The Ranger and the Porcupine
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 macs 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.
