Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/94

 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