116 The Ottawa Naturalist. [January 



its spiny tail, the porcupine always stands strictly on the defensive. 

 He is the original passive resister. One winter morning while break- 

 ing my way on snowshoes through a thick growth of alders along the 

 ledge of a swamp, I came on a porcupine trying to hide in the hollow 

 butt of an ash tree. Protected by my heavy deerskin mitts, I seized 

 him by the hind legs in order to carry him out into the open with the 

 intention of photographing him. Naturally, he objected to this 

 impertinence, and in his struggles his formidable yellow teeth came 

 alarmingly close to my hand. But the poor creature never made the 

 slightest attempt to bite. His faith was all in his quills: they had 

 failed him, and he knew no other defence. But to carry 25 lbs. of 

 contorting porcupine at arms length with one hand, and my camera 

 and tripod with the other, and to force a way through the brush, all 

 at one and the same time was too much for me, and I had to drop the 

 porcupine. He promptly hitched himself up to the top of a tall young 

 red maple, climbing the smooth bark as easily as a person goes 

 upstairs. This was about noon, and as I left him, it was beginning 

 to snow heavily. I passed the place again on my way home about 

 five o'clock in the evening. It was still snowing, and there was the 

 porcupine clinging to the slender maple top in exactly the same 

 position in which I had left him five hours before, with about four 

 inches of snow piled on his back! I have often wondered how long 

 he stayed there. 



Our porcupines occasionally make their dens in a hollow log 

 or under an upturned stump, but their favorite dwelling is in a crevice 

 between the stones of a rocky hillside. They be but a feeble folk yet 

 make they their houses in the rocks. They are confirmed vegetarians, 

 living in a state of nature exclusively on bark and twigs; and being 

 poor travellers they always lodge close to their food supply. This is 

 often a poplar tree, on which they feed continuously night after night 

 they are mostly nocturnal in their habits until it is completely 

 stripped of its bark out to the very end of the branches. They also 

 browse on cedars, hemlocks and spruces, but in the case of these 

 conifers, it is the tender twigs that they eat. In the winter, their 

 resorts are readily discovered by the trench-like path they make in 

 the snow from their den to the tree they are feeding on. And their 

 table manners being sadly wanting in refinement, they let many 

 succulent pieces fall to the ground, which are so attractive to the hares, 

 that the snow beneath the porcupine tree is generally trampled hard 

 by the concourse of Lepus americanus gathered to feast on these 

 crumbs from the rich man's table. 



While the porcupine is a vegetarian, he is not a bigoted one. He 

 feeds on all kinds of scraps around a camp and sometimes he indulges 

 in peculiar hors d'ceuvres. Fire rangers often complain* that the por- 

 cupines eat their cotton posters off the trees; and lately a farmer on 



