ble nursling.
Before he was two months old she was forced to wean him, but by that
time he was quite able to travel down to the beach and feast on the
tender lily-pads and arrow-head leaves that grew in the shallow water,
within easy reach from fallen and half-submerged tree-trunks.

One June day, as he and his mother were fishing for lily-pads, each of
them out on the end of a big log, a boy came down the steep bank that
rose almost from the water's edge. He wasn't a very attractive boy. His
clothes were dirty and torn--and so was his face. His hat was gone, and
his hair had not seen a comb for weeks. The mosquitoes and black-flies
and no-see-'ems had bitten him until his skin was covered with blotches
and his eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly see. And worst of
all, he looked as if he were dying of starvation. There was almost
nothing left of him but skin and bones, and his clothing hung upon him
as it would on a framework of sticks. If the Porcupine could have
philosophized about it he would probably have said that this was the
wrong time of year for starving; and from his point of view he would
have been right. June, in the woods, is the season of plenty for
everybody but man. Man thinks he must have wheat-flour, and that doesn't
grow on pines or maple-trees, nor yet in the tamarack swamp. But was
there any wild, fierce glare in the boy's eyes, such a light of hunger
as the story-books tell us is to be seen in the eyes of the wolf and the
lynx when they have not eaten for days and days, and when the snow lies
deep in the forest, and famine comes stalking through the trees? I don't
think so. He was too weak and miserable to do any glaring, and his
stomach was aching so hard from eating green gooseberries that he could
scarcely think of anything else.

But his face brightened a very little when he saw the old she-porcupine,
and he picked up a heavy stick and waded out beside her log. She clacked
her teeth together angrily as he approached; but he paid no attention,
so she drew herself into a ball, with her head down and her nose covered
by her forepaws. Reaching across her back and down on each side was a
belt or girdle of quills, the largest and heaviest on her whole body,
which could be erected at will, and now they stood as straight as young
spruce-trees. Their tips were dark-brown, but the rest of their length
was nearly white, and when you looked at her from behind she seemed to
have a pointed white ru