Forest Neighbors Part 5

The Porcupine was certainly game. I saw the paddle rise in the air and come down with a tremendous whack, but it seemed to have little effect.

The Porky's coat of quills and hair was so thick that a blow on the back did not trouble him much. If my friend could have hit him across the nose it would have ended the matter then and there, but the canoe was too narrow and its sides too high for a crosswise stroke. He tried thrusting, but that was no better. When a good-sized porcupine has really made up his mind to go somewhere he may be slow, but it takes more than a punch with the end of a stick to stop him; and this Porky had fully determined to go aft and get acquainted with the foreman.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_He quickly made his way to the beach._"]

My friend couldn't even kick, for he was kneeling on the bottom of the dug-out, with his feet behind him, and if he tried to stand up he would probably capsize.

"Say, Hulbert, what am I going to do?"

I didn't give him any advice, for my sympathies were largely with the Porcupine. Besides, I hadn't any advice to give. Just then the canoe drifted around so that I could look into it, and I beheld the Porcupine bearing down on my helpless friend like Birnam Wood on its way to Dunsinane, his ruffle of quills erect, fire in his little black eyes, and a thirst for vengeance in his whole aspect. My friend made one or two final and ineffectual jabs at him, and then gave it up.

"It's no use!" he called; "I'll have to tip over!" and the next second the canoe was upside down and both belligerents were in the water. The Porcupine floated high--I suppose his hollow quills helped to keep him up--and he proved a much better swimmer than I had expected, for he quickly made his way to the beach and disappeared in the woods, still chattering disrespectfully. My friend waded ash.o.r.e, righted his canoe, and we resumed our journey. I don't think I'll tell you what he said. He got over it after a while, and in the end he probably enjoyed his joke more than if it had turned out as he had intended.

The summer followed the winter into the past, and the Moon of Falling Leaves came round again. The Porcupine was not alone. Another porky was with him, and the two seemed very good friends. In fact, his companion was the very same lady porcupine who had stood by while he fought the battle of the log and the lily-pads, though I do not suppose that they had been keeping company all those months, and I am by no means certain that they remembered that eventful morning at all. Let us hope they did, for the sake of the story. Who knows how much or how little of love was stirring the slow currents of their sluggish natures--of such love as binds the dove or the eagle to his mate, or of such steadfast affection as the Beaver and his wife seem to have felt for each other?

Not much, perhaps; yet they climbed the same tree, ate from the same branch, and drank at the same spring; and the next April there was another arrival in the old hollow log--twins, this time, and both of them alive.

But the Porcupine never saw his children, for a wandering fit seized him, and he left the Glimmergla.s.s before they were born. Two or three miles away was a little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway crossed one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five miles away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly moving about, backing, hauling, and making up their trains. As the mossback lay awake in the long, quiet, windless winter nights, he often heard them puffing and snorting, now with slow, heavy coughs, and now quick and sharp and rapid. One night when he was half asleep he heard something that said, "chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew," like an engine that has its train moving and is just beginning to get up speed. At first he paid no attention to it. But the noise suddenly stopped short, and after a pause of a few seconds it began again at exactly the same speed; stopped again, and began a third time. And so it went on, chewing and pausing, chewing and pausing, with always just so many chews to the second, and just so many seconds to each rest. No locomotive ever puffed like that.

The mossback was wide awake now, and he muttered something about "another of those pesky porkies." He had killed the last one that came around the house, and had wanted his wife to cook it for dinner and see how it tasted, but she wouldn't. She said that the very sight of it was enough for her, and more than enough; and that it was all she could do to eat pork and potatoes after looking at it.

He turned over and tried to go to sleep again, but without success. That steady "chew-chew-chew" was enough to keep a woodchuck awake, and at last he got up and went to the door. The moonlight on the snow was almost as bright as day, and there was the Porcupine, leaning against the side of the barn, and busily rasping the wood from around the head of a rusty nail. The mossback threw a stick of stove-wood at him, and he lumbered clumsily away across the snow. But twenty minutes later he was back again, and this time he marched straight into the open shed at the back of the house, and began operations on a wash-tub, whose mingled flavor of soap and humanity struck him as being very delicious. Again the mossback appeared in the doorway, s.h.i.+vering a little in his night-s.h.i.+rt.

The Porcupine was at the foot of the steps. He had stopped chewing when the door opened, and now he lifted his forepaws and sat half-erect, his yellow teeth showing between his parted lips, and his little eyes staring at the lamp which the mossback carried. The quills slanted back from all around his diminutive face, and even from between his eyes--short at first, but growing longer toward his shoulders and back.

Long whitish bristles were mingled with them, and the mossback could not help thinking of a little old, old man, with hair that was grizzly-gray, and a face that was half-stupid and half-sad and wistful. He was not yet two years of age, but I believe that a porcupine is born old. Some of the Indians say that he is ashamed of his homely looks, and that that is the reason why, by day, he walks so slowly, with hanging head and downcast eyes; but at night, they say, when the friendly darkness hides his ugliness, he lifts his head and runs like a dog. In spite of the hour and the cheering influence of the wash-tub, our Porky seemed even more low-spirited than usual. Perhaps the lamplight had suddenly reminded him of his personal appearance. At any rate he looked so lonesome and forlorn that the mossback felt a little thrill of pity for him, and decided not to kill him after all, but to drive him away again.

He started down the steps with his lamp in one hand and a stick of wood in the other, and then--he never knew how it happened, but in some way he stumbled and fell. Never in all his life, not even when his wildest nightmare came and sat on him in the wee, sma' hours, had he come so near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment. He thought he was going to sit down on the Porcupine. Fortunately for both of them, but especially for the man, he missed him by barely half an inch, and the Porky scuttled away as fast as his legs could carry him.

In spite of this unfriendly reception, the Porcupine hung around the edges of the clearing for several months, and enjoyed many a meal such as seldom falls to the lot of the woods-people. One night he found an empty pork-barrel out behind the barn, its staves fairly saturated with salt, and hour after hour he sc.r.a.ped away upon it, perfectly content.

Another time, to his great satisfaction, he discovered a large piece of bacon rind among some sc.r.a.ps that the mossback's wife had thrown away.

Later he invaded the sugar-bush by night, gnawing deep notches in the edges of the sap buckets and barrels, and helping himself to the sirup in the big boiling-pan.

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 mola.s.ses 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 mola.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sengers 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 Glimmergla.s.s. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 marksmans.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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.

He was spared the very last and worst pangs--for that, at least, we may be thankful. On the last day of his life he sat under a beech-tree, weak and weary and faint. He could not remember when he had eaten. His coat of hair and quills was as thick and bushy as ever, and outwardly he had hardly changed at all, but under his skin there was little left but bones. And as he sat there and wished that he was dead--if such a wish can ever come to a wild animal--the Angel of Mercy came, in the shape of a man with a revolver in his pistol pocket--a man who liked to kill things.

"A porky!" he said. "Guess I'll shoot him, just for fun."

The Porcupine saw him coming and knew the danger; and for a moment the old love of life came back as strong as ever, and he gathered his feeble strength for one last effort, and started up the tree. He was perhaps six feet from the ground when the first report came.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Four shots, as fast as the self-c.o.c.king revolver could pour the lead into his body. The Porky stopped climbing.

For an instant he hung motionless on the side of the tree, and then his forepaws let go, and he swayed backward and fell to the ground. And that was the end of the Porcupine.

THE ADVENTURES OF A LOON

HIS name was Mahng, and the story which I am about to relate is the story of his matrimonial career--or at least of a portion of it.

One snowy autumn night, three years ago, he was swimming on the Glimmergla.s.s in company with his first wife--one of the first, that is.

There may possibly have been others before her, but if so I wasn't acquainted with them. It was a fine evening--especially for loons. There was no wind, and the big, soft flakes came floating lazily down to lose themselves in the quiet lake. The sky, the woods, and the sh.o.r.es were all blotted out; and the loons reigned alone, king and queen of a dim little world of leaden water and falling snow. And right royally they swam their kingdom, with an air as if they thought G.o.d had made the Glimmergla.s.s for their especial benefit. Perhaps He had.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_He went under as simply as you would step out of bed._"]

It was very, very lonely, but they liked it all the better for that. At times they even lost sight of each other for a little while, as one dived in search of a herring or a young salmon trout. I wish we could have followed Mahng down under the water and watched him at his hunting.

He didn't dive as you do, with a jump and a plunge and a splash. He merely drew his head back a little and then thrust it forward and downward, and went under as simply and easily as you would step out of bed, and with a good deal more dignity. It was his feet that did it, of course. They were not good for much for walking, but they were the real thing when it came to swimming or diving. They were large and broad and strongly webbed, and the short stout legs which carried them were flattened and compressed that they might slip edgewise through the water, like a feathered oar-blade. The muscles which worked them were very powerful, and they kicked backward with so much vigor that two little jets of spray were often tossed up in his wake as he went under, like the splash from a steamer's paddles. And he had a rudder, too, for in the after part of his body there were two muscles just like tiller-ropes, fastened to his tail in such a way that they could twist it to either side, and steer him to port or starboard as occasion demanded. With his long neck stretched far out in front, his wings pressed tightly against his sides, and his legs and feet working as if they went by steam, he shot through the water like a submarine torpedo-boat. "The Herdsman of the Deep," the Scottish Highlanders used to say, when in winter a loon came to visit their lochs and fiords.

Swift and strong and terrible, he ranged the depths of the Glimmergla.s.s, seeking what he might devour; and perhaps you can imagine how hastily the poor little fishes took their departure whenever they saw him coming their way. Sometimes they were not quite quick enough, and then his long bill closed upon them, and he swallowed them whole without even waiting to rise to the surface.

The chase thus brought to a successful conclusion, or perhaps the supply of air in his lungs giving out, he returned to the upper world, and again his voice rang out through the darkness and the falling snow. Then his wife would answer him from somewhere away off across the lake, and they would call back and forth to each other with many a laugh and shout, or, drawing closer and closer together, they would cruise the Glimmergla.s.s side by side, with the big flakes dropping gently on their backs and folded wings, and the ripples spreading out on either hand like the swell from the bow of a s.h.i.+p.

Once Mahng stayed down a little longer than usual, and when he came up he heard his wife calling him in an excited tone, as if something had happened to her. He hurried toward her, and presently he saw a light s.h.i.+ning dimly through the throng of moving snow-flakes, and growing brighter and brighter as he approached until it was fairly dazzling. As he drew nearer still he caught sight of his wife sitting on the water squarely in front of that light, and watching it with all her eyes. She was not calling now. She had forgotten Mahng, she had forgotten to paddle, she had forgotten everything, in her wonder at this strange, beautiful thing, the like of which had never before been seen upon the Glimmergla.s.s. She herself was a rarely beautiful sight--if she had only known it--with the dark water rippling gently against her bosom, her big black head thrust forward, and the feathers of her throat and breast glistening in the glare of the headlight, white as the snow that was falling around her.

All this Mahng saw. What he did not see, because his eyes were dazzled, was a boat in the shadow behind the light, and a rifle-barrel pointing straight at his wife's breast. There was a blinding flash, a sharp, cras.h.i.+ng report, and a cloud of smoke; and Mahng dived as quick as a wink. But his wife would never dive again. The bullet had gone tearing through her body, and she lay stretched out on the water, perfectly motionless, and apparently dead. And then, just as Mahng came to the surface a hundred yards away, and just as my partner put out his hand to pick her up, she lifted her head and gave a last wild cry. Mahng heard it and answered, but he was too far away to see what happened. He dared not return till the light had disappeared, and by that time she was gone. She had straggled violently for a moment, and had struck savagely at the hunter's hand, and then she had as suddenly collapsed, the water turned red, and her eyes closed forever. Did you know that among all G.o.d's creatures the birds are the only ones whose eyes close naturally in death? Even among men it is not so, for when our friends die we lay our hands reverently upon their faces, and weight their stiff lids with gold. But for the bird, Nature herself performs the last kindly office, and as the light fades out from the empty windows of the soul, the curtain falls of its own accord.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_She herself was a rarely beautiful sight._"]

During the next two or three days Mahng's voice was frequently to be heard, apparently calling his wife. Sometimes it was a mournful, long-drawn cry--"Hoo-WOOOO-ooo"--that might have been heard a mile away--a cry that seemed the very essence of loneliness, and that went right down where you lived and made you feel like a murderer. And sometimes he broke into a wild peal of laughter, as if he hoped that that might better serve to call her back to him.

His children had gone south some time before. They had seemed anxious to see the world. Perhaps, too, they had dreaded the approach of colder weather more than the older birds, who had become somewhat seasoned by previous autumns. Anyhow, they had taken the long trail toward the Gulf of Mexico, and now that his wife was gone Mahng was entirely alone. At last he seemed to make up his mind that he might as well follow them, and one afternoon, as he was swimming aimlessly about, I saw him suddenly dash forward, working his wings with all their might, beating the water at every stroke, and throwing spray like a side-wheeler.

Slowly--for his body was heavy, and his wings were rather small for his size--slowly he lifted himself from the water, all the time rus.h.i.+ng forward faster and faster. He couldn't have made it if he hadn't had plenty of sea-room, but by swinging round and round in long, wide circles he managed to rise little by little till at last he was clear of the tree-tops. He pa.s.sed right over my head as he stood away to the south--his long neck stretched far out in front, his feet pointing straight back beyond the end of his short tail, and his wings beating the air with tremendous energy. How they did whizz! He made almost as much noise as a train of cars. He laughed as he went by, and you would have said that he was in high spirits; but before he disappeared that lonely, long-drawn cry came back once more--"Hoo-WOOOO-ooo."

In the course of his winter wanderings through the South he happened to alight one day on a certain wild pond down in Mississippi, and there he found another loon--a widow whose former husband had lost his life the previous summer under rather peculiar circ.u.mstances.

Beside a small lake in Minnesota there lives an old Dutchman who catches fish with empty bottles. On any calm, still day you may see a lot of them floating upright in the water, all tightly corked, and each with the end of a fis.h.i.+ng-line tied around its neck. They seem very decorous and well-behaved, but let a fish take one of the hooks and begin to pull, and immediately that particular bottle turns wrong end up, and acts as if it had taken a drop too much of its own original contents.

Then the Dutchman paddles out in his little scow, and perhaps by the time he has hauled in his fish and re-baited the hook another bottle is excitedly standing on its head. But never before nor since have any of them behaved as wildly as the one that a loon got hold of.

The loon--not Mahng, you understand, but the first husband of his new acquaintance--had dived in search of his dinner, and the first thing he saw that looked as if it might be good to eat was the bait on one of the Dutchman's hooks. He swallowed it, of course, and for the next five minutes he went charging up and down that pond at a great rate, followed by a green gla.s.s monster with the name of a millionnaire brewer blown in its side. Sometimes he was on the surface, and sometimes he was under it; but wherever he went that horrible thing was close behind him, pulling so hard that the sharp cord cut the corners of his mouth till it bled. Once or twice he tried to fly, but the line caught his wing and brought him down again. When he dived, it tangled itself around his legs and clogged the machinery; and when he tried to shout, the hook in his throat would not let him do anything more than cough. The Dutchman got him at last, and eventually Mahng got his widow, as you shall see.

She had her children to take care of, and for a time she was very busy, but after a few weeks they flew away to the south, as Mahng's had done, and she was free to go where she liked and do what she pleased. For a while she stayed where she was, like a sensible person. Minnesota suited her very well, and she was in no hurry to leave. But, of course, she could not stay on indefinitely, for some frosty night the lake would freeze over, and then she could neither dive for fish nor rise upon the wing. A loon on ice is about as helpless as an oyster. And so at last she, too, went south. She travelled by easy stages, and had a pleasant journey, with many a stop, and many a feast in the lakes and rivers along the route. I should like to know, just out of curiosity, how many fish found their way down her capacious gullet during that pilgrimage through Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee.