There are many bare places on the little pine trees, towards the top,
where the porcupines have gnawed the bark away and left the white flesh
showing. And some trees are dying from the top.
Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans,
Americans all say the same.
At full moon a month ago, when I went down the long clearing in the
brilliant moonlight, through the poor dry herbage a big porcupine began
to waddle away from me, towards the trees and the darkness. The animal
had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon
it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as
it went. That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting
itself demon-like on the air.
It waddled very slowly, with its white spiky spoon-tail steering flat,
behind the round bear-like mound of its back. It had a lumbering,
beetle’s, squalid motion, unpleasant. I followed it into the darkness
of the timber, and there, squat like a great tick, it began scrapily to
creep up a pine-trunk. It was very like a great aureoled tick, a bug,
struggling up.
I stood near and watched, disliking the presence of the creature. It is
a duty to kill the things. But the dislike of killing him was greater
than the dislike of him. So I watched him climb.
And he watched me. When he had got nearly the height of a man, all his
long hairs swaying with a bristling gleam like an aureole, he hesitated,
and slithered down. Evidently he had decided, either that I was
harmless, or else that it was risky to go up any further, when I could
knock him off so easily with a pole. So he slithered podgily down again,
and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that
white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail. He was as big as a middle-sized pig:
or more like a bear.
I let him go. He was repugnant. He made a certain squalor in the
moonlight of the Rocky Mountains. As all savagery has a touch of
squalor, that makes one a little sick at the stomach. And anyhow, it
seemed almost more squalid to pick up a pine-bough and push him over,
hit him and kill him.
A few days later, on a hot, motionless morning when the pine-trees put
out their bristles in stealthy, hard assertion; and I was not in a good
temper, because Black-eyed Susan, the cow, had disappeared into the
timber, and I had had to ride hunting her, so it was nearly nine
o’clock before she was milked: Madame came in suddenly out of the
sunlight, saying “I got such a shock! There are two strange dogs, and
one of them has got the most awful beard, all round his nose.”
She was frightened, like a child, at something unnatural.
“Beard! Porcupine quills, probably! He’s been after a porcupine.”
“Ah!” she cried in relief. “Very likely! Very likely!”--then with a
change of tone; “Poor thing, will they hurt him?”
“They will. I wonder when he came.”
“I heard dogs bark in the night.”
“Did you? Why didn’t you say so? I should have known Susan was hiding--”
The ranch is lonely, there is no sound in the night, save the
innumerable noises of the night, that you can’t put your finger on;
cosmic noises in the far deeps of the sky, and of the earth.
I went out. And in the full blaze of sunlight in the field, stood two
dogs, a black-and-white, and a big, bushy, rather handsome sandy-red
dog, of the collie type. And sure enough, this latter did look queer and
a bit horrifying, his whole muzzle set round with white spines, like
some ghastly growth; like an unnatural beard.
The black-and-white dog made off as I went through the fence. But the
red dog whimpered and hesitated, and moved on hot bricks. He was fat and
in good condition. I thought he might belong to some shepherds herding
sheep in the forest ranges, among the mountains.
He waited while I went up to him, wagging his tail and whimpering, and
ducking his head, and dancing. He daren’t rub his nose with his paws any
more: it hurt too much. I patted his head and looked at his nose, and he
whimpered loudly.
He must have had thirty quills, or more, sticking out of his nose, all
the way round: the white, ugly ends of the quills protruding an inch,
sometimes more, sometimes less, from his already swollen, blood-puffed
muzzle.
The porcupines here have quills only two or three inches long. But they
are devilish; and a dog will die if he does not get them pulled out.
Because they work further and further in, and will sometimes emerge
through the skin away in some unexpected place.
Then the fun began. I got him in the yard: and he drank up the whole
half-gallon of the chickens’ sour milk. Then I started pulling out the
quills. He was a big, bushy, handsome dog, but his nerve was gone, and
every time I got a quill out, he gave a yelp. Some long quills were
fairly easy. But the shorter ones, near his lips, were deep in, and hard
to get hold of, and hard to pull out when you did get hold of them. And
with every one that came out, came a little spurt of blood and another
yelp and writhe.
The dog wanted the quills out: but his nerve was gone. Every time he saw
my hand coming to his nose, he jerked his head away. I quieted him, and
stealthily managed to jerk out another quill, with the blood all over my
fingers. But with every one that came out, he grew more tiresome. I
tried and tried and tried to get hold of another quill, and he jerked
and jerked, and writhed and whimpered, and ran under the porch floor.
It was a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job. The day was blazing
hot. The dog came out and I struggled with him again for an hour or
more. Then we blindfolded him. But either he smelled my hand approaching
his nose, or some weird instinct told him. He jerked his head, this way,
that way, up, down, sideways, roundwise, as one’s fingers came slowly,
slowly, to seize a quill.
The quills on his lips and chin were deep in, only about a quarter of an
inch of white stub protruding from the swollen, blood-oozed, festering
black skin. It was very difficult to jerk them out.
We let him lie for an interval, hidden in the quiet cool place under the
porch floor. After half an hour, he crept out again. We got a rope round
his nose, behind the bristles, and one held while the other got the
stubs with the pliers. But it was too trying. If a quill came out, the
dog’s yelp startled every nerve. And he was frightened of the pain, it
was impossible to hold his head still any longer.
After struggling for two hours, and extracting some twenty quills, I
gave up. It was impossible to quiet the creature, and I had had enough.
His nose on the top was clear: a punctured, puffy, blood-darkened mess;
and his lips were clear. But just on his round little chin, where the
few white hairs are, was still a bunch of white quills, eight or nine,
deep in.
We let him go, and he dived under the porch, and there he lay invisible:
save for the end of his bushy, foxy tail, which moved when we came near.
Towards noon he emerged, ate up the chicken-food, and stood with that
doggish look of dejection, and fear, and friendliness, and greediness,
wagging his tail.
But I had had enough.
“Go home!” I said. “Go home! Go home to your master, and let him finish
for you.”
He would not go. So I led him across the blazing hot clearing, in the
way I thought he should go. He followed a hundred yards, then stood
motionless in the blazing sun. He was not going to leave the place.
And I! I simply did not want him.
So I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the
house. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to dive under the
porch, and there stick, haunting the place.
I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree. Already
in the heat was that sting-like biting of electricity, the thunder
gathering in the sheer sunshine, without a cloud, and making one’s whole
body feel dislocated.
I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him,
I suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying: “Go home!” He
turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose.
With a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash,
gone. And I stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit
him, unintentionally, on his sore nose.
But he was gone.
And then the present moon came, and again the night was clear. But in
the interval there had been heavy thunder-rains, the ditch was running
with bright water across the field, and the night, so fair, had not the
terrific, mirror-like brilliancy, touched with terror, so startling
bright, of the moon in the last days of June.
We were alone on the ranch. Madame went out into the clear night, just
before retiring. The stream ran in a cord of silver across the field, in
the straight line where I had taken the irrigation ditch. The pine tree
in front of the house threw a black shadow. The mountain slope came down
to the fence, wild and alert.
“Come!” said she excitedly. “There is a big porcupine drinking at the
ditch. I thought at first it was a bear.”
When I got out he had gone. But among the grasses and the coming wild
sunflowers, under the moon, I saw his greyish halo, like a pallid living
bush, moving over the field, in the distance, in the moonlit
_clair-obscur_.
We got through the fence, and following, soon caught him up. There he
lumbered, with his white spoon-tail spiked with bristles, steering
behind almost as if he were moving backwards, and this was his head. His
long, long hairs above the quills quivering with a dim grey gleam, like
a bush.
And again I disliked him.
“Should one kill him?”
She hesitated. Then with a sort of disgust:
“Yes!”
I went back to the house, and got the little twenty-two rifle. Now never
in my life had I shot at any live thing: I never wanted to. I always
felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean. With difficulty I had fired
once or twice at a target: but resented doing even so much. Other people
could shoot if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to
me even to try.
But something slowly hardens in a man’s soul. And I knew now, it had
hardened in mine. I found the gun, and with rather trembling hands, got
it loaded. Then I pulled back the trigger and followed the porcupine. It
was still lumbering through the grass. Coming near, I aimed.
The trigger stuck. I pressed the little catch with a safety-pin I found
in my pocket, and released the trigger. Then we followed the porcupine.
He was still lumbering towards the trees. I went sideways on, stood
quite near to him, and fired, in the clear-dark of the moonlight.
And as usual I aimed too high. He turned, went scuttling back whence he
had come.
I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into
the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed
to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking
his head under like a hedgehog.
“He’s not dead yet! Oh, fire again!” cried Madame.