I was rolling around in the underbrush a while back looking for some oak seedlings that I’d planted (and which I did not find) when I went under a robust shrub and found on the other side a kind of secret clearing—surrounded by dense thickets of young beech saplings and extending under the hefty trunk of a mostly-fallen oak. The oak had fallen a few years back along with about twenty other trees during a down-burst that lasted all of 90 seconds and that I remember shaking the walls of the house and thrumming the poorly sealed gaps in the closed windows while I listened to the pop pop pop of a whole community of canopy trees hitting the ground. This little clearing under the shrubbery looked like it was a clearing not entirely by happenstance but by virtue of being well trod—lots of small feet mashing down last year’s leaf litter. Up the slope on the other side of the fallen oak trunk a smooth track of flattened leaves snaked out into the thick brush.
A game trail for the smaller in stature! I came back with a trail cam and visions of moodily lit fishers and mink on midnight patrols—maybe even a crouching bobcat. It is several hundred videos later and while I suppose I cannot definitively say that none of those animals use the secret clearing trail, what I can say for sure is that I have discovered a porcupine superhighway. Or at least it is during the month of May. Porcupines at night, porcupines during the day, porcupines waddling and standing up and stopping to eat tree saplings, stopping to mark territory and then to intently smell where other porcupines have marked territory. Porcupines grunting, whining, and clacking their teeth and even a porcupine making a sprinter’s dash the likes of which I have never seen from the species before. And also porcupines standing up to give the quills a good thoughtful shake out before continuing on a slow but purposeful amble off into the night—with the kind of measured pace and steady bringing up the pads of the paws with each step forward that sends my lungs into a nice expansive breath and lets just a little tension out of my shoulders. The business of the world carries on in an infinite unseen corners.
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