Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals

by William Davenport Hulbert

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.

"High up in the top of a tall hemlock."

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.