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 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