“Most carnivores would not pass up a meal of porcupine.”

This one sentence from The Nature of Southeast Alaska says more than I really want to fathom about the world.

My favorite other carnivore and I have only encountered one live porky on our walks so far, but over the winter Cedar brought me a few souvenirs –including one quill in her lower gum–from maybe the same porky we watched a few months earlier.

According to neighbor Molly (and the new contender, sorry Mom, for most faithful reader), this poor porkster was done in by an eagle. If it’s the one I think it is (was), its life accomplishments included “girdling” and killing a nice ornamental pine in the yard where it met talons.

Turns out these funny looking pot-bellied waddlers may be the dominant herbivores in the nearby woods. Apparently, that domination is sponsored by its incisor teeth.

Again from The Nature of Southeast Alaska, about the rodent family of beavers, porcupines, and hoary marmots:

A rodent could be defined, with apologies to kangaroo rats and other racy exceptions, as a plump and visually unimpressive body designed to transport a truly impressive set of curved, chisel-tipped, ever growing, self-sharpening incisors. The incisor has been for rodents what gunpowder was for European invaders of the new world.

O’Clair, Armstrong, Carstensen, The Nature of Southeast Alaska, 1997

Well, even gunpowder backfires sometimes. I have learned a few interesting factoids about these dudes (and porkettes), though. First, of course, you’re wondering how on earth they mate, right? The Nature of Southeast Alaska calls it a “brief but spectacular” event, but gives no salacious details. Luckily (?) the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game edges us closer to porky porn (sorry, Mom).

Males seeking receptive females expand their home ranges up to five times the normal size. If more than one male shows interest in the same female, they will fight for the opportunity to mate with the female. Males use their incisor teeth and quills when fighting, and usually the largest and heaviest male wins. The breeding male then splashes the female with urine. If she is not ready to mate, she shakes off the urine and leaves. If she is ready, she stays and the male mounts in the traditional posture with the female in front and the male in the rear. She will curl her tail over her back, covering most of the quills.

North American Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) , Alaska Department of fish and Game Website

So, old Erethizon D. gets it started with a golden shower, and apparently a girl or two likes that. Who knew? They want to get it right, though, because they only make one baby per year and have a crazy-long gestation period (7 months). Maybe that explains why she only covers “most of the quills.”

But back to not passing up the meal. Should you find yourself famished in our neighborhood, you may want to do as fishers and wolves do, circling it, biting its nose repeatedly, and then flip when ready, and…it’s bon apetit from the underside.

Besides their quills (which I’ve learned some folks capture for art by making contact with styrofoam boards) porkies have a few more tricks up their sleeveless sleeves. And this may be of value to my carnivore. After flashing a “rosette” of quills under their tails, they also emit a chemical from under their skin that The Nature of Southeast Alaska describes as “a mixture of strong, unwashed human body odor, marijuana and coconut.” That ought to either trigger flight, or a nose vacation not unlike a trip to a beach in Mexico. We’ll see.

And you knew I’d get to Shakespeare, to make my not-so-gracious exit from this one. Looking at this porkster’s little “fingers,” I couldn’t help but feel a bit of empathy for this fellow as Hamlet did looking at the skull of the old jester, Yorick. That, and I don’t really want to dwell too long on what the next porky post may entail.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

Hamlet, ACt V, sc. i

I’ve written elsewhere about Gary Paulsen’s My Life in Dog Years, but it occurred to me this weekend, during the dreaded spring cleaning, that our girl’s little life is recorded in the complete backyard scatological record.

This post is mainly to disabuse myself of any remaining romance—that having a dog might place me in a Paulsen-esque narrative. Instead, it leaves me right here, in three or four hundred dollars’ worth of dog food’s deep shit. A sordid tale indeed. Hope your weekend was more exciting than mine.

(I herby relinquish any last claims to having an audience.)

This morning it occurred to me how happy Cedar’s happy-plodding sounds make me.

On the bigtree trail, she’ll get lost in some kind of smell- or chewfest then come plodding and jingling up to and past me. On this quiet springy morning–where I imagined the forest has one thing on its to-do list: GROW!–Cedar’s bass paw-plods and treble tag-jingles made me think of Irish music, the bodhran and the tambourine, maybe. Which in turn turned me to my man, Seamus.

Here are some haunting lyrics of his that suggest he had more than verbal music in his soul.

THE GIVEN NOTE
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
 
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
 
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy
 
For he had gone alone into the island,
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
 
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
 
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

And here are a couple of clips…the first an attempt to capture a few of Cedar’s given notes (not captured was fiddle-wail when neighbor dog Kamou–aka Kujo– sunk his teeth into Cedar’s flank), the second, maybe a nod to the lovely “bits of a tune / Coming in on loud weather.”

In any case, a moment of gratitude for these little notes, and I guess, “the whole thing.”

KENT
Who’s there, besides foul weather?
GENTLEMAN
One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

King lear, Act 3, Scene 1

It’s been an active few days for our pup, including a frolic in some spring nasties. If she’s minded like the weather, unlike Shakespear’s mad king who “Strives in his little word of man to outscorn / the to-and-fro of conflicting wind and rain” our girl is merely trying to outPLAY them.

Here are a moments from the last few days, including some fun in some in the “conflicting wind and rain,” a gallop in some nice spring corn snow, and a still morning to approach an eagle.

Weather gives us a ready metaphor for our moods, but I guess there’s some science that suggests biological and psychological roots to these things. Apparently, the French researcher Guéguen established that a woman is more likely to give a flirtatious man her number on a sunny day. But Juneau dudes shouldn’t go all King Lear in despair here. His later research showed identified the “dog effect” a finding which his male colleague, Saad called “astonishing”: “…[A] man’s likelihood of obtaining a woman’s phone number increases three-fold when accompanied by a dog!” (Don’t worry, Katrina, despite the Manthropomorphic reporting in these pieces, I think it works both ways.)

In any case, the sun is coming out. Cedar is “most quietly” napping, in no less of a good or bad mood. And I’d settle for meeting a woman or a man or kid or robot who loves to exercise dogs.

I’ll tune my gratitude for an uneventful week in Cedarville. I guess that’s a matter of perspective. For her, it was chock full of birds and squirrels and things to tug on and eat and things to play with and eat and snow to play in and eat.

I remember Carl Olson, our sit-behind-the-desk-and-lob-grenades-of-profundity high school English teacher, dictating the definition of coy to us for our weekly vocabulary, lesson. “The definition of coy is ‘coquettishly shy or bashful.'” I don’t remember anyone asking him to define coquette.

I thought about that definition this morning, watching what’s become Cedar’s standard move for doggie meetups at Sandy Beach. My little coquette.

Good work when you can get it I guess.

P.S. A coydog is technically “a canid hybrid resulting from a mating between a male coyote and a female dog.” If Cedar is a hybrid, I suspect it’s between a Lab and a mouse.

This weekend, I treated myself to Liz McKenzie, Hank Lentfer, and Richard K. Nelson’s brilliant collaboration The Singing Planet. I hadn’t realized I’d have such a rapt movie date. In hindsight, this was the perfect selection for Cedar the listener.

Hank (who is the father of Katie’s good friend, Linnea, and who has toted the girls to wild places over the curve of the earth in the same skiff he used in the film) collaborated with one of my heroes and friends, Richard “Nels” Nelson, for years capturing wild sounds in Glacier Bay. (Nels once recommended I could do similar work with an iPhone and a salad bowl.)

The film is a 39-minute love poem to the planet. Nels’ rapture about the chorus of birds always starting somewhere at every moment as dawn spreads over the spinning earth is worth the (low) price of admission, as was Hank’s comment after the screening, summoning a David James Duncan image of a starfish regenerating most of its body to suggest how we might use just attentive listening to begin to regenerate our relationship with the wild.

Hank says, “Listen. It’s gorgeous. Fill yourself with the sound,” and I think Cedar took the message to heart. I love how she looks up to the sky for the birds, just before Nels describes raven as a Koyukon Athabaskan diety. Watch (and listen):

What this clip doesn’t show is my movie date bolting when the sound track switched from birds to wolf.