Wisdom of the Wilderness/Quills the Indifferent
QUILLS was born in a capacious hole in the heart of a huge and ancient red maple near the banks of the Tobique River, in New Brunswick.
The hole had to be capacious; for Quills's mother was a fine porcupine, in her prime, fully two and a half feet in length, massive in build, and a good twenty pounds in weight; and moreover, her armament of long, bristling spines made it essential that she should not be unduly crowded in her nest. But the entrance was only large enough for her to squeeze through it without discomfort, so the dusky interior was sheltered, warm and dry. It was also safe; for in all the wilderness there was no savage marauder reckless enough to invade a porcupine's nest while the owner was at home.
In proportion to the size of his mother, Quills, like all young porcupines, was an amazingly big baby. His length was about eleven inches, his weight a shade over two pounds—and this when he was not yet twenty-four hours old. He was richly clothed with long, dark fur, almost black, under which lay hidden his sprouting armament of spines, already formidable though only about half an inch in length. Born with the insatiable appetite of his tribe, he lay stretched out between his mother's stumpy forelegs nursing greedily, with an incessant accompaniment of tiny squeaks and squeals of satisfaction. The sounds were loud enough to attract the notice of two little black-and-white woodpeckers who had just alighted on the trunk near the hole. With sleek heads cocked alertly and bright eyes keen with interrogation they listened to the curious noises inside the tree. Then they clambered on up the trunk to a safer height, wondering no doubt that any youngling should be guilty of such an indiscretion as to thus betray the secret of its hiding place. They could not know that the porcupine baby, almost alone among the babes of the wild, was exempted, through the reputation of his spines, from the law of silence as the price of life.
It was spring; and spring comes late to the high valley of the Tobique River. The ancient red maple, still full of vigorous life in the sapwood of its outer shell, was mantled over every branch and twig with a glowing veil of tiny, rose-red blooms, though the green of its leaf buds was hardly yet showing through the brown sheaths. The ice had broken up and been swept away in tumbling masses, and the current of the swift river, swollen with the spring freshet, filled the air about the porcupine's nest with a pleasant, softly thunderous roar. From all the open glades the snow was gone, though masses of it, shrunken and grayish, still lingered in the fir thickets and the deeper hollows. On the drier hillocks and about the old rotting stumps a carpet of round, flat, yellowish-green and bronzy leaves shielded the lurking pink-and-white blossoms and haunting perfumes of the Mayflower, or Trailing Arbutus, the shy darling of the Northern spring. The fairy fragrance came and went elusively across the pervading scent of moist earth and spicy balsam tips, as the mild breeze pulsed vaguely through the forest.
It was midafternoon of the second day of Quills's life. Pleasantly fatigued from his double duty of nursing and growing, he fell into a sound sleep. Then his mother, spurred by the now insistent demands of her own appetite, gently disentangled herself from the clutch of his baby claws in her fur, crawled from the hole, and descended the trunk to seek a hasty meal.
But what was haste for a porcupine would have been regarded as the extreme of lazy loitering in any other creature of the wild. At the foot of the old maple she stood for some moments loudly sniffing the air with her blunt nostrils. Then, as if making up her mind that it was hemlock she wanted, she ambled off with heavy deliberation to the nearest hemlock tree, climbed it with a noisy rattling of claws, settled herself comfortably in the first crotch, and fell to gnawing the rough bark. When she had taken the edge off her appetite with this fare—which no stomach but a porcupine's could ever digest—she crawled out along a branch, as far as it would bear her weight, and gathering a lot of the slender twigs between her forepaws, made a hearty dessert of the dark-green, glossy frondage. Other hemlocks, standing at a greater distance from her nest, already bore the conspicuous marks of her foraging; but this one she had hitherto left untouched, against the day when she would be wanting to take her meals near home.
While his mother was away feeding, Quills had slept, soundly and silently, for perhaps an hour or more. Then he woke up—hungry, of course, as befitted a healthy young porcupine. Finding no warm mother to snuggle him and feed him, he at once set up his small but earnest complaint of whines and squeals and grumbles, all indifferent as to who or what might overhear him.
As it chanced at this moment, a hungry weasel—the most insatiably bloodthirsty of all the wilderness prowlers—was just approaching the root of the old maple, nosing out the somewhat stale trail of a rabbit. As his keen ear caught these telltale sounds from within the tree, he stopped short, and his malignant little eyes began to blaze. Then he glided around the great trunk, halted just below the hole, and sniffed discriminatingly at the strong, fresh scent upon the bark. But at this point he hesitated—and it is not usual for a hungry weasel to hesitate. The scent was porcupine; and a grown-up porcupine was a proposition which not even his audacity was prepared to tackle. The sound from within that tempting hole, to be sure, was the voice of a baby porcupine. But was the baby alone—or was the mother with it? In the latter case, he would as soon have jumped into the jaws of a lynx as enter that hole. The fresh scent on the bark offered no solution to the problem. Was it made in coming out or going in? He sniffed at it again, growing fiercer and more hungry every moment.
Suddenly he heard behind him a dry rattling of quills, and a confused noise of squeals and chattering grunts. The mother porcupine was hurrying across the moist turf, gnashing her jaws, and looking twice her natural size with every quill on end. In her rage and anxiety she was making remarkable speed, for a porcupine. The weasel, his long white fangs bared, and his eyes red with disappointed fury, whipped about and stood facing her till she was within three or four feet of him. But for all his rage he was no fool. For her gnashing yellow teeth he had no respect whatever. But those deadly, poisonous, needlesharp spines of hers! He had no wish to interview them too closely. With eleventh-hour discretion he slipped aside to make way for her, and glided off to pick up again the trail of the rabbit.
The mother porcupine never even turned her head to see where the enemy had gone. Wild with anxiety she scrambled up the trunk and into her nest. Her experienced nose, however, at once assured her that the weasel had not been inside. Instantly appeased she stretched herself on her side, drew the complaining youngster to her breast, licked and nosed him for a few moments, and settled into a comfortable dose.
Having this hearty mother's attention all to himself—an exceptional advantange, as a porcupine baby has generally one brother or sister if not more, to share the maternal supply—young Quills grew and throve amazingly. And his armor of spines throve with him. In a few weeks he was out of the hole and following his mother up into the hemlock trees, where he speedily learned to feed on the glossy, green tips of the frondage. From this diet he passed quickly to the stronger fare of the harsh and bitter bark, the gnawing of which was a delight to his powerful, chisel-like teeth.
By the time the full flush of the Tobique summer, ardent and swift, had crowded the richsoiled valley with greenery and bloom, Quills's mother had grown altogether indifferent to him. She had long ago refused him her breasts, of which, indeed, he had no further need. But she still permitted him to follow her about, if he wanted companionship, so long as he did not trouble her. And in this way he learned the few things—astonishingly few, it would seem—that a porcupine needs to know in order to hold his own in the struggle for existence. He learned, among other things, that nearly all the green stuff that the forest produced was more or less fit for his food—that there were other trees besides the hemlock whose bark was tasty and nourishing and pleasantly resistant to his teeth, and that in a broad, sunny backwater of the river there grew a profusion of great, round, flat leaves, the pads of the water lily, which were peculiarly thrilling to his palate. In fact, most of his learning had to do with food, which was what he appeared to live for. His enemies were few, and seldom enthusiastic. And he never troubled his head about avoiding them. With an indifference nothing less than colossal he left it to them to avoid him, if they wished; and they did so wish, ninety-nine times out of the hundred.
Along toward the latter part of August, Quills found that his mother was no longer indifferent. She had grown actually unfriendly. Whenever he came near her she grunted and chattered at him in such an irritable fashion that it was obvious, even to a not oversensitive spirit like his, that his companionship was resented. This attitude neither grieved nor angered him, however. She was no longer of any importance to him. He simply quit following her, went his own way, and forgot her. Striking off on his own, and impelled by instinct to seek a fresh range for himself, he plunged into the still warm tide of the sunny backwater and swam, with much splashing and little speed, to the opposite bank. Swimming was no task to him, for his coat of hollow quills made it impossible for him to sink. The backwater was not more than thirty or forty yards in width; but when he had crossed it, and crawled forth upon the opposite bank, he felt that he had found a new world, and owned it.
He ambled joyously along the bank to a point where he had marked a bed of bright green arrow weed, and gorged himself to his great content on the shapely, pointed leaves and stout, succulent stalks. Then he climbed a big poplar and curled up to sleep, self-sufficient and pleased to be alone.
Quills was by this time more than half grown up; and moreover, thanks to his ample nourishment when a baby, he was as big and strong as many a less favored porcupine at maturity. In color he was of a very dark brown, verging on black, and peppered with a dingy, yellowish white, his long fur being dark with light tips, and his spines cream-colored with black tips. The spines on his body ranged from two to four inches in length, and when he was not angry they were partly concealed by the fur, which was considerably longer. The quills on his head and the sides of his face were about an inch in length. His short, blunt muzzle was free from spines, but closely furred to the lips, and conspicuously adorned by his large and prominent front teeth, his gnawing teeth, which were of a vivid darkyellow color. His legs, and all the under parts of his body, were clothed in dense, soft fur, entirely without spines. His tail, about five inches in length, was very thick and powerful, and heavily armed with spines to the tip. The spines on his body were for his protection, but this armed tail was his one weapon of offense—a weapon with which, at a single stroke, he could fill an enemy's mouth or paws with a hundred barbed and poisonous needles. And the peculiar deadliness of these needles, large and small alike, lay in their power of swift and inexorable burrowing. Once their subtle points penetrated the skin their innumerable microscopic, scalelike barbs would begin working them inward through the muscles, setting up violent inflammations as they went, till they would reach some vital part and put their wretched victim out of his misery.
So far in his career young Quills had had no occasion to test the efficiency of that formidable tail of his, as a weapon, though from time to time he would stretch himself elaborately, leg after leg and claw after claw, ruffle up all his spines as if to see that they were in working order, and lash out alarmingly with the aforesaid tail by way of keeping it efficient and ready for action. And now, as luck would have it, the first enemy he was to encounter was the very one against whom his best defenses were of least avail—namely, man himself. But fortunately for young Quills, and for this, his brief biography, the man in question was neither in need of meat (least of all, of such harsh meat as porcupine!) nor was he of a destructive disposition. He was magnanimous—and Quills never knew that he held on to his little lease of life by favor.
The man had come up the Tobique in a canoe, partly for the fishing, partly to refresh his spirit with the clean airs of the wilderness. He left his guide frying bacon and trout for the midday meal, and strolled up the backwater to cast a fly and see if there were any big fish lurking in the shade of the lily pads. He forgot about his fishing, however, when he caught sight of Quills, looking somewhat like a big, dilapidated bird's nest, curled up asleep in the crotch of a young poplar. Being interested in all the kindred of the wild, the man reeled in his line, stood the rod carefully in a bush, and went and shook the tree as hard as he could, to see what Quills would do.
Quills woke up with a startled squeak, dug his claws into the bark to secure himself, and peered down to see what was the matter. At sight of this wanton disturber of his dreams he grew very angry. He chattered, and grunted, and clashed his big yellow teeth loudly, and ruffled up his deadly spines as a clear warning to the intruder to keep off.
The man laughed, as if pleased at this bold defiance. He looked about for a long pole, thinking to pole Quill from his perch so as to observe him a little nearer at hand. But poles for poking porcupines do not lie about the Tobique wildnerness—as he presently realized. He decided to climb the poplar, for a closer—but not too close—investigation. But the moment he began to climb, Quills, boiling with indignation, started down to meet the danger halfway. He came down backward, with his tail lashing savagely. And he came down so astonishingly fast that the man had barely time to drop to the ground and jump out of the way, chuckling at the speedy success of his experiment.
"Half a jiffy and the beggar would havs made my face look like a pincushion," he muttered, approvingly.
Reaching the ground Quills stopped, and stood chattering his defiance. The man, some paces distant, eyed him humorously for a few seconds, then went and got his fishing rod out of the bush. With a bit of string from his jacket pocket he tied his cloth cap over the butt of the rod; and then, like a fencer with a button on his foil, with this weapon of courtesy he came and made a gentle thrust at Quills's blunt nose. Quick as a flash Quills whisked around, and lashed at the impertinent weapon with his tail. The man at once withdrew it, and examined his cap. It was stuck full, at the one slashing blow, with beautiful, polished, black-tipped, white quills.
"Thanks, awfully, old chap," said he. "They are lovely specimens, so I won't tease you any more," and carrying his prize carefully before him he turned back to the canoe. Quills glared after him till his long form had vanished through the trees. Then his anger cooled, and exultation at his easy and signal triumph took its place. His spines went down till they were hidden beneath the dark fur and he seemed to have shrunk to half his size.
The stress of his emotions having made him hungry—anything will do to make a porcupine hungry—he crawled down to the edge of the water and fell to feasting in a patch of arrow weed.
Autumn on the Tobique passed swiftly, in a blaze of color. A few sudden touches of frost in the night—and then the maples stood glorious in scarlet and crimson, the birches and poplars shimmered in pale gold, the ash trees smouldered in dull purple, and the rowans flaunted their great bunches of waxy, orange-vermilion berries against the solid, dark-green background of hemlock and spruce. The partridge coveys whirred on strong wings across the glowing corridors of the forest, under a sky of sharp cobalt. For a day or two every tree top was elusively vocal with the thin-drawn, single notes of the migrating cedar waxwings—notes which were mere tiny beads of sound. The ice which formed each night along the edges of the shallow pools floated away each morning before the unclouded sun was two hours high. And the air, stirred with light breezes, sparkling and rich with earth scents, was like wine in the veins of every creature alive. One night came a light sifting of snow, in gossamer flakes which vanished at the first touch of the sun. Then the breezes died away; the air, losing its crisp tang, grew balmy and languorous; the sharp blue of the sky veiled itself in a tender, opaline haze; the wilderness seemed to fall asleep, its silence broken only by the whispers of the falling leaves—and, once in a while, the startling chirr-rr-rr of a red squirrel. Life, for the moment, had taken on the tissue of a dream. It was the magic Indian Summer.
It passed, as it had come, in a night. Day broke steel-gray and menacing, with a bitter wind cutting down out of the North; and in a few hours everything was rigid with frost. Quills, though the cold in reahty had small terror for his hardy and warm-clad frame, had been disturbed and annoyed by the sudden change. It occurred to him that a warm and sheltered retreat, like his dimly remembered nest in the old maple, would be a better sleeping place than the draughty branches of a hemlock or a spruce. In this frame of mind he thought of a tempting looking hole which he had noticed, under a big boulder some fifty yards or so up the backwater. He knew that the hole belonged to an old dog fox, but the fact did not trouble him. His brain had only room for one idea at a time. He set out straight for that hole.
He had no idea whether the owner was at home or not, but he made no attempt to find out. By way of precaution, however, he turned round before entering and backed in, slashing vigorously with his spiked tail as he did so. The fox was not at home. Quills found the retreat dry and warm. So, having well breakfasted before leaving his tree, he settled down with his hind quarters to the entrance, and unconcernedly went to sleep.
Presently the fox came trotting home, intent on getting out of the wind and having a nap in his snug den. But just before the threshold he stopped short, the fur on his neck stood up, and his eyes went green. He had scented the trail of Quills—and it led straight into his lair. Stealthily he tiptoed forward, peered in—and saw confronting him that spiny tail and rump.
His blood boiled at the intruder's insolence. But he was a wise old beast; and in his rash youth he had once been lame for a month, through having tried to interfere with a most insignificant-looking porcupine. Curbing his righteous wrath—as there was nothing else to do—he turned about and with his scratching hind paws insultingly sent a shower of earth in upon the slumbering Quills. Then he trotted off. Quills, thus rudely awakened, crawled forth, chattering indignantly, and shook out the defilement from his long coat. But as the fox was nowhere in sight he promptly forgot his wrath, and turned into the den again to resume his nap.
Gradually, but inexorably, winter now closed down upon the valley of the Tobique. And it was a hard winter—for all the hunting beasts and birds, a desperate winter. The rabbits, that autumn, had been smitten with one of their periodical epidemics, and died off like flies. This did not trouble Quills directly—a strict vegetarian, he was assured of plenty so long as the forest stood. But indirectly it made a vital difference to him. All the prowling and pouncing kindred—the great horned owls and the eagles, the lynxes, foxes, martens, and minks soon found themselves goaded by such hunger as might at any moment drive them to take unwonted risks. Quills little guessed how often, as he was gnawing complacently at his meal of hemlock bark, he would be watched longingly by savage and hungry eyes. But had he guessed it his indifference would have remained quite unruffled. He had all he could eat, and a warm hole to sleep in; and why should he borrow trouble?
But one biting December afternoon, Quills's complacency got something of a shock. Just as he was crawling luxuriously into his den, one of those great horned owls which are the feathered Apaches of the wilderness, came winnowing low overhead on wings as silent as sleep. His round, staring eyes caught sight of Quills's hind quarters, just vanishing into the hole. There was no time to note exactly what it was, and hunger had made the great bird rash even beyond his wont. He swooped instantly, and struck his terrible talons into the tail and haunch.
With a loud hiss, like that of an angry cat, he let go precipitately, and fairly bounced up into the air again, both murderous talons struck deep with spines which seemed to burn into his sinews. He flew in haste to the nearest branch, and set himself to the painful task of plucking out the torments with his beak, holding up first one claw and then the other. With some of the spines he was successful, but others he merely managed to nip off close to the skin. For several weeks he could do no hunting for the fiery anguish in them, but could only sit moping in his hollow tree, where he would soon have starved but for the food brought to him by his faithful mate.
As for Quills, this was his first experience of physical pain. And it was his first taste of fear. Whining and squealing and grunting all at once, he shrank into his den, and carefully parting the spines and fur with his nose, strove to lick the wounds made by those steel-sharp talons. For a day or two he had no appetite and stayed sulking in the den. But the healthy flesh, being unpoisoned, soon healed, and Quills was himself again, except for a certain unaccustomed watchfulness. Even a malevolent—but to him harmless—little weasel, or a scouting mink, he would honor with his suspicions; and one day when a gigantic bull moose came and stood beneath the tree in which he was feeding, he arrayed all his defenses as if expecting immediate attack. But the huge, black beast did not even trouble to look at him, so his fears were soon allayed.
A porcupine's memory, however, seems to be extraordinarily short; and Quills's was no exception to the rule. When his wounds no longer pricked him to remembrance, he forgot all about the affair and recovered his old indifference. One day when he was returning to his den for a doze—right into his pathway, with a noiseless pounce, dropped a great, gray, furry beast, with tufted ears, and long, white, snarling teeth, and huge pads of paws. It crouched before him, its stub of a tail twitching, and glared upon him with pale, cruel, moonlike eyes. Up went Quills's spines at once, and he ducked his nose between his forepaws, but he was determined to get to his den, so he came right on. Seeing, however, that the intruder showed no sign of getting out of the way. Quills suddenly turned around and came on backward, lashing out fiercely with his tail. The lynx was wild with hunger, but not to the pitch of suicidal recklessness. He ached Intolerably for the well-nourished flesh that he knew lay hidden beneath those bristling spines; but he knew the price that he would have to pay for it. With a screech of disappointed rage he slipped from the path, and Quills disappeared into his hole.
As the long and bitter winter drew on, Quills had many more or less similar encounters with the lynxes, and two with a surly old black bear. Paradoxical as the statement may appear, he usually faced the enemy with his tail. And the result was always the same. No prowler was prepared to pay the price which Quills would have exacted for his carcass. But along in March, when the snow had begun to settle heavily under a week of thaw, Quills was confronted by a new enemy before whom his indifference melted more swiftly than the snow.
Very early one morning, when the first ghostgray light of dawn was beginning to glimmer through the windless forest, Quills had just come down out of an old hemlock when he caught sight of a strange beast gliding over the snow. The stranger, dark brown in color, with a bushy tail, long and low-set body, weasel-shaped head, and grizzly-gray face with black snout, was somewhat under three feet in length. It was distinctly smaller, and at first glance less dangerous-looking, than a lynx. But some inherited instinct told Quills at once that this was an enemy far more to be dreaded than the fiercest of lynxes. He had never seen a fisher before. Fortunately for the porcupine tribe, fishers were very scarce in the Valley of the Tobique. But a chill of ancestral fear struck to Quills's heart.
The fisher, catching sight of him, whirled in his tracks, and darted at him with a deadly intensity of purpose very different from the hesitating attitude of Quills's other foes. And Quills's tactics were now different. Jutting from the snow was a heavy windfall, its top supported in the lower branches of a neighboring beech tree. Under this protection Quills thrust his nose and head, clear to the shoulders, leaving only his armed back and fiercely slashing tail exposed to the assault. He was no more in this position ere the enemy was upon him.
Now in nine cases out of ten—perhaps even in ninety-nine out of a hundred—the fight between a porcupine and a fisher has but one result. The fisher eats the porcupine. He is incomparably the stronger. He is, taking it all in all, the most savage, swift, and crafty of all the marauders of the wilderness. And above all else, the porcupine's quills, so deadly to others, have for him comparatively few terrors. They do not poison or inflame his flesh, which seems to possess the faculty of soon casting them forth again through the skin. All he has to do is to flip the victim over on its back—annexing as few spines as possible in the act—and he has the unprotected throat and belly at the mercy of his fangs.
In the present case, however, the too confident fisher had an exceptional porcupine to deal with. Quills was not only unusually large and vigorous, but, for a porcupine, sagacious. He had settled himself down solidly into the snow; and when the fisher, dodging a blow of his tail, and accepting a sharp dose of spines in the shoulder, tried to turn him over with a twist of the paw, Quills resisted successfully, and with a timely swing of his haunches stabbed his assailant's whole flank full of spines.
The fisher had expected some resistance, some more or less futile defence, but this was attack. Always short in temper, he flew into a blind rage at the pain and the surprise of it. He stood back a few inches to gain impetus for the next effort, and this was his mistake—this, and underrating his opponent. At that very instant he got a full, flailing stroke across his face from Quills's tail. It filled his nose and mouth with spines—that was to be expected. But—for the blow had surely been guided by the patron spirit of all the porcupines—it also filled both his eyes.
With a screech of anguish he flung himself full on Quills's back and strove to bite down through the armor of the spines. But he was now totally blind. And his jaws were stuck so full of spines as to be practically powerless. Meanwhile his mad struggles were simply driving deeper and deeper into all his tender under parts those terrible four-inch spikes. All at once the agony grew too appalling for even his indomitable spirit. He lurched off, and dragged himself away, stumbing and staggering, till he reached a thicket which he felt to be dense enough to hide his defeat. And here death came to him, none too soon.
For some minutes after his defeated foe had gone, Quills remained with his head thrust under the branch, chattering fierce defiance and lashing wildly with his tail. Then, very cautiously, he backed off and looked about him. His spines and fur were disheveled, and he was bleeding from some deep scratches where his assailant's claws had gone home. But he was not seriously the worse for his encounter—and he had beaten, overwhelmingly, the terrible killer of porcupines! His somber and solitary spirit glowed with triumph. Rather hurriedly he crawled on to his lair, and there set himself to a much-needed toilet. And outside his retreat the first long, level rays of the sunrise crept across the snow, touching the trunks of the birches and the poplars to a mystical rose-pink and saffron.