Petey the Porcupine had been twigging or mating about all afternoon, and as it got late was hurrying to get home before dark.
It was an early morning, when the woods were still and everyone was asleep, that Petey discovered he had a wicked thorn from a rosebush hidden away in his sharpest quills. He was scaling a high, high stone wall when he scratched against the bush and received his thorny visitor. As soon as Petey reached home, away he searched and looked and felt, but still couldn’t find the thorn; he just could feel it in his most bothering quill. Then he wrinkled up his nose and began to cry.
He had a very, very nice home down at the root of an old wood-chuck hole, where he had a little pile of dry leaves for a bed and felt so very comfortable. But that thorn was making him prickly and cross, and it was all on account of his quills. Now, on account of his quills, no one could pull the thorn out of his quill, because no one could get stem enough near it. But after thinking and thinking, what did he think but that he would ring up the woeful woodchuck, his neighbor, who lived way, way down the end of a lofty tree. So he ran up to the tree and whistled, but got no answer. After calling and calling, he received a half-waking grunt from the burrow, “What do you want, Pete?”
“Is that you, Polly?” growled Petey.
“Wouldn’t be a growler if I could help it. Won’t you come down, Polly?”
“No time; what do you want?”
“Did you ever get a thorn in your foot?”
“Often. Good night. I never oomplained, though,’cause it did me good.”
“Should be glad to hear any one complain, tho’.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Might try.”
“Do so.”
“Gets me mad. Good night.”
After trying and trying again, and beating his head against the wall, Petey discovered, though, that he had no one to blame but himself for getting the thorn into his quill. But still no one need have known it, really, if he hadn’t made up his mind to complain. Just then Polly Woodchuck happened to be in her burrow-thinking-over things. “What, I wonder, does that pet porcupine, Petey, want bothering me at this late afternoon, just when I’d got all the ten little woodchuck youngsters quiet on their beds of soft moss, and was getting myself ready for a good snooze. Wondering triangles if he has made a call and not spoken, or if I’ve had an unintentional nap. Won’t take a minute to see.”
So down the woodchuck came, and the very first thing she did was to take a bite half off the vexing thorn without so much as saying, “By your leave.”
“Well, that saves me a little,” said Petey.
“And by your leave I might think I was going home to get a good snooze after all,” and snaps the rest half right off.
“Much obliged. Say, did ever it occur to you that your faces are much alike? Not to-day; too tight.”
“Not to day I didn’t mean. Never did.”
“Never did! Well, I never expected to hear that from a woodchuck.”
Spotting a rotting fence paling half off at the top, the careless woodchuck, while answering Petey, put her head through imagining the rest of her body was just as far away from the nail, when all at once tingling! Oo, oo, oo! went her paw.
“Difference of opinion,” grunted she.
With that Petey scampered away, and then scampered back, and then scampered away again. At last he came back and said, “You just hand me that nailsake, Polly and hold the other end of the paling. Wood is a friend to quills. When I run my quills against the wood, why, that darned nail pulls itself out.”
And so it did.
“No matter how long the main stem might grow,” said Petey, feeling terribly peachy when he once more got in his own hole, “it’s always the first thorn in that gives the pain. Be it a friend or be it a foe, it matters not a pin-the pain it always undergoes is only for a short time at best. I always do hate to go pokin’ my nose in other people’s business; but I’m vastly obliged to you, Polly.”
“Time enough to rest when you get home,” said she to her babies. She had been sleeping on that obligation for the last month. Never bothered about it.