Porcupine

The wind has been making strange sounds today, squeaking at the windows like rags full of windex, speaking like unexpected visitors on the porch whose slamming car doors I didn’t hear. It blew snow across the road like smoke from a witch’s brew spilling over the edges of a pot, heavier than air. On our walk, it blew my dog’s fur into pinwheels.

It’s dark now, and I can’t stop thinking about the porcupine my dog has run into twice this winter in the hedge between two fields. The first day, she had a face full of quills by the time I reached her. Covered with tiny barbs, the quills expand from the heat of whatever they stick into and are difficult to remove. You’re supposed to twist them a little. I didn’t know this. They didn’t seem to bother my dog, who continued—to my friend’s chagrin—to bark at the porcupine until I got her on the leash. We took her home and my husband held her muzzle closed while I pulled the quills out of her nose, her gums, her chin.

The second day we encountered the little porcupine, the smallest one I have seen, he appeared in a tuft of long grass the same winter-black and tan as his cowlick of quills. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by my dog’s relentless barking. He blatantly refused to escape up a tree. He sat on my boot while I tried to keep the dog away and looked up at me, miniscule eyes in a tiny face on a body unsizeable because of the raised quills. I pulled the dog away and we watched him waddle north, until he determined we were headed that way also and turned in the other direction.

The wind is still blowing, rattling the storm windows like small claps of thunder all around the house. My dog is on the couch curled into the smallest circle one can imagine, all four feet concealed somehow beneath her. I’m sitting under an afghan, my hood up. And somewhere in the windbreak between our field and the neighbor’s is the little porcupine we sometimes see.