Ereth's Birthday, Page 2

  Shifting his gaze forward, the porcupine tried to calculate how far he would have to go before he reached the cabin. A good way. Sighing with frustration, he told himself yet again that the salt would make his efforts worthwhile.

  He went on.

  The snow became so deep, it was increasingly difficult to keep his chin above the surface. “Elephant elbows,” Ereth swore, beginning to falter for the first time. He glanced back. For just a second he thought something was following him. “Nonsense,” he muttered. Reminding himself yet again of the tasty treat that lay ahead, he pushed on, one step at a time.

  The sky grew darker, the air colder, the snow deeper. The trip was taking hours.

  “Stop snowing!” Ereth shouted at the unrelenting sky. “Can’t you see I’m trying to get some salt?”

  There was no reply.

  Pausing to catch his breath, Ereth began to wonder if he would ever reach the cabin. As he recalled, the trail led over a small hill. Beyond that, right on the shores of Long Lake, was the cabin.

  Perhaps he should go home. He turned to look back. Once again he had the brief sensation that something was stalking him. “You’re acting like an old creature,” Ereth chided himself. “Imagining things.” And he moved on.

  Marty the Fisher, high in a tree, seeing Ereth look back, ducked away in haste. He need not have bothered. Ereth merely glanced back before continuing on.

  “Good,” Marty muttered. “All I need to be is patient. Very patient.”

  “No,” Ereth said under his breath as he trudged along. “I’ve come too far to go back.” Besides, he reminded himself for the millionth time, it was his birthday. Back home there was nothing but raucous children. Better to be alone than in the midst of a crowd and ignored.

  The porcupine did consider climbing a tree to wait out the storm. He shook his head. “I’m too close to salt.”

  On he went.

  Ereth blinked open his eyes. Had he fallen asleep? Had he stopped? Had he walked in his sleep? If so, how far had he gone?

  Ereth peered to the right and the left. The landscape revealed nothing. The forest was just as white as the last time he had looked. For all he knew he might have gone a mile. Or ten. Or perhaps he’d fallen asleep and hadn’t moved at all. He looked back. Was something there? No. He was getting silly.

  With a shake of his quills—sloughing off what felt like a ton of snow—Ereth forced himself forward again. But it had become very hard to walk. Perhaps, he told himself by way of encouragement, he was just climbing the hill, the last obstacle before reaching the cabin. He did know he was feeling light-headed. Hadn’t he thought something was following him? Even so, he took one slow step after another slow step, like a wind-up toy running down.

  Suddenly, his way seemed easier. Lifting his head Ereth looked forward. With the swirling snow in his eyes, it took a moment for him to realize he was looking down a hill, beyond which was an open space. At the bottom, Ereth saw a large mound of snow. In one or two places, light seemed to glow from within the mound. Sticking up from the top of the mound was a silver pipe, from which dark smoke drifted. The smoke carried the smell of roasting meat. Ereth, a vegetarian, curled his lips in disgust.

  But the evidence was plain: the open space was Long Lake. Buried in the snow was the log cabin. The cabin would have salt. But inside the cabin were . . . humans.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Cabin

  THERE WAS ALMOST no animal or bird in the world Ereth feared. Owls, foxes, beavers—they were all one to him. True, only rarely would any of them bother him. His sharp quills assured him of that. And if the need came, he was more than capable of defending himself.

  Humans were quite another matter. Sometimes they merely watched the animals in the forest. Other moments they wanted to touch them. Or run away. On still other occasions, however, the humans stayed and killed. People were that unpredictable.

  The last thing the tired Ereth wanted to do was confront one. Besides, if humans were in the cabin, most likely it was because they were hunting. No, it did not bode well at all. And yet, there was the salt . . .

  Staring at the cabin, Ereth tried to make up his mind what to do.

  Marty the Fisher, perched high on a branch forty yards behind Ereth, looked on with troubled interest. He, too, realized that humans were in residence. As he had followed Ereth through the forest, Marty had wondered where the porcupine was so doggedly heading. Now that he saw the destination, he could guess what the porcupine was after. “Salt,” Marty said to himself. “That stupid beast has come out in a storm in search of human salt.”

  Just to know he was close to humans made Marty anxious. He had little doubt these humans were hunters, the worst kind of humans from his point of view. For all he knew, they might even be looking for him, just as they had tracked down his whole family. It made him recall his ironclad rule: keep far away from humans and all things human.

  “If Ereth has any brains,” Marty thought, “he’ll back off from that cabin and those people. I hope he does. He’s acting tired. He’s probably cold and hungry. Good! When he turns back from the cabin, he won’t have the energy to resist when I strike.

  “Of course, if he’s idiot enough to go forward, I’ll wait him out. There are always ways to lure someone like Ereth to where I’d like him to be.”

  Marty flexed his sharp claws, watched, and waited.

  Ereth gave a shake of his head. There was, all in all, no choice to be made. He was cold, tired, and hungry. As far as he could determine, the best shelter would be directly under the cabin. Relatively speaking, it would be warm and dry there. It was probably the best place to find some food too. And of course, there was the whole purpose of the trip to consider: salt. How could he come so far without so much as a lick to show for it? Besides, though he did not like to mess with humans, he thought it most unlikely they would go under the house.

  Moving downhill slowly, his breath a cloud of frosty vapor, Ereth watched and listened with every step he took. He was halfway there when, with a flash of golden light, the cabin door burst open. A man so bundled in furs he looked more bear than human stepped onto the porch, gathered up the last load of logs that lay by the door, then returned to the cabin. The door banged behind him, shutting in the light.

  After a brief pause, Ereth continued downhill. Moving as fast as the deep snow and his short legs allowed, he waddled across the open space between hill and cabin. Heart racing, panting for breath, he ducked under the structure.

  He was there. The heat radiating down from the house above was instantly soothing.

  Ereth took a deep breath and looked around. Only a little snow had collected, and that on the northern side. He noticed a broken chair, a blue plastic tarpaulin bunched up in a corner, a canoe, a snowmobile, a pile of long logs, and, on the pile, an axe.

  Unable to restrain himself, Ereth rushed forward, climbed the log pile, sniffed at the axe handle, and all but swooned. The axe handle bore the remains of human sweat: salt.

  Heart aflutter, Ereth stuck out his tongue and began to lick the handle as a human would attack an ice cream cone. Oh, rapture! Oh, bliss! Oh, salt! It was all he had imagined. The struggle through the snow had been worth it!

  In a dreamy mood, he had just begun to chew on the axe handle when he was interrupted by the sound of a human voice from above.

  “I’m telling you, Wayne,” the voice said, “I’m so hungry I could eat a live porcupine!”

  “Pulsating puppy pimples,” Ereth snarled. “He can start by chewing my tail!”

  Despite brave thoughts, Ereth, wondering if it might be better to bolt from the cabin while escape was still easy, looked around nervously. Though everything in him told him to run, the idea of doing something to teach that human a lesson was hard to resist.

  Turning back to the axe handle, an angry Ereth gnawed furiously. As he chewed, he cast his eyes around in search of something else to mangle.

  That’s when he spied the snowmobile. Ereth was perfectly aw
are what it was. He had experienced just how much noise they made, the ghastly fumes they left in their wake, the way they chewed up the forest floor. Having seen them from a distance he also knew how humans used them: by sitting on the long black seat that ran down the middle, then twisting the handlebars, which caused the machine to shoot forward at enormously loud and smelly speeds.

  Though Ereth did not like snowmobiles, humans, he knew, loved them. As far as he was concerned, that made the snowmobile the perfect target.

  Having chewed the axe handle almost in two, the porcupine waddled over to the snowmobile. Using his front paws, he hoisted himself onto the black seat. It was soft and pliable. Twisting around, he lifted his tail and whacked it a few times. When he was done, a goodly number of quills remained sticking straight up from the seat. “Burping bird burgers,” he muttered. “That’ll fix them.”

  That accomplished, Ereth used his high perch to observe the rest of the area. In doing so he noticed a cardboard box and wondered if there was anything in it worth eating.

  Climbing down from the snowmobile, he waddled over to the box and peered inside, only to recoil in fear. The box held four black, metal spring traps, the kind human trappers use to catch animals by their legs. There was also a box trap, designed to catch larger animals alive and transport them elsewhere.

  “Killers,” Ereth whispered in fury. “They’re nothing but killers!”

  “Hey, Parker,” one of the human voices suddenly said from above. “We need to get some more firewood. Where’d you leave that axe?”

  “Under the cabin. On the log pile.”

  “If we’re going to keep from freezing tonight I better chop us some more wood. It’s getting colder.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Fine,” the voice said. “I’m going to get some wood from under the cabin. Be right back.” The conversation was followed by the sound of one of the humans moving toward the cabin door.

  Ereth, close to panic, looked for a place to conceal himself. He caught sight of the blue plastic tarpaulin off in a corner.

  From above came more footsteps as well as the sound of a door opening and closing. Hurriedly Ereth clawed his way under the plastic.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ereth’s Revenge

  FROM BENEATH THE TARPAULIN Ereth could see nothing. But he could hear someone stomp out onto the porch, then crunch through the snow around the cabin. There were some grunts and groans, which Ereth presumed were the sounds of the human lifting one of the logs. For a moment all Ereth could hear was breathing. Then he heard a snap, followed by a cry: “Gol darn! Who did this?”

  A smiling Ereth knew the man had tried to use the axe.

  “Must have been a porcupine!” the man snarled. “Stupid jerk!”

  Ereth grinned.

  The human swearing was followed by the sound of steps that suggested the man was going back around the cabin to the porch.

  Ereth poked his head out from under the plastic and listened intently. Within moments there came the sound of a human voice.

  “Hey, Wayne! Some blazing idiot of a porcupine chewed through the axe handle. Busted on my first stroke. Can’t use it.”

  “Oh, oh.”

  “And hey, man, with night coming on and the temperature dropping, we’re going to run out of heat. Maybe we better head out while the going is good. Not much point in hanging around here anyway.”

  “What about the rest of the traps?”

  “How many we set? Sixteen out of twenty? Not bad, considering the weather. We can take care of the rest later.”

  “Just have to move quickly,” the second man agreed. “Better not travel in the dark.”

  “Fine with me. We’ll just leave everything and go.”

  Ereth, feeling quite satisfied with himself, retreated as far back under the tarpaulin as he could go.

  For a while he heard footfalls crisscrossing directly overhead. These sounds were followed by movement on the porch and the sound of the humans crunching through the snow.

  “Hey, Wayne,” a voice called. “Give me a hand with the snowmobile.”

  Ereth heard sounds of pushing, and shoving and hauling.

  “Come on, get on. We gotta move.”

  Ereth held his breath.

  “Yoooooow!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Holy . . . look at that! Porcupine quills! I sat on them! Ow!”

  The other man laughed. “Hey, you said you could eat a porcupine alive, didn’t you? Guess he heard what you said and got to you first.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Ereth grinned and nodded.

  There was a loud roar as the snowmobile’s motor kicked in.

  “You going to sit or stand?”

  “Hurts too much to sit.”

  “Sure, but it’ll hurt a lot more if you stand and fall off. I’ll go as fast as I can.”

  The noise rose and fell as the snowmobile roared off. The stench of gas fumes made Ereth gag. Soon the machine—and the humans—were gone. The deep winter silence returned.

  From his place on the hill Marty the Fisher watched the snowmobile race away.

  Though surprised, he was very pleased. “Good,” he said to himself. “The humans are gone. Now if I can get Ereth away from the cabin, he’ll be an easy target.” He put his mind to finding a way to lure the porcupine back into the woods.

  Beneath the cabin, Ereth waddled about sniffing, in hopes of finding something to eat. It was while lifting his nose up toward one corner of the cabin that he suddenly caught a powerful scent. Salt. Such a strong smell could mean only one thing: there was a lot of salt inside the cabin. He began to tremble with excitement.

  The next moment Ereth rushed out from beneath the cabin, bounded through the snow drifts, scrambled up the front steps, made his way to the door, then thrust his black nose into the crack where the door met the frame. He inhaled deeply.

  “Penguin peanuts,” he whispered in awe. “There must be a ton of the stuff in there.” His teeth chattered with anticipation.

  Struggling to contain himself, Ereth examined the door intently. When he realized it was padlocked, he began to shove it with his forehead as well as his front paws. It wouldn’t budge.

  Furious, he backed off and studied the walls of the cabin. About four feet off the ground—to the right of the door—was a small glass window. Perhaps he could get in that way.

  Since Ereth climbed trees with ease, working his way up the side of the log cabin to the window ledge proved no problem. Once there he pressed his face to the glass pane and peered inside. A small table stood in one corner of the room. It was littered with plates, knives, and forks—even food. In the middle of the table stood a glass jar filled with salt.

  “Salt,” Ereth murmured even as he began to drool. “A whole jar of salt.” In a frenzy now, he began to butt his head against the window.

  Ereth worked harder, certain that just a little more effort would shove it in entirely. “Pitted potwallopers!” he cried, as he thumped away. “Open up!”

  Even as the window began to give, Ereth heard a voice from the woods behind him. “Help!” came the cry. “Someone help me! Please!”

  “Mosquito mung,” Ereth grunted angrily as he tried to ignore the cry from the woods. Intent upon his task, he worked feverishly, poking his claws in and around the edges of the cabin window, trying to push it in. “Open up!” he shouted.

  “Won’t someone help me?” came yet another call.

  “No, I won’t!” Ereth replied out loud. “I’ve got better things to do.”

  Butting against the window as well as shoving with his paws, he gave a great grunt of exertion. The window fell in, striking the wood floor with the sound of shattering glass.

  The smell of salt saturated the air. “Oh, my, oh, my,” the porcupine crooned with excitement. “A room of salt! It’s heaven. It’s bliss.”

  “Help! I’m hurt,” came the wail from the woods, more desperate than ever.

  Prepared t
o leap down into the room, Ereth felt compelled to look back over his shoulder.

  “I’m dying,” came yet another cry. “Please. Help me.”

  “Donkey doughnuts,” Ereth griped, glaring in the direction of the woods. “Why does everybody have to call on me for help? Used to be, taking care of yourself was what the world was about. It’s not as if anybody cares about my life!” he added with exasperation.

  “Please help!” came the cry again.

  Ereth shook his head in frustration. “Buckled badger burgers!” he complained. “I’m never going to enjoy eating this salt with that racket in my ears.” Angry and frustrated, Ereth crawled down from the window, tail first.

  For a moment he stood at the edge of the porch and gazed furiously at the still falling snow. Every tree and bush was coated with thick white frosting. Branches were bent, small shrubs partially flattened. In the deepening dusk the whiteness seemed to be turning purple with cold.

  “Maybe it’s a trick,” Ereth suddenly thought. “Maybe somebody wants to get me away so he can have the salt for himself. Or maybe . . .” it suddenly occurred to him, “somebody is trying to lure me into the woods.”

  Ereth considered that notion only briefly. “Anybody messing with me gets a quill up his snoot faster than a diving owl with lead claws.”

  With another look back at the cabin and a deep sniff of the salt, Ereth waddled down the steps and plunged into the snow.

  The snow had become deeper. To make any progress Ereth had to leap forward by fits and starts. Every few leaps he paused to catch his breath. But now that he had committed himself to finding the creature, the cries for help had ceased.

  “I’ll bet anything the dunce who was calling is better,” Ereth muttered. He pushed on almost out of spite. “Catastrophic coyote culls! If it wasn’t for this idiot I could be eating that salt right now. But no. Kind, old Ereth always puts others before himself. Blessed saint is what I am. Busted bird bloomers!” he cried, lashing his tail about in anger. “I never think of myself. Never! Well, when I find whoever called I’ll give him a piece of my mind—and tail—so he won’t ever send out false alarms again.” With such thoughts, Ereth plunged in among a cluster of trees.