For a moment he lay down beside her, listening, and eyeing the opening to their nest.  Then he began to sniff about the log walls.  He was close to the opening when a sudden fresh scent came to him, and he grew rigid, and his bristles stood up.  The scent was followed by a whimpering, babyish chatter.  A porcupine entered the opening and proceeded to advance in its foolish fashion, still chattering in that babyish way that has made its life inviolable at the hands of man.  Kazan had heard that sound before, and like all other beasts had learned to ignore the presence of the innocuous creature that made it.  But just now he did not stop to consider that what he saw was a porcupine and that at his first snarl the good-humored little creature would waddle away as fast as it could, still chattering baby talk to itself.  His first reasoning was that it was a live thing invading the home to which Gray Wolf and he had just returned.  A day later, or perhaps an hour later, he would have driven it back with a growl.  Now he leaped upon it.

A wild chattering, intermingled with pig-like squeaks, and then a rising staccato of howls followed the attack.  Gray Wolf sprang to the opening.  The porcupine was rolled up in a thousand-spiked ball a dozen feet away, and she could hear Kazan tearing about in the throes of the direst agony that can befall a beast of the forests.  His face and nose were a mat of quills.  For a few moments he rolled and dug in the wet mold and earth, pawing madly at the things that pierced his flesh.  Then he set off like all dogs will who have come into contact with the friendly porcupine, and raced again and again around the windfall, howling at every jump.  Gray Wolf took the matter coolly.  It is possible that at times there are moments of humor in the lives of animals.  If so, she saw this one.  She scented the porcupine and she knew that Kazan was full of quills.  As there was nothing to do and nothing to fight she sat back on her haunches and waited, pricking up her ears every time Kazan passed her in his mad circuit around the windfall.  At his fourth or fifth heat the porcupine smoothed itself down a little, and continuing the interrupted thread of its chatter waddled to a near-by poplar, climbed it and began to gnaw the tender bark from a limb.

At last Kazan halted before Gray Wolf.  The first agony of a hundred little needles piercing his flesh had deadened into a steady burning pain.  Gray Wolf went over to him and investigated him cautiously.  With her teeth she seized the ends of two or three of the quills and pulled them out.  Kazan was very much dog now.  He gave a yelp, and whimpered as Gray Wolf jerked out a second bunch of quills.  Then he flattened himself on his belly, stretched out his forelegs, closed his eyes, and without any other sound except an occasional yelp of pain allowed Gray Wolf to go on with the operation.  Fortunately he had escaped getting any of the quills in his mouth and tongue.  But his nose and jaws were soon red with blood.  For an hour Gray Wolf kept faithfully at her task and by the end of that time had succeeded in pulling out most of the quills.  A few still remained, too short and too deeply inbedded for her to extract with her teeth.