Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more frequently.  As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above.  Forty or fifty feet up the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine.

There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine.  He is the “lost man’s friend,” for the wandering and starving prospector or hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can kill him.  He is the humourist of the wilderness—­the happiest, the best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew breath.  He talks and chatters and chuckles incessantly, and when he travels he walks like a huge animated pincushion; he is oblivious of everything about him as though asleep.

As this particular “porky” advanced upon Muskwa and Thor, he was communing happily with himself, the chuckling notes he made sounding very much like a baby’s cooing.  He was enormously fat, and as he waddled slowly along his side and tail quills clicked on the stones.  His eyes were on the path at his feet.  He was deeply absorbed in nothing at all, and he was within five feet of Thor before he saw the grizzly.  Then, in a wink, he humped himself into a ball.  For a few seconds he scolded vociferously.  After that he was as silent as a sphinx, his little red eyes watching the big bear.

Thor did not want to kill him, but the path was narrow, and he was ready to go on.  He advanced a foot or two, and Porky turned his back toward Thor and made ready to deliver a swipe with his powerful tail.  In that tail were several hundred quills.  As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated.

Muskwa was looking on curiously.  He still had his lesson to learn, for the quill he had once picked up in his foot had been a loose quill.  But since the porcupine seemed to puzzle Thor, the cub turned and made ready to go back along the slide if it became necessary.  Thor advanced another foot, and with a sudden chuck, chuck, chuck—­the most vicious sound he was capable of making—­Porky advanced backward and his broad, thick tail whipped through the air with a force that would have driven quills a quarter of an inch into the butt of a tree.  Having missed, he humped himself again, and Thor stepped out on the boulder and circled around him.  There he waited for Muskwa.

Porky was immensely satisfied with his triumph.  He unlimbered himself; his quills settled a bit; and he advanced toward Muskwa, at the same time resuming his good-natured chuckling.  Instinctively the cub hugged the edge of the path, and in doing so slipped over the edge.  By the time he had scrambled up again Porky was four or five feet beyond him and totally absorbed in his travel.