F Is For Food

...and also for Fate, which has decreed that our garage shall be devoured by porcupines.

In June, our drawn-out battles with the porcupine who'd been eating the garage all spring came to a bloody end (you can read about it here).

At the time, one of you commented that she hoped he was the only one.  After a post in which I wrote about hearing hair-raising screams in the night, another of you said that perhaps it was a porcupine in mourning.  You were both right:  he was not the only one, and now one of his survivors is gnawing on the garage.

Is it the porcupine's widow, trying to assuage her grief by feasting on the painted wood?  Is it a son or daughter bent, like Orestes or Electra, on avenging the father's murder?  Or is it just a random porcupine, one of the procession of deer, fisher cats, turkeys, bears and moose that casually roam our land?  Was he waddling his way down to the river, perhaps, when the irresistible smell of our garage wafted across the field, into the woods, and drew him like a magnet?

In any case, we are at war again.  This time, however, we will not fool around with humane traps, hardware cloth or sprigs of mint, but will go straight for deadly force:  Grandma Rube's pheasant-hunting gun.  But first, of course, we have to be made aware of the creature's presence, which means once again rigging up the motion detector that will turn a radio on in the house.  Which means extension cords snaking through the kitchen, and the radio coming on every time a butterfly flits by.  It also means keeping the gun in readiness by the front door, and hiding it when anybody comes to the house.  And it means a killing, which, however justified, is never less than awful.

Somebody once wrote that the peace of the countryside is an urban myth.  So true.