THE OUILLS OF A PORCUPINE 
25 
scale of its former magnificence. The 
invaders possibly departed as swiftly as 
they had come; or if, as seems more 
probable, they eventually established 
themselves as a ruHng caste among the 
subject Minoans, they chose for their 
dwellings other sites than those of the 
old palaces. The broken fragments of 
the Minoan race crept back after the 
sack to the blackened ruins of their holy 
and beautiful house, not to rebuild it, but 
to divide its stately rooms and those of 
its dependencies by rude walls into poor 
dwelling-houses, where they lived on — 
a very different life from that of the 
golden days before the sack. 
THE QUILLS OF A PORCUPINE 
By Frederick V. Coville 
THE porcupine is an animal quiet 
and inoffensive in his own pur- 
suits, but powerful in the means 
of his defense and terrible in his use of 
it against his chief enemy, the dog. 
Carper and I were hunting coyotes 
and bears in the backwoods of Oregon. 
There were seven dogs in our pack. 
They had been specially selected and 
trained to hunt bear. Two were pure- 
bred foxhounds, whose part it was to 
find the trail and lead the pack on it 
unerringly by their marvelous keenness 
of scent. Nig, the old one, was scarred 
and partly crippled from encounters with 
bear. Rover, two years old, though with 
less experience, was in the prime of ac- 
tivity, keenness, and endurance. Ranger, 
the staghound, was tall and strong and, 
when the game was in sight, very swift. 
In the open he could catch and kill a 
coyote. Tige, the bloodhound, was the 
heaviest of the pack. His nose was keen, 
and on a bear trail he was true and tire- 
less, and savage in the operations at the 
finish. In other game he had less inter- 
est, and when he slept he growled and 
dreamed of bear hunts. Jule was a mixed 
bloodhound and bulldog, and Bounce and 
Drum were her two yearling pups, one 
yellow, the other brindle. 
For two hours one morning we had 
followed the dogs without picking up a 
fresh trail. We were passing from an 
open ridge into a forest of fir and pine 
when the young foxhound, first sniffing 
excitedly with his nose to the ground, 
raised the coarse hair between his shoul- 
ders, bayed sharply, and plunged into 
the timber. The other dogs closed in 
behind and disappeared. 
Carper tore after them through the 
brush, scaling the slippery logs without 
danger by means of his spiked lumber- 
man's shoes, and I followed as best I 
could. Approaching a little opening in 
the timber, I heard the sound of a gen- 
eral fight. Carper yelling, cursing, and 
kicking among the dogs, then a rifle shot, 
and then another. When I burst through 
the chaparral Carper was still yelling 
and kicking the dogs away from the car- 
cass of a porcupine, grazed by his first 
bullet and plowed open by the second. 
"Well," said he, "we are in for it now." 
The porcupine had taken a position 
beneath a log that was raised a little 
above the ground. As the dogs attacked 
him he turned and struck them terrific 
blows in the face with his short clubbed 
tail, almost as muscular as a gorilla's 
arm, and at every stroke he left a mark 
like a cushionf ul of barbed needles. Dogs 
less fierce would have quit sooner and 
suffered less, but that bunch of bear- 
dogs had behind them a thousand years 
of the fiery passion of the slayer. The 
dogs that could reach the porcupine bit 
him in the back and tail till mouth and 
tongue were a bloody, quivering mass of 
barbs. Only by the fiercest onslaught on 
the dogs themselves had Carper been able 
to open them up so that he could shoot 
the porcupine. 
The dogs were now pawing their faces 
and plowing their noses along the ground 
in agony, breaking off some of the quills 
at the surface and driving the barbed 
