Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/96

 ing 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.