Part 4 (2/2)
The meal was hardly finished when they lay down between their blankets--the white man to sleep, and the half-breed to listen, listen, listen for the coming of the wolves. Beyond the camp-fire's little circle of ruddy light, vague shadows moved mysteriously, as if living things were prowling about among the trees and only waiting for him to fall asleep. Yet there was no wolf-howl to be heard, nor anything else to break the silence of the winter night, save possibly the dropping of a dead branch, or the splitting open of a tree-trunk, torn apart by the frost. And by and by, in spite of himself, the half-breed's eyelids began to droop.
But somebody else was awake--awake, and tempted with a great temptation.
The porcupine--not ours, but the other one--had caught the fragrance of coffee and bacon. Here were new odors--different from anything that had ever before tickled his nostrils--strange, but indescribably delicious.
He waited till the land-lookers were snoring, and then he started down the tree. Half-way to the ground he encountered the cloud of smoke that rose from the camp-fire. Here was another new odor, but with nothing pleasant about it. It stung his nostrils and made his eyes smart, and he scrambled up again as fast as he could go, his claws and quills rattling on the bark. The half-breed woke with a start. He had heard something--he was sure he had--the wolves were coming, and he gave the white man a punch in the ribs.
”Wake up, wake up, m'shoor!” he whispered, excitedly. ”The wolves are coming. I can hear them on the snow.”
The white man was up in a twinkling, but by that time the porcupine hod settled himself in a crotch, out of reach of the smoke, and the woods were silent again. The two listened with all their ears, but there was not a sound to be heard.
”You must have been dreaming, Louis.”
The half-breed insisted that he had really heard the patter of the wolves' feet on the snow-crust, but the timber cruiser laughed at him, and lay down to sleep again. An hour later the performance was repeated, and this time the white man was angry.
”Don't you wake me up again, Louis. You're so rattled you don't know what you're doing.”
Louis was silenced, but not convinced, and he did not let himself go to sleep again. The fire was dying down, and little by little the smoke-cloud grew thinner and thinner until it disappeared entirely. Then the half-breed heard the same sound once more, but from the tree overhead, and not from across the snow. He waited and watched, and presently a dark-brown animal, two or three feet in length and about the shape of an egg, came scrambling cautiously down the trunk. The porky reached the ground in safety, and searched among the tin plates and the knives and forks until he found a piece of bacon rind; but he got just one taste of it, and then Louis. .h.i.t him over the head with a club. Next morning the land-lookers had porcupine soup for breakfast, and they told me afterward that it was very good indeed.
Our Porky had seen it all. He waited till the men had tramped away through the woods, with their packs on their backs and their snow-shoes on their feet, and then he, too, came down from his tree on a tour of investigation. His friend's skin lay on the snow not very far away--if you had pulled the quills and the longer hairs out of it, it would have made the pelt which the old fur-traders sometimes sold under the name of ”spring beaver”--but he paid no attention to it. The bacon rind was what interested him most, and he chewed and gnawed at it with a relish that an epicure might have envied. It was the first time in all his gluttonous little life that he had ever tasted the flavor of salt or wood-smoke; and neither lily-pads, nor beechnuts, nor berries, nor anything else in all the woods could compare with it. Life was worth living, if only for this one experience; and it may be that he stowed a dim memory of it away in some dark corner of his brain, and hoped that fortune would some day be good to him and send him another rind.
The long, long winter dragged slowly on, the snow piled up higher and deeper, and the cold grew sharper and keener. Night after night the pitiless stars seemed sucking every last bit of warmth out of the old earth and leaving it dead and frozen forever. Those were the nights when the rabbits came out of their burrows and stamped up and down their runways for hours at a time, trying by exercise to keep from freezing to death, and when the deer dared not lie down to sleep. And hunger came with the cold and the deep snow. The buck and the doe had to live on hemlock twigs till they grew thin and poor. The partridges were buried in the drifting snow, and starved to death. The lynxes and the wild-cats hunted and hunted and hunted, and found no prey; and it was well for the bears and the woodchucks that they could sleep all winter and did not need food. Only the Porcupine had plenty and to spare. Starvation had no terrors for him.
But the hunger of another may mean danger for us, as the Porcupine discovered. In ordinary times most of the animals let him severely alone. They knew better than to tackle such a living pin-cus.h.i.+on 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 Glimmergla.s.s 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 Glimmergla.s.s, 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 Glimmergla.s.s in company with a friend of mine, each of us in a small dug-out canoe, when we found the Porky asleep in the suns.h.i.+ne.
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!”
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