Nights were frosting already
when the porcupine came down the hill and started nosing around our
yard. This year, I started explaining to the porcupine how my mood
generally follows the trend of the season. I told him I’d
like him to understand a little about the condition of the world
and how that relates to the earth’s cyclical tendencies.
Since the porcupine stayed a while, I assigned him a
gender and began to love him. Alone in the day, husband at work and
the children at their activities, I sought the porcupine’s
opinion, not just about the weather and what he thought about the
flux in the Supreme Court, but also about important things, like
the meaning of shelter and protection and nurturing.
Because I wanted the porcupine to reciprocate my affection, I
started to compliment him. I remarked on his skill at camouflage in
the sagebrush. Another day, I said I respected his audacity when he
lumbered across the open yard in the middle of the day. I mentioned
that he retained a look of dignity, even while freeloading under
our shed. He did not seem anxious about the coming of winter, I
told my friends, describing the porcupine’s puttering ways
and his refusal to rush.
Then, the porcupine ate my
spinach. The day I removed the protective covering from a young
patch, he chomped it down to the roots. He was indifferent, sitting
at the edge of the plot, pulling up each dark leaf and consuming it
in a demonstration of eating as just another chore.
We
had a talk. I explained how I had planted the spinach mid-August in
hopes of a spring harvest. Did he understand nothing about
conservation and restraint? The porcupine sat through my lecture,
or maybe he stood through it; I realized I couldn’t tell the
difference. The land was barren around us, the grass dry, the earth
going hard with cold. The porcupine did not shy from eye contact,
pitying me, burdened as I was with reasoning, logic and emotion,
while he ate the last bits of green.
It was my fault. I
had practically invited him to devour my crops, speaking to him in
those soothing tones for weeks, nurturing his dependency as surely
as I nursed my own, letting the season slip away.
“It’s bad behavior to eat people’s food,” I told the
porcupine. “No way to show your gratitude.” I scolded him while I
squatted a few feet away. A snowstorm was building over the
mountains, grey clouds stacking up like so much regret, heaving
their shadowy shoulders. “We’re not going to let you stay
here forever,” I said.
The next day, my neighbor drove
down to see if he could find some wire in our barn. “You want me to
shoot that porcupine for you?” he asked. He pointed to where the
animal was scratching around a pile of rocks near the swing set.
“He’s gonna cause you a heap a trouble, you know. Get under
your car and eat your brake lines, chew the paint off your shed.”
Little wisps of snow starting to lick around our ankles.
I looked to where my spring spinach had been. The porcupine looked
at us, his nose pointed and sniffing the air, his eyes dots of
black indifference.
“I kinda like that porcupine,” I
admitted. It was the cultural equivalent to declaring a love for
cockroaches or rats. “He’s cute,” I pointed out. “And he
poses for photographs, turns his head so you can get his better
side.”
My neighbor nodded, and thanked me for the wire.
A week later, we herded the porcupine into a box. My
husband pushed at him gently with a snow shovel, and I held the box
on the ground until the porcupine walked in. The kids cried as we
drove up the county road a mile to place where we like to cut wood.
“What if we never see him again?” They wailed from the back seat in
the way of children who have learned to anthropomorphize small
animals with the help of their needy mothers.
When I
opened the box, the porcupine didn’t even look at me. He was
content with his nose in the corner like a humiliated child. We
finally had to lift an edge of the box and dump him out.
I waited for him to do something unusual. Particularly, I would
have liked for him to stand on his hind feet and wave good-bye. I
wanted that porcupine to mean something. But autumn was over, and
he had to find food, and maybe a home. He wasn’t concerned
about me. He walked away, uphill through the inch or so of snow and
disappeared under a tangle of aspen logs.
Kate
Krautkramer is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in
Yampa, Colorado.
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