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.
[Illustration: "_He quickly made his way to the beach._"]
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.
At another time an Indian robbed him of the longest and best of his
quills--nearly five inches in length some of them--and carried them off
to be used in ornamenting birch-bark baskets. And on still another
occasion he narrowly escaped death at the hands of an irate canoe-man,
in the side of whose Rob Roy he had gnawed a great hole.
The end came at last, and it was the saddest, hardest, strangest fate
that can ever come to a wild creature of the woods. He--who had never
known hunger in all his life, who was almost the only animal in the
forest who had never looked famine in the eye, whose table was spread
with good things from January to December, and whose storehouse was full
from Lake Huron to the Pictured Rocks--he of all others, was condemned
to die of starvation in the midst of plenty. The Ancient Mariner, with
water all around him and not a drop to drink, was no worse off than our
Porcupine; and the Mariner finally escaped, but the Porky didn't.
One of the summer tourists who wandered up into the north woods that
year had carried with him a little rifle, more of a toy than a weapon,
a thing that a sportsman would hardly have condescended to laugh at. And
one afternoon, by ill luck, he caught sight of the Porcupine high up in
the top of a tall tree. It was his first chance at a genuine wild beast,
and he fired away all his cartridges as fast as he could load them into
his gun. He thought that every shot missed, and he was very much ashamed
of his marksmanship. But he was mistaken. The very last bullet broke one
of the Porcupine's lower front teeth, and hurt him terribly. It jarred
him to the very end of his tail, and his head felt as if it was being
smashed to bits. For a minute or two the strength all went out of him,
and if he had not been lying in a safe, comfortable crotch he would have
fallen to the ground.
The pain and the shock passed away after a while, but when supper-time
came--and it was almost always supper-time with the Porcupine--his left
lower incisor was missing. The right one was uninjured, however, and for
a while he got on pretty well, merely having to spend a little more time
than usual over his meals. But that was only the beginning of trouble.
The stump of the broken tooth was still there and still growing, and it
was soon as long as ever, but in the meantime its fellow in the upper
jaw had grown out beyond its normal length, and the two did not meet
properly. Instead of coming together edge to edge, as they should have
done, each wearing the other down and keeping it from reaching out too
far, each one now pushed the other aside, and still they kept on
growing, growing, growing. Worst of all, in a short time they had begun
to crowd his jaws apart so that he could hardly use his right-hand
teeth, and they too were soon out of shape. The evil days had come, and
the sound of the grinding was low. Little by little his mouth was forced
open wider and wider, and the food that passed his lips grew less and
less. His teeth, that had all his life been his best tools and his most
faithful servants, had turned against him in his old age, and were
killing him by inches. Let us not linger over those days.
He was spared the very last and worst pangs--for that, at least, we may
be thankful. On the last day of his life he sat under a beech-tree, weak
and weary and faint. He could not remember when he had eaten. His coat
of hair and quills was as thick and bushy as ever, and outwardly he had
hardly changed at all, but under his skin there was little left but
bones. And as he sat there and wished that he was dead--if such a wish
can ever come to a wild animal--the Angel of Mercy came, in the shape
of a man with a revolver in his pistol pocket--a man who liked to kill
things.
"A porky!" he said. "Guess I'll shoot him, just for fun."
The Porcupine saw him coming and knew the danger; and for a moment the
old love of life came back as strong as ever, and he gathered his feeble
strength for one last effort, and started up the tree. He was perhaps
six feet from the ground when the first report came.
"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Four shots, as fast as the self-cocking
revolver could pour the lead into his body. The Porky stopped climbing.
For an instant he hung motionless on the side of the tree, and then his
forepaws let go, and he swayed backward and fell to the ground. And that
was the end of the Porcupine.
THE ADVENTURES OF A LOON
HIS name was Mahng, and the story which I am about to relate is the
story of his matrimonial career--or at least of a portion of it.
One snowy autumn night, three years ago, he was swimming on the
Glimmerglass in company with his first wife--one of the first, that is.
There may possibly have been others before her, but if so I wasn't
acquainted with them. It was a fine evening--especially for loons. There
was no wind, and the big, soft flakes came floating lazily down to lose
themselves in the quiet lake. The sky, the woods, and the shores were
all blotted out; and the loons reigned alone, king and queen of a dim
little world of leaden water and falling snow. And right royally they
swam their kingdom, with an air as if they thought God had made the
Glimmerglass for their especial benefit. Perhaps He had.
[Illustration: "_He went under as simply as you would step out of
bed._"]