By Peter Anderson
They are both solitary creatures who want to be left alone.
The ranger has been swinging a Pulaski all day, clearing deadfall off of highline trails – fifteen miles and twenty lodgepole taken out at 10,000 feet. Back at the wall tent he eats mac and cheese, burrows into his bag, and reads Abbey by kerosene until his lantern flares out like an old star.
The porcupine wants salt and knows where to find it. He crawls under the ranger’s floor and gnaws and gnaws and gnaws on the plywood, loud as a bad memory, until the ranger can’t stand it any longer. A million stars witness him in his skivvies as he flashes a beam under the cabin and side-arms rocks which throw sparks when they hit the old stovepipe that is stashed there. Close may be good enough, he thinks. He goes back to bed, but the gnawing resumes.
Back into the night, he is armed, this time, with the assembled poles of a bivouac tent, which he wields like a pool cue. The porcupine huddles under the far corner of the cabin floor, but the ranger still lands a direct hit on the quill pig’s snout which, for a moment, he regrets. Then he remembers his dog’s tongue hammered with quills and a one-eyed coyote who hunts only on his good side.
Finally they part ways, he thinks, as his nemesis waddles off into the dark spruce. The ranger crawls back into his cocoon where he drifts off into a vision of elk on a night ridge, echoing the bugling in the meadow below his camp. Meantime, the porcupine finds a pack saddle cinch, salted with horse sweat.
They are both solitary creatures who want to be left alone.
