnawed at it with a relish that an epicure might have envied. It was the first time in all his gluttonous little life that he had ever tasted the flavor of salt or wood-smoke; and neither lily-pads, nor beechnuts, nor berries, nor anything else in all the woods could compare with it. Life was worth living, if only for this one experience; and it may be that he stowed a dim memory of it away in some dark corner of his brain, and hoped that fortune would some day be good to him and send him another rind.

The long, long winter dragged slowly on, the snow piled up higher and deeper, and the cold grew sharper and keener. Night after night the pitiless stars seemed sucking every last bit of warmth out of the old earth and leaving it dead and frozen forever. Those were the nights when the rabbits came out of their burrows and stamped up and down their runways for hours at a time, trying by exercise to keep from freezing to death, and when the deer dared not lie down to sleep. And hunger came with the cold and the deep snow. The buck and the doe had to live on hemlock twigs till they grew thin and poor. The partridges were buried in the drifting snow, and starved to death. The lynxes and the wild-cats hunted and hunted and hunted, and found no prey; and it was well for the bears and the woodchucks that they could sleep all winter and did not need food. Only the Porcupine had plenty and to spare. Starvation had no terrors for him.

But the hunger of another may mean danger for us, as the Porcupine discovered. In ordinary times most of the animals let him severely alone. They knew better than to tackle such a living pin-cushion as he; and if any of them ever did try it, one touch was generally enough. But when you are ready to perish with hunger, you will take risks which at other times you would not even think about; and so it happened that one February afternoon, as the Porky was trundling himself deliberately over the snow-crust, a fierce-looking animal with dark fur, bushy tail, and pointed nose sprang at him from behind a tree and tried to catch him by the throat, where the quills did not grow, and there was nothing but soft, warm fur. The Porcupine knew just what to do in such a case, and he promptly made himself into a prickly ball, very much as his mother had done seven or eight months before, with his face down, and his quills sticking out defiantly. But this time his scheme of defence did not work as well as usual, for the sharp little nose dug into the snow and wriggled its way closer and closer to where the jugular vein was waiting to be tapped. That fisher must have understood his business, for he had chosen the one and only way by which a porcupine may be successfully attacked. For once in his life our friend was really scared. Another inch, and the fisher would have won the game, but he was in such a hurry that he grew careless and reckless, and did not notice that he had wheeled half-way round, and that his hind-quarters were alongside the Porcupine's. Now, sluggish and slow though a porky may be, there is one of his members that is as quick as a steel trap, and that is his tail. Something hit the fisher a whack on his flank, and he gave a cry of pain and fury, and jumped back with half a dozen spears sticking in his flesh. He must have quite lost his head during the next few seconds, for before he knew it his face also had come within reach of that terrible tail and its quick, vicious jerks. That ended the battle, and he fled away across the snow, almost mad with the agony in his nose, his eyes, his forehead, and his left flank. As for the Porky, he made for the nearest tree as fast as he could go, hardly trusting in his great deliverance. And I don't believe there is any sight in all the Great Tahquamenon Swamp much funnier than a porky in a hurry--a porky who has really made up his mind that he is in danger and must hustle for dear life. He is the very personification of haste and a desire to go somewhere quick, and he picks his feet up and puts them down again as fast as ever he can; and yet, no matter how hard he works, his legs are so short and his body so fat that he can't begin to travel as fast as he wants to.

Another day the lynx tried it, and fared even worse than the fisher--not the Canada lynx, with whom we are already somewhat acquainted, but the bay lynx. The fisher had had some sense, and would probably have succeeded if he had been a little more careful, but the lynx was a fool. He didn't know the very first thing about the proper way to hunt porcupines, and he ought never to have tried it at all, but he was literally starving, and the temptation was too much for him. Here was something alive, something that had warm red blood in its veins and a good thick layer of flesh over its bones, and that was too slow to get away from him; and he sailed right in, tooth and claw, regardless of the consequences. Immediately he forgot all about the Porcupine, and his own hunger, and everything else but the terrible pain in his face and his forepaws. He made the woods fairly ring with his howls, and he jumped up and down on the snow-crust, rubbing his head with his paws, and driving the little barbed spears deeper and deeper into the flesh. And then, all of a sudden, he ceased his leaping and bounding and howling, and dropped on the snow in a limp, lifeless heap, dead as last summer's lily-pads. One of the quills had driven straight through his left eye and into his brain. Was it any wonder if in time the Porcupine came to think himself invulnerable?

Even a northern Michigan winter has its ending, and at last there came an evening when all the porcupines in the woods around the Glimmerglass were calling to each other from one tree to another. They couldn't help it. There was something in the air that stirred them to a vague restlessness and uneasiness, and our own particular Porky sat up in the top of a tall hemlock and sang. Not like Jenny Lind, nor like a thrush or a nightingale, but his harsh voice went squealing up and down the scale in a way that was all his own, without time or rhythm or melody, in the wildest, strangest music that ever woke the silent woods. I don't believe that he himself quite knew what he meant or why he did it. Certainly no one else could have told, unless some wandering Indian or trapper may have heard the queer voices and prophesied that a thaw was coming.

The thaw arrived next day, and it proved to be the beginning of spring. The summer followed as fast as it could, and again the lily-pads were green and succulent in the shallow water along the edge of the Glimmerglass, and again the Porcupine wandered down to the beach to feed upon them, discarding for a time his winter diet of bark and twigs. Why should one live on rye-bread when one can have cake and ice-cream?

And there among the bulrushes, one bright June morning, he had a fight with one of his own kind. Just as he was approaching his favorite log, two other porcupines appeared, coming from different directions, one a male, and the other a female. They all scrambled out upon the log, one after another, but it soon became evident that three was a crowd. Our Porky and the other bachelor could not agree at all. They both wanted the same place and the same lily-pads, and in a little while they were pushing and shoving and growling and snarling with all their might, each doing his best to drive the other off the log and into the water. They did not bite--perhaps they had agreed that teeth like theirs were too cruel to be used in civilized warfare--but they struggled and chattered and swore at each other, and made all sorts of queer noises while they fought their funny little battle--all the funnier because each of them had to look out for the other's quills. If either had happened to push the wrong way, they might both have been in serious trouble. It did not last long. Our Porky was the stronger, and his rival was driven backward little by little till he lost his hold completely and slipped into the lake. He came to the surface at once, and quickly swam to the shore, where he chattered angrily for a few minutes, and then, like the sensible bachelor that he was, wandered off up the beach in search of other worlds more easily conquered. There was peace on our Porky's log, and the lily-pads that grew beside it had never been as fresh and juicy as they were that morning.

Two months later, on a hot August afternoon, I was paddling along the edge of the Glimmerglass in company with a friend of mine, each of us in a small dug-out canoe, when we found the Porky asleep in the sunshine. He was lying on the nearly horizontal trunk of a tree whose roots had been undermined by the waves till it leaned far out over the lake, hardly a foot from the water.

My friend, by the way, is the foreman of a lumber-camp. He has served in the British army, has hunted whales off the coast of Greenland, married a wife in Grand Rapids, and run a street-car in Chicago; and now he is snaking logs out of the Michigan woods. He is quite a chunk of a man, tall and decidedly well set up, and it would take a pretty good prize-fighter to whip him, but he learned that day that a porcupine at close quarters is worse than a trained pugilist.

"Look at that porky," he called to me. "I'm going to ram the canoe into the tree and knock him off into the water. Just you watch, and you'll see some fun."

I was somewhat uncertain whether the joke would ultimately be on the Porcupine or the man, but it was pretty sure to be worth seeing, one way or the other, so I laid my paddle down and awaited developments. Bang! went the nose of the dug-out against the tree, and the Porcupine dropped, but not into the water. He landed in the bow of the canoe, and the horrified look on my friend's face was a delight to see. The Porky was wide awake by this time, for I could hear his teeth clacking as he advanced to the attack.

"Great Scott! He's coming straight at me!"

The Porcupine was certainly game. I saw the paddle rise in the air and come down with a tremendous whack, but it seemed to have little effect. The Porky's coat of quills and hair was so thick that a blow on the back did not trouble him much. If my friend could have hit him across the nose it would have ended the matter then and there, but the canoe was too narrow and its sides too high for a crosswise stroke. He tried thrusting, but that was no better. When a good-sized porcupine has really made up his mind to go somewhere he may be slow, but it takes more than a punch with the end of a stick to stop him; and this Porky had fully determined to go aft and get acquainted with the foreman.

My friend couldn't even kick, for he was kneeling on the bottom of the dug-out, with his feet behind him, and if he tried to stand up he would probably capsize.

"Say, Hulbert, what am I going to do?"

I didn't give him any advice, for my sympathies were largely with the Porcupine. Besides, I hadn't any advice to give. Just then the canoe drifted around so that I could look into it, and I beheld the Porcupine bearing down on my helpless friend like Birnam Wood on its way to Dunsinane, his ruffle of quills erect, fire in his little black eyes, and a thirst for vengeance in his whole aspect. My friend made one or two final and ineffectual jabs at him, and then gave it up.

"It's no use!" he called; "I'll have to tip over!" and the next second the canoe was upside down and both belligerents were in the water. The Porcupine floated high--I suppose his hollow quills helped to keep him up--and he proved a much better swimmer than I had expected, for he quickly made his way to the beach and disappeared in the woods, still chattering disrespectfully. My friend waded ashore, righted his canoe, and we resumed our journey. I don't think I'll tell you what he said. He got over it after a while, and in the end he probably enjoyed his joke more than if it had turned out as he had intended.

The summer followed the winter into the past, and the Moon of Falling Leaves came round again. The Porcupine was not alone. Another porky was with him, and the two seemed very good friends. In fact, his companion was the very same lady porcupine who had stood by while he fought the battle of the log and the lily-pads, though I do not suppose that they had been keeping company all those months, and I am by no means certain that they remembered that eventful morning at all. Let us hope they did, for the sake of the story. Who knows how much or how little of love was stirring the slow currents of their sluggish natures--of such love as binds the dove or the eagle to his mate, or of such steadfast affection as the Beaver and his wife seem to have felt for each other? Not much, perhaps; yet they climbed the same tree, ate from the same branch, and drank at the same spring; and the next April there was another arrival in the old hollow log--twins, this time, and both of them alive.

But the Porcupine never saw his children, for a wandering fit seized him, and he left the Glimmerglass before they were born. Two or three miles away was a little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway crossed one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five miles away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly moving about, backing, hauling, and making up their trains. As the mossback lay awake in the long, quiet, windless winter nights, he often heard them puffing and snorting, now with slow, heavy coughs, and now quick and sharp and rapid. One night when he was half asleep he heard something that said, "chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew," like an engine that has its train moving and is just beginning to get up speed. At first he paid no attention to it. But the noise suddenly stopped short, and after a pause of a few seconds it began again at exactly the same speed; stopped again, and began a third time. And so it went on, chewing and pausing, chewing and pausing, with always just so many chews to the second, and just so many seconds to each rest. No locomotive ever puffed like that. The mossback was wide awake now, and he muttered something about "another of those pesky porkies." He had killed the last one that came around the house, and had wanted his wife to cook it for dinner and see how it tasted, but she wouldn't. She said that the very sight of it was enough for her, and more than enough; and that it was all she could do to eat pork and potatoes after looking at it.

He turned over and tried to go to sleep again, but without success. That steady "chew-chew-chew" was enough to keep a woodchuck awake, and at last he got up and went to the door. The moonlight on the snow was almost as bright as day, and there was the Porcupine, leaning against the side of the barn, and busily rasping the wood from around the head of a rusty nail. The mossback threw a stick of stove-wood at him, and he lumbered clumsily away across the snow. But twenty minutes later he was back again, and this time he marched straight into the open shed at the back of the house, and began operations on a wash-tub, whose mingled flavor of soap and humanity struck him as being very delicious. Again the mossback appeared in the doorway, shivering a little in his night-shirt.

The Porcupine was at the foot of the steps. He had stopped chewing when the door opened, and now he lifted his forepaws and sat half-erect, his yellow teeth showing between his parted lips, and his little eyes staring at the lamp which the mossback carried. The quills slanted back from all around his diminutive face, and even from between his eyes--short at first, but growing longer toward his shoulders and back. Long whitish bristles were mingled with them, and the mossback could not help thinking of a little old, old man, with hair that was grizzly-gray, and a face that was half-stupid and half-sad and wistful. He was not yet two years of age, but I believe that a porcupine is born old. Some of the Indians say that he is ashamed of his homely looks, and that that is the reason why, by day, he walks so slowly, with hanging head and downcast eyes; but at night, they say, when the friendly darkness hides his ugliness, he lifts his head and runs like a dog. In spite of the hour and the cheering influence of the wash-tub, our Porky seemed even more low-spirited than usual. Perhaps the lamplight had suddenly reminded him of his personal appearance. At any rate he looked so lonesome and forlorn that the mossback felt a little thrill of pity for him, and decided not to kill him after all, but to drive him away again. He started down the steps with his lamp in one hand and a stick of wood in the other, and then--he never knew how it happened, but in some way he stumbled and fell. Never in all his life, not even when his wildest nightmare came and sat on him in the wee, sma' hours, had he come so near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment. He thought he was going to sit down on the Porcupine. Fortunately for both of them, but especially for the man, he missed him by barely half an inch, and the Porky scuttled away as fast as his legs could carry him.

In spite of this unfriendly reception, the Porcupine hung around the edges of the clearing for several months, and enjoyed many a meal such as seldom falls to the lot of the woods-people. One night he found an empty pork-barrel out behind the barn, its staves fairly saturated with salt, and hour after hour he scraped away upon it, perfectly content. Another time, to his great satisfaction, he discovered a large piece of bacon rind among some scraps that the mossback's wife had thrown away. Later he invaded the sugar-bush by night, gnawing deep notches in the edges of the sap buckets and barrels, and helping himself to the sirup in the big boiling-pan.

Life was not all feasting, however. There was a dog who attacked him two or three times, but who finally learned to keep away and mind his own business. Once, when he had ventured a little too close to the house, and was making an unusual racket with his teeth, the mossback came to the door and fired a shotgun at him, cutting off several of his quills. And still another night, late in the spring, when he was prowling around the barn, a bull calf came and smelled him. Next morning the mossback and his boys threw that calf down on the ground and tied his feet to a stump, and three of them sat on him while a fourth pulled the quills from his nose with a pair of pincers. You should have heard him grunt.

Then came the greatest adventure of all. Down beside the railway was a small platform on which supplies for the lumber-camps were sometimes unloaded from the trains. Brine and molasses and various other delectable things had leaked out of the barrels and kegs and boxes, and the Porcupine discovered that the planks were very nicely seasoned and flavored. He visited them once too often, for one summer evening, as he was gnawing away at the site of an ancient puddle of molasses, the accommodation train rolled in and came to a halt. He tried to hide behind a stump, but the trainmen caught sight of him, and before he knew it they had shoved him into an empty box and hoisted him into the baggage-car. They turned him loose among the passengers on the station platform at Sault Ste. Marie, and his arrival created a sensation.

When the first excitement had subsided, all the girls in the crowd declared that they must have some quills for souvenirs, and all the young men set to work to procure them, hoping to distinguish themselves by proving their superiority in strength and courage over this poor little twenty-pound beast just out of the woods. Most of them succeeded in getting some quills, and also in acquiring some painful experience--especially the one who attempted to lift the Porcupine by the tail, and who learned that that interesting member is the very hottest and liveliest portion of the animal's anatomy. They finally discovered that the best way to get quills from a live porcupine is to hit him with a piece of board. The sharp points penetrate the wood and stick there, the other ends come loose from his skin, and there you have them. Our friend lost most of his armor that day, and it was a good thing for him that departed quills, like clipped hair, will renew themselves in the course of time.

One of the brakemen carried him home, and he spent the next few months in the enjoyment of city life. Whether he found much pleasure in it is, perhaps, a question, but I am rather inclined to think that he did. He had plenty to eat, and he learned that apples are very good indeed, and that the best way to partake of them is to sit up on your haunches and hold them between your forepaws. He also learned that men are not always to be regarded as enemies, for his owner and his owner's children were good to him and soon won his confidence. But, after all, the city was not home, and the woods were; so he employed some of his spare time in gnawing a hole through the wall in a dark corner of the shed where he was confined, and one night he scrambled out and hid himself in an empty barn. A day or two later he was in the forest again.

The remaining years of his life were spent on the banks of St. Mary's River, and for the most part they were years of quietness and contentment. He was far from his early home, but the bark of a birch or a maple or a hemlock is much the same on St. Mary's as by the Glimmerglass. He grew bigger and fatter as time went on, and some weeks before he died he must have weighed thirty or forty pounds.

Once in a while there was a little dash of excitement to keep life from becoming too monotonous--if too much monotony is possible in a porcupine's existence. One night he scrambled up the steps of a little summer cottage close to the edge of the river, and, finding the door unlatched, he pushed it open and walked in. It proved to be a cottage full of girls, and they stood around on chairs and the tops of wash-stands, bombarded him with curling-irons, poked feebly with bed-slats, and shrieked with laughter till the farmers over on the Canadian shore turned in their beds and wondered what could be happening on Uncle Sam's side of the river. The worst of it was that in his travels around the room he had come up behind the door and pushed it shut, and it was some time before even the red-haired girl could muster up sufficient courage to climb down from her perch and open it again.