A Letter to a Porcupine

Dear Porcupine,

You must have weighed about 50 pounds. It took the two of us - she with her heavy rake, me with the pitchfork - to lift you and deposit you unceremoniously into the compost pile, to cover you with amber leaves. I still can't believe that I was the one to kill you.

As far as I know, you were completely healthy until that sunless Friday morning. Perhaps doing the same thing you had always done: ate tree bark from any standing maple or oak that caught your eye or tickled your nose. You might have been nibbling the tender shoots from the tops of some of the oldest silver maples of central Vermont. Maybe you were busy making little porcupines earlier that morning. I don't know.

Do porcupines mourn their dead? Your kind doesn't have the greatest reputation in that regard, at least among my race, the humans. But what do we know?

In the event that porcupines do not, I choose to remember you. Rather, I am compelled to. Never before had I been required to end the life of an animal that to all appearances was in its prime.

For that, I am sorry. Yours was a death that seemed a good idea - or at least a grim necessity. But not to this human. I am sorry.

Sincerely,

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