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Even the settlers' dogs exhibit the same strong fancy for hunting porcupines, but are not so successful in coming off without injury; indeed, they often issue from the combat covered over with spines sticking in their flesh. Captain Hardy gives us an anecdote of the extraordinary fancy the Indian dogs have for hunting porcupines.
In the course of time he had accumulated a creditable museum of natural history, which to this day may be seen at Mostyn House, in Parkgate; and to it have been added specimens of caribou, seals, foxes, porcupines and other Labrador animals, which in his busy later years he has found time to mount, for he is still the same eager and devoted student of nature.
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.
Quite a number of badgers are to be found in the Tahoe region, and they must find abundance of good food, for the specimens I have seen were rolling in fat, and as broad backed as a fourteen inch board. Several times, also, have I seen porcupines, one of them, weighing fully twenty-five pounds, on the slopes of Mt. Watson, waddling along as if he were a small bear.
At night the many creatures of the forest ventured out across the plains in search of food, weasels; big white hares; deer, planting daintily their little sharp hoofs where the frozen turnips were most plentiful; porcupines in quest of anything they could get their keen teeth into; and often the big timber wolves would send shivering across the waste a long whining howl.
They were gaudily ornamented, as was almost every portion of costume, with porcupines' quills dyed with brilliant colours, and worked into fanciful, and in many cases extremely elegant, figures and designs; for North American Indians oftentimes display an amount of taste in the harmonious arrangement of colour that would astonish those who fancy that education is absolutely necessary to the just appreciation of the beautiful.
No creature made a sound except the porcupines; and as they died they cried like little children. In the green spruce and cedar timber, heavy with the pitch that made their thick tops spurt into flame like a sea of explosive, the fire rushed on with a tremendous roar. From it in a straight race there was no escape for man or beast.
And there among the bulrushes, one bright June morning, he had a fight with one of his own kind. Just as he was approaching his favorite log, two other porcupines appeared, coming from different directions, one a male, and the other a female. They all scrambled out upon the log, one after another, but it soon became evident that three was a crowd.
Sometimes a muskrat swam hastily in a pointed furrow of ripple; vanishing wings, barely sensed in the flash, left us staring; stealthy withdrawals of creatures, whose presence we realized only in the fact of those withdrawals, snared our eager interest; porcupines rattled and rustled importantly and regally from the water's edge to the woods; herons, ravens, an occasional duck, croaked away at our approach; thrice we surprised eagles, once a tassel-eared Canada lynx.
Julian walked as slowly as possible, so as not to irritate them, while in the depth of bushes he could distinguish porcupines, foxes, vipers, jackals, and bears. He began to run; the brutes followed him. The serpent hissed, the malodorous beasts frothed at the mouth, the wild boar rubbed his tusks against his heels, and the wolf scratched the palms of his hands with the hairs of his snout.
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