Without an instant’s hesitation, Pero suddenly doubled her nose between her forelegs, and rolled herself into a tight ball, leaving all her long, prickly spikes outside.  This was a very convenient way of avoiding danger, but the only drawback to it was that, while she was coiled up, she could see nothing and hear very little.

However, she knew that the wisest thing was to keep perfectly still.  And when she did this she was seldom touched.  This time, however, something turned her over, and over, and over, till she felt sick and faint and dizzy; so dizzy at last that she suddenly unrolled herself a little bit in order to see where she was.  To her great joy, she saw that she was near her burrow, and, with a wonderfully quick movement for so clumsy a creature, and with a peculiar rustling of all her quills, Pero crept quickly into her hole, leaving the man perfectly astonished.

For some time she lay there with her babies, quivering and shaking with fright—­for the man was trying to get in.  The light was getting broader and brighter, and at last, in sheer terror, Pero began to burrow further into the mound.

She went at it with nose and head and paws, as hard as she could go, scraping quickly with her sharp-clawed little feet, throwing the earth behind till she nearly smothered her babies, and pushing her snout-like nose into the earth as hard and fast as she could.

How long she would have gone on with this can never be known, but one of the babies, nearly suffocated with the earth, set up a little, whimpering cry, and Pero’s motherly heart responded at once.

She knew it was a cry of pain—­of distress—­and so she suddenly gave up the burrowing and turned back to her little one.

It was a good thing she did so, for she had to do some more burrowing work in order to get the babies out of the earth which she had thrown over them.  But by the time she had done this she realized that the man had stopped trying to get in, and so she was able to lie down.

Her tired little body was quivering with excitement; her nostrils opening and shutting convulsively, and her little heart beating like a trip-hammer.  She gathered her babies to her and gave them their evening meal, but all the time she was listening for the enemy.

He was indeed an enemy, and was deeply disappointed at not being able to get Pero, for there were so many burrows about there, and the porcupines had done so much mischief to his various crops—­potatoes, carrots, rice and roots of many kinds—­that he was determined to destroy them.

So determined was he to kill them, that he was already having dogs trained to take up the scent of the porcupine—­dogs who would not be quite so stupid as Jock, although in many cases they would probably get a few quills.

There were two reasons for killing the porcupines.  One was to get rid of them and their destructive propensities; the other was that they provided an article of food, their flesh being very white and palatable, resembling pork or veal.