kill him after all, but to drive him away again.
He started down the steps with his lamp in one hand and a stick of wood
in the other, and then--he never knew how it happened, but in some way
he stumbled and fell. Never in all his life, not even when his wildest
nightmare came and sat on him in the wee, sma' hours, had he come so
near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment. He thought he was
going to sit down on the Porcupine. Fortunately for both of them, but
especially for the man, he missed him by barely half an inch, and the
Porky scuttled away as fast as his legs could carry him.

In spite of this unfriendly reception, the Porcupine hung around the
edges of the clearing for several months, and enjoyed many a meal such
as seldom falls to the lot of the woods-people. One night he found an
empty pork-barrel out behind the barn, its staves fairly saturated with
salt, and hour after hour he scraped away upon it, perfectly content.
Another time, to his great satisfaction, he discovered a large piece of
bacon rind among some scraps that the mossback's wife had thrown away.
Later he invaded the sugar-bush by night, gnawing deep notches in the
edges of the sap buckets and barrels, and helping himself to the sirup
in the big boiling-pan.

Life was not all feasting, however. There was a dog who attacked him two
or three times, but who finally learned to keep away and mind his own
business. Once, when he had ventured a little too close to the house,
and was making an unusual racket with his teeth, the mossback came to
the door and fired a shotgun at him, cutting off several of his quills.
And still another night, late in the spring, when he was prowling around
the barn, a bull calf came and smelled him. Next morning the mossback
and his boys threw that calf down on the ground and tied his feet to a
stump, and three of them sat on him while a fourth pulled the quills
from his nose with a pair of pincers. You should have heard him grunt.

Then came the greatest adventure of all. Down beside the railway was a
small platform on which supplies for the lumber-camps were sometimes
unloaded from the trains. Brine and molasses and various other
delectable things had leaked out of the barrels and kegs and boxes, and
the Porcupine discovered that the planks were very nicely seasoned and
flavored. He visited them once too often, for one summer evening, as he
was gnawing away at the site of an ancient puddle of molasses, the
ac