Tales Of The Porcupine: Final Chapter

As you may recall, a porcupine has, for the last several months, been doing his or her best to eat the post between our garage doors.  We have tried to dissuade him with hardware cloth, through which he has chewed;  with sprigs of mint, which he has ignored;  and with a humane trap, baited with salted apple slices, which ditto.

Finally, two weeks ago, my spouse rigged up a motion detector which turned on a radio inside the house whenever anything passed in front of it.  Then he retrieved the .410 shotgun with which his Southern grandmother hunted pheasants in the Al-Can Highway in 1944, and propped it just inside the front door.

Days passed, and whenever people came to the house, the gun was secreted out of sight.  Also during that time, dozens of birds flew in front of the motion detector and caused the radio to come on, but only for an instant.  Of the porcupine there was no sign, and we theorized that the motion detecting apparatus had accomplished what hardware cloth and sprigs of mint had failed to do.

Then, last night, shortly after midnight, a BBC interview with a British novelist roused us from sleep.  The radio was on, and it was staying on.  It was the porcupine.

My spouse leaped from the bed, ran downstairs, loaded his grandmother's gun and stepped silently into the moonlit night.  It was the porcupine all right, big as a Cocker Spaniel, gnawing away at our garage post.  Not wishing to cause further damage to the post, he first shooed the creature away, and then, Bam!  The porcupine was no more.

What between the blast of the shotgun and the thought of the porcupine lying dead in the moonlight, it took us a long time to get back to sleep.

This morning, after breakfast, my husband carried the beast into the woods, down the hill and beyond the swamp, where I hope he will provide some other creature's tasty dinner (but who eats a porcupine?) and not be found by our dogs.

I have a B.A. in Biology, so I felt honor-bound to take a look at the corpus before it was taken away.  It's amazing how squeamish I've become over time.  There were quills all over the ground, a little blood, a wound I could hardly bear to look at.

We're having broccoli quiche and a green salad for dinner tonight, and going to bed early.

Blessings At Evening

Coming back from dinner with friends, I went straight to the chicken house to shut the hens in for the night.  As I changed from my dressy clogs (in Vermont this is not an oxymoron) into my barn clogs, my heart was full of dread.

This is a dangerous season for chickens.  Foxes, raccoons, coyotes, hawks and fisher cats are all looking for chicken dinners to take home to their growing families .  And a roosterless flock such as mine is especially vulnerable (I have never lost a chicken during the times that I've had a rooster).

All day long the red-tailed hawks had been wheeling overhead, giving their mating whistles.  I noticed that the hens were not tempted by the emerald expanse of grass inside the moveable fence, but were sticking close to their house.  In the afternoon, I went to give them a spotty apple and they came running--all but one of the New Hampshire Reds.  I called and called, squatted and peered under the shed, looked for feathers on the grass...nothing.
I gathered the eggs and went into the house.  I knew that if the missing hen didn't come to roost at sundown, I'd never see her again.  If she hadn't been eaten during the day, there was no way she would survive a night in the woods.

Imagine my delight, then, when I went to shut the hen house door after dinner and there she was, on the roost with her sisters.  I stood at the door for a moment while Biblical parables of lost lambs returned to the fold ran through my mind and then, at the edge of the woods, a thrush began to sing.  It was answered by one farther in, then another.  The three of them went on and on, piping their otherworldly tunes as the light dimmed, and I thought "In all the world, this is the place I'd rather be, at the threshold of the shed, with the hens safe inside, and thrushes singing in the woods."

On the way back to the house I saw that the porcupine has been chewing on our garage post through the hardware mesh that my husband nailed up.

First Salad

Tonight, for the first time since last fall, we're having a fresh salad:  lettuce from the transplants I put in a mere two weeks ago, augmented by a bunch of ramps a friend picked and gave me.  Walking the dogs in the woods this morning, found a small ramp plantation of our very own down by the swamp.  Won't be getting many from there this year, but it has promise.

The rhubarb is looking positively threatening.  Must harvest some in self-defense.  I tear those huge leaves off the stems and plunk them on top of whatever weeds I want to kill--they make a splendid mulch, green, local, organic, etc.

The baby hens in the basement are getting livelier by the minute.   I'm afraid any day now they'll hop out of their tub, fall to the floor and die of cold/stress/loneliness.  Must put some wire mesh over the tub.

Speaking of which, husband repainted garage post after last night's porcupine depredations and put on yet another swath of wire mesh (how high can this critter reach anyway?).  The trap is still out there, salted apples still untouched.  We're trying not to resort to staying up all night with a gun.