acquainted, but the
bay lynx. The fisher had had some sense, and would probably have
succeeded if he had been a little more careful, but the lynx was a fool.
He didn't know the very first thing about the proper way to hunt
porcupines, and he ought never to have tried it at all, but he was
literally starving, and the temptation was too much for him. Here was
something alive, something that had warm red blood in its veins and a
good thick layer of flesh over its bones, and that was too slow to get
away from him; and he sailed right in, tooth and claw, regardless of the
consequences. Immediately he forgot all about the Porcupine, and his own
hunger, and everything else but the terrible pain in his face and his
forepaws. He made the woods fairly ring with his howls, and he jumped up
and down on the snow-crust, rubbing his head with his paws, and driving
the little barbed spears deeper and deeper into the flesh. And then,
all of a sudden, he ceased his leaping and bounding and howling, and
dropped on the snow in a limp, lifeless heap, dead as last summer's
lily-pads. One of the quills had driven straight through his left eye
and into his brain. Was it any wonder if in time the Porcupine came to
think himself invulnerable?

Even a northern Michigan winter has its ending, and at last there came
an evening when all the porcupines in the woods around the Glimmerglass
were calling to each other from one tree to another. They couldn't help
it. There was something in the air that stirred them to a vague
restlessness and uneasiness, and our own particular Porky sat up in the
top of a tall hemlock and sang. Not like Jenny Lind, nor like a thrush
or a nightingale, but his harsh voice went squealing up and down the
scale in a way that was all his own, without time or rhythm or melody,
in the wildest, strangest music that ever woke the silent woods. I don't
believe that he himself quite knew what he meant or why he did it.
Certainly no one else could have told, unless some wandering Indian or
trapper may have heard the queer voices and prophesied that a thaw was
coming.

The thaw arrived next day, and it proved to be the beginning of spring.
The summer followed as fast as it could, and again the lily-pads were
green and succulent in the shallow water along the edge of the
Glimmerglass, and again the Porcupine wandered down to the beach to feed
upon them, discarding for a time his winter diet of bark and twigs. Why
should one live on r