” … like the time I strangled that poor Porcupine…”

It’s just going to be stories from the past from now on, I think, because they are easier to write, and it’s pretty clear that it’s futile for me to “save up” these stories for some future memoir.  Besides, it’s good practice.  Because of the time constraints in my life right now, these won’t be stories in any real sense (those have a beginning, middle, and an end), but rather “sketches”, I think, would be more accurate.

So this poor porcupine.  He is still staring at me these 27 years later with two round black marbles for eyes.   It haunts me, honestly.

See, my first college degree, such as it was, was in Fish and Wildlife Technology at the State University of New York at Cobleskill, which is a pretty nice little college town nestled in the rolling, grassy farmlands southwest of Albany, and which are really an extension of the Catskills themselves, minus the thick forests. The students in that program were almost universally small-town kids from around the state, like myself, who dreamed of a career with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.  Most of these kids, though, were way ahead of me in the actual hunting/fishing/trapping categories, since I never much liked to kill things when I was growing up, so I had a lot to learn if I was going to catch up and join the rest of the class, as it were.

We would have “game dinners”, which were organized by the professors and featured just about everything you could eat that was running around that part of the country from venison to grouse to trout — delicious and rowdy affairs with plenty of beer and wine and the things you do when you are freshmen in college.

My girlfriend at the time, Johnna Lee McClelland, had a project for one of the introductory classes wherein she had to pick an animal, trap it,  skin it, and present the pelt to the professor for a grade.  The project was graded both on skill as well as originality.  I thought that a porcupine would be pretty original, not to mention challenging to skin, and so I promised her I would furnish her with a freshly killed porcupine for her to complete her project.

The problem was that I had no traps, no real trapping skills, and did not have a ready supply of porcupines hanging around the college or even my house, which was about a hundred miles south. But, I went back home on spring break determined to find myself a porcupine.  A few years before that, when I used to camp in the Catskills with my best friend at the time, Kevin Reidy, we would be awakened in the middle of the night sometimes by strange clicking and grinding noises all around the tent, which turned out to be bands of porcupines waddling around at night, fretting as they are wont to do, apparently at least since Shakespeare’s day.  So I headed up to the Catskills.

A few days of camping and hiking found me not far from Echo Lake, climbing up a steep, wooded path toward Mount Overlook.  And what do you suppose I found as I approached about the halfway point? — a fretful Porpentine, swaying above me in the trees about fifteen feet above me!

First I had to climb up a small adjacent tree armed with a long stick, and I was able to prod the poor little guy until he fell out of the tree.  Then I jumped down and caught up to him pretty quickly and tried hitting him with a stout stick, but his body of quills were excellent protection against my blows.  Finally, I somehow rolled him over and pressed the thick, twisted club-like tree branch against his throat, and, like I said earlier, watched his black marble eyes watch me as he slowly expired.

When I presented this trophy to my girlfriend the following week and told her the story she was appropriately horrified.  She didn’t break up with me at that very moment, but if I remember, it wasn’t much long after that.   A sad, strange story from a long time ago …