Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals

by William Davenport Hulbert

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.