Critters

Encounters with sharp, moving objects.

Porcupine in a Cottonwood Tree, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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I was thinking about porcupines today. I have met a few in the Yukon over the years. They are the definition of poky, in two senses of the word. Obviously, they’re covered in quills, and maybe (I’m not a biologist) because of this, they aren’t the swiftest animals you’ll meet. Unfortunately, you’ll sometimes meet them on the road - and because they’re not that fast, they don’t always get out of the way in time. Uncle Jordan found that out one day, driving down the dirt road to our house. Apologizing profusely, he hovered over it with a massive rock, knowing he had to end its misery.

I was lucky enough to pull up beside a mama porcupine and three of her babies rambling along the Atlin road once. I pulled over and jumped out to see if I could follow them, but they had already disappeared into the brush, and since I am covered in pink flesh with nerves tingling just under the surface and they are covered in the equivalent of thousands of tiny spears, I figured both they and I were better off unacquainted.

Once I saw a porcupine perched above me, clinging to a spruce tree. I hadn’t even considered that it was something they could physically do, but it makes sense. I don’t know where else they would hide, in a pinch. This guy turned and looked at us, his face soft, with a kind of stupidly sweet countenance. I half expected him to burst into song in a quaint, old-timey accent, like a Disney cartoon, regaling us with the tale of why he didn’t gore one of the dogs we were walking with today. Kipper had, as we now say in my family, already “gotten into” a porcupine (probably this exact one) earlier that week and was still smarting from the quills yoinked out of his muzzle. The memory of which wouldn’t have kept him from trying again, though.

However, nothing compares to our first dog, Nugget’s ability to pick a losing fight with a prickly creature. We spent a couple of weeks in Haines, Alaska, over the course of two summers when I was around 9 and 10 years old. The destination was the Southeast Alaska State Fair. For our parents, this meant rocking out to Commander Cody (”Two triple cheese, side order of fries!”) at the festival’s main stage, and for us, this meant cotton candy, tie-dye t-shirts, and pig racing. One year, I was near the front of the crowd before the race began, and the announcer picked my flailing hands out of the mass of kids who wanted to pick a pig to root for. I chose “Magnum P.I.G.”, of course. Tom Selleck had been one of my first celebrity crushes. I have no memory of whether my pig crushed the competition that day, but I felt like a superstar myself-speaking into the microphone in front of a crowd of cheering strangers.

When we weren’t skipping around at the fairgrounds, we were at our campsite. And this wasn’t just any campsite. We pitched our tents at Chilkat State Park, sheltered under towering coastal hemlock and firs, but only a few hundred feet away from the shores of a wide inlet, bordered by snow-capped mountains, a glacier creeping down the face of one of them. Bald eagles would soar overhead throughout the day, diving down into the water to snatch salmon, heaving them back up into the air, struggling with the weight of their catch. It was a wild place and a wet one, too. We skipped stones and looked for treasures, pearled, peeling mussels, and slivered tuskshells, stranded by the receding tide.

Tenting in Southeast Alaska is a gamble. Cheap, yes. Dry and warm? Not often. I remember waking up in the pitch-black night, hearing my dad splashing around, readjusting the tarp overhead to try and keep the water from pooling under our sleeping bags. But, despite his most valiant efforts, we’d wake up, shivering from cold, our pajamas soggy, and our spirits dampened. On those days, we’d crowd around the sizzling embers of the campfire, wiggling our toes to keep them warm; the family outing began with a trip to the laundromat, where our wet gear would be tossed for a few hours, and we would wander the aisles of the general store to stay out of the rain. If we were lucky, my parents would cave and take us for burgers and sodas at the aptly named Porcupine Pete’s, the only place in town that felt like a real, American burger joint. I admit that none of us were gastronomically adventurous in the mid-’80s, and The Bamboo Room never got a chance to prove its merits.

The day I remember best, though, is the day of Nugget’s impromptu, big sleep. She had done it again. Found a porcupine to tussle with at the campsite, and her swollen face looked like the dartboard at a busy pub. She kept scraping her muzzle and burrowing it between her paws, trying to nudge the quills out, which only made her more inflamed. My dad had to do something for her. These remote towns aren’t served by 24-hour emergency veterinarians. He went to the pharmacy, asked for a dose of anesthesia and some syringes, shot her up, and laid her out under a tree at the public park, proceeding to extract every single quill with a pair of pliers. Thankfully, it was a warm day, and we kids rolled in the grass and chased each other with dandelions. Within a few hours, and a hefty nap in the van, our dog shakily rejoined the waking world, ready to take on the next unwitting, barbed rodent. Indeed, it wouldn’t be too long before she would.

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