In the mystical transparency of the moonlight the leafy world seemed all afloat. The solid ground, the trees, the rail fences, the serried ranks of silver-washed corn seemed to have lost all substantial foundation. Everything lay swimming, as it were, upon a dream. The light that poured down from the round, gold-white, high-sailing moon was not ordinary moonlight, but that liquid enchantment which the sorceress of the heavens sheds at times, and notably at the ripe of the summer, lest earth should forget the incomprehensibility of beauty. A little to one side, beyond the corn-field and over a billowy mass of silvered leafage, stood the gray, clustered roofs of a backwoods farmstead.
In the top of a tall, slim poplar, leaning out from the edge of the woods and over the fence that marked the bounds of the wilderness, clung a queer-looking, roundish object, gently swaying in the magic light. It might almost have been mistaken for a huge, bristly bird's-nest, but for the squeaky grunts of satisfaction which it kept emitting at intervals. Whether it was that the magic of the moonlight had got into its blood, driving it to strange pastimes, or that it was merely indulging an established taste for the game of "Rock-a-bye-baby," observation made it plain that the porcupine was amusing itself by swinging in the tree-top. Any other of the woods folk would have chosen for their recreation a less conspicuous spot than this poplar-top thrust out over the open field. But the porcupine feared nobody, and was quite untroubled by bashfulness. He cared not a jot who heard, saw, or derided him. It was a pleasant world; and for all that had ever been shown him to the contrary, it belonged to him.
After a time he got tired of swinging and squeaking. He straightened himself out, slowly descended the tree, and set off along the top of the fence toward the farmyard. Never before had it occurred to him to visit the farmyard; but now that the moon had put the madness into his head, he acted upon the whim without a moment's misgiving. Unlike the rest of the wild kindreds, he stood little in awe of either the works or the ways of man.
Presently the fence turned off at a sharp angle to the way he had chosen to go. He descended, and crawled in leisurely fashion along an unused, grassy lane, wandering from side to side as he went, as if time were of no concern to him. About a hundred feet from the fence he came to a brook crossing the lane. Spring freshets had carried away the little bridge, doubtless years before, and now the stream was spanned by nothing but an old tree-trunk, carelessly thrown across. Upon the end of this,--for him an ample bridge,--the porcupine crawled, never troubling himself to inquire if another passenger might chance to be crossing from the other side.
At the very same moment, indeed, another passenger raised furtive, padded paws, and took possession of the opposite end of the bridge. It was a huge bob-cat, with stubby tail and wide, pale green, unwinking eyes. It had come stealing down from the thick woods to visit the farmyard,--driven, perhaps, by the same moon-madness that stirred the porcupine. But at the edge of the silent farmyard, white and tranquil under the flooding radiance, the man-smell on the bars had brought the bob-cat to a sudden halt. No moon-madness could make the cautious cat forget the menace of that smell. It had turned in its tracks, and concluded to look for woodchucks in the corn-field.
When the bob-cat had taken a few paces along the log, it paused and glared at the porcupine vindictively, its eyes seeming to emit faint, whitish flames. The porcupine, on the other hand, came right on, slowly and indifferently, as if unaware of the bob-cat's presence. The latter crouched down, flattened back its ears, dug long, punishing claws into the bark, opened its sharp-toothed jaws, and gave a savage spitting snarl. Was it possible that this insignificant, blundering, sluggish creature, this pig of the tree-tops, was going to demand the right of way? The porcupine, unhurried, continued to advance, nothing but an increased elevation of his quills betraying that he was aware of an opponent. The cat's absurd stub of a tail twitched spasmodically, and for a few seconds it seemed as if rage might get the better of discretion. But all the wild creatures know the qualities of that fine armory of quills carried by the porcupine. The big cat pulled himself together with a screech, ran back, and sprang off to a rock on the bank, whence he spat impotently while the porcupine crawled by.
So leisurely was the progress of the bristling little adventurer that it was a good half-hour ere he reached the farmyard bars. Here he stopped, and sniffed curiously. But it was no dread of the dreaded man-smell that delayed him. The bars had been handled by many hot, toiling hands; and the salt of their sweat had left upon the wood a taste which the porcupine found pleasant. Here and there, up and down, he gnawed at the discoloured surfaces. Then, when the relish was exhausted, he climbed down on the inside, and marched deliberately up the middle of the yard toward the kitchen door. His quills made a dry, rustling noise as he went; his claws rattled on the chips, and in the unshadowed open he was most audaciously in evidence. His bearing was not defiant, but self-reliant, as of one who minded his own business and demanded to be let alone. From the stables across the yard came the stamping of horses' hoofs; a turkey in the tree behind the barn _quit-quitted_ warningly; and a long-drawn, high-pitched _kwee-ee-ee-ee-ee_ of inquiry came from the wakeful Leghorn cock in the poultry-house. To all these unfamiliar sounds the porcupine turned the deaf ear of self-contained indifference.
At this moment around from the front door-step came the farmer's big black and white dog, to see what was exciting his family. He was a wise dog, and versed in the lore of the wilderness. Had the intruder been a bear he would have sought to attract its attention, and raised an outcry to summon his master to the fray. But a porcupine! He was too wary to attack it, and too dignified to make any fuss over it. With a scornful _woof_, he turned away, and strolled into the garden, to dig up an old bone which he had buried in the cucumber-bed.
The porcupine, meanwhile, had found something that interested him. Near the kitchen door stood an empty wooden box, shining in the moonlight. First its bright colour, then its scent, attracted his attention. It had recently contained choice flakes of salted codfish, and the salt had soaked deep into its fibres. With the long, keen chisels of his front teeth, he attacked the wood eagerly,--and the loud sound of his gnawings echoed on the stillness. It awoke the farmer, who rubbed his eyes, arose on his elbow, listened a moment, muttered, "Another of them durn porkypines!" and dropped to sleep again.
When the leisurely adventurer had eaten as much of the box as he could hold, he took it into his head to go home,--which meant, to any comfortable tree back in the woods. His home was at large. This time he decided to go through a hole under the board fence between the barn and the fowl-house. And it was here that, for the first time on this expedition, he was induced by a power outside himself to change his mind. As he approached the hole under the fence, from the radiance of the open yard beyond came another animal, heading for the same point. The stranger was much smaller than the porcupine, and wore no panoply of points. But it had the same tranquil air of owning the earth. The moonlight, shining full upon it, showed its pointed nose, and two broad, white stripes running down the black fur of its back.
The stranger reached the opening in the fence about three seconds ahead of the porcupine. And this time the porcupine was the one to defer. He did not like it. He grunted angrily, and his deadly spines stood up. But he drew aside, and avoided giving any offence to so formidable an acquaintance. No foot of ground would his sturdy courage yield to bob-cat, bear, or man; but of a skunk he was afraid. When the skunk had passed through the fence, and wandered off to hunt for eggs under the barn, the porcupine turned and went all the way around the fowl-house. Then he struck down through the back of the garden, gained the rail fence enclosing the corn-field, and at length, whether by intention, or because the fence, a convenient promenade, led him to it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird. But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung himself luxuriously to sleep.
[The end]
Charles G. D. Roberts's essay: When The Moon Is Over The Corn