and they told me afterward that it was very good indeed.

Our Porky had seen it all. He waited till the men had tramped away
through the woods, with their packs on their backs and their snow-shoes
on their feet, and then he, too, came down from his tree on a tour of
investigation. His friend's skin lay on the snow not very far away--if
you had pulled the quills and the longer hairs out of it, it would have
made the pelt which the old fur-traders sometimes sold under the name of
"spring beaver"--but he paid no attention to it. The bacon rind was what
interested him most, and he chewed and gnawed at it with a relish that
an epicure might have envied. It was the first time in all his
gluttonous little life that he had ever tasted the flavor of salt or
wood-smoke; and neither lily-pads, nor beechnuts, nor berries, nor
anything else in all the woods could compare with it. Life was worth
living, if only for this one experience; and it may be that he stowed a
dim memory of it away in some dark corner of his brain, and hoped that
fortune would some day be good to him and send him another rind.

The long, long winter dragged slowly on, the snow piled up higher and
deeper, and the cold grew sharper and keener. Night after night the
pitiless stars seemed sucking every last bit of warmth out of the old
earth and leaving it dead and frozen forever. Those were the nights when
the rabbits came out of their burrows and stamped up and down their
runways for hours at a time, trying by exercise to keep from freezing to
death, and when the deer dared not lie down to sleep. And hunger came
with the cold and the deep snow. The buck and the doe had to live on
hemlock twigs till they grew thin and poor. The partridges were buried
in the drifting snow, and starved to death. The lynxes and the wild-cats
hunted and hunted and hunted, and found no prey; and it was well for the
bears and the woodchucks that they could sleep all winter and did not
need food. Only the Porcupine had plenty and to spare. Starvation had no
terrors for him.

But the hunger of another may mean danger for us, as the Porcupine
discovered. In ordinary times most of the animals let him severely
alone. They knew better than to tackle such a living pin-cushion as he;
and if any of them ever did try it, one touch was generally enough. But
when you are ready to perish with hunger, you will take risks which at
other times you would not even think about; and so it happened that o