614 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



specimen, a full-grown male, contained nothing but the finely 

 comminuted shoots of Sagittaria." 



SALT There is one very marked departure from its vegetarian 



diet that the Porcupine continually makes, and that is, it 

 eats any sort of salt pork or butter that it can find, doubtless 

 disliking the grease, but forcing it down for the joy of the 

 salt. It is so keen after this delicacy that it will gnaw up 

 every bit of wood that tastes in the least degree briny. 



I have many times visited old mining camps in the 

 Rockies and lumber camps up the Ottawa to find that the 

 common fate of every wooden article of furniture in the 

 kitchen, from the meat block to the soup ladle, was to be 

 devoured by Porcupines for the sake of the salt they held. 

 It seems to be this weakness that brings them about the camp, 

 where they are such a nuisance, and this, therefore, more than 

 any other, brings on their death sentence from man. Doubtless 

 it is this craving for salts and grease that makes them gnaw the 

 cast antlers of Deer. 



QUILLS But the central thought in the Porcupine, the wonderful 



peculiarity, the secret of its life, indeed, is its quill equipment. 

 To specialize and grow quills it has relinquished speed, cunning, 

 and keenness of senses; all the revenues of its body seem to 

 have been converted to the growing of those awful spines, and 

 in the primitive times when first evolved the idea was abso- 

 lutely justified by results. 



The quills are about i inch long on the head and 4 inches 

 on the back, they are absent from the muzzle, the under parts 

 and the legs. They are so hidden in the wool and hair that 

 they are hard to see, but are always unpleasantly easy to feel. 

 They are so thickly placed that a Porcupine stripped of its wool 

 and hair, as I have seen it by partial decomposition, is still clad 

 densely with quills; each of these is a keen, many barbed, and 

 poisonous dagger — not arrow, for they are not and cannot in 

 any sense be thrown. There is, however, this to be said — 

 while those on the head and body are defensive, those on the 



