The Forest of my Mind

by Wayne F. Burke

I was hiking the Long Trail. It was late afternoon when I descended Mount Greylock in the northwest corner of Massachusetts and nearly dusk when I arrived at my campsite, a sturdy lean-to in a forest clearing.

     Tired to the point of exhaustion, I lay my sleeping bag out on the shelter floor and immediately fell asleep.

     I was awoke some time later, by the sound of something, some creature, seemingly eating its way through the floor of the shelter, gnawing bites out of the wooden structure.

     A rabbit? Beaver? I rapped the floor with my walking stick and the gnawing ceased. I returned to sleep and was awoke, again, in pitch-black night, by a different sound: the barking, yip-yapping, of what sounded like dogs. What would dogs be doing in the middle of the forest? I asked myself. I turned my flashlight on.

    Along the lip of the shelter floor sat a row of lumpish creatures: porcupines! Half a dozen of them equally spaced along the floor. I stood and lashed the floor with my stick. The porkies slowly took indifferent notice of me, glancing over their shoulders before leisurely standing, then slowly ambling, their quills rattling as they stepped, and dropping down over the floor’s edge.

     I turned my light beam ahead. The sight beyond the shelter shocked me. My blood ran cold. A congregation of porcupines packed together like spectators at a football match—as far and wide as my light could reach. A porcupine assembly: whole families, communities, frolicking, yip-yapping in higher and lower decibels, some of huge size, the girth of hogs. Their pinhole eyes reflected like stars in the light’s beam. I would they move, I wondered, en masse, onto the lean-to floor?

If so, how would I stop them? I would be pinioned by their reed-like quills—like a human pin cushion!

     I determined to remain awake the rest of the night. But I was tired—so tired. My eyelids insisted on closing. I dozed, heavily, for some time. When I came to, I discovered my flashlight, which I foolishly failed to shut off, had dimmed considerably. It barely showed the outline of a giant porcupine sitting at the foot of my sleeping bag, its back to me. The back resembled a bull’s eye of dark center and dark concentric rings in a circular design.

     I beat the floor furiously. The huge porky slowly took notice of me. Would I have to lash the thing to move it? What kind of reaction would follow the lash? An attack? A call to its fellows out front to begin a siege of the shelter? (I knew almost nothing of porcupines—not even if they could threw their quills or not. (Not.))

    The big guy finally moved, swaying as he walked, a mountain of quills rattling and clicking together as he sauntered to the floor edge and dropped off.

     Starlight had lessened the eeriness of the black sky by then, but an eerie sight overhead greatly disturbed me: along the topmost shelter beam, some twenty feet above, a row of star-y-eyed porcupines, looking down upon me, lined the width of the beam, their heads side by side. A packed gallery!

     Adding to my disturbance were more porcupine heads along the perpendicular sides of the shelter. Peeping in at me from the wings!

     My flashlight went dead, leaving me alone in the dark with my prickly audience.

     More sleep was out of the question. I held vigil, lashing the stick down whenever the shadow of a porky appeared on the floor.

     I had a vision of a porcupine crowd thick as commuters on a big city subway platform. The crowd inched up onto the shelter floor, moving as one, and ever so slowly, slowly, quills clicking with each movement, coming closer, closer. . . . The huge porky who had sat by my feet stood in the crowd’s center: “Fellow porcupines!” he orated, “Do you wish to be free? Then follow me! Drive this intruder from our woods!”

     I shuddered awake. The first light of dawn shone—a dull white smear far off over the mountains.

     The yip-yapping out front slowly lessened, then ceased. The silence was beautiful. The world had righted itself—so I felt.

     In the morning light I discovered the area around the shelter had been used as a dumping ground for trash and garbage—the reason, no doubt, for the large gathering of the porcupine tribe I had slept with and shared the night.

Wayne F. Burke's short stories have appeared in Punk Noir, Dumpster Press, Bardball, SAVA Press, The Daily Dope Fiend, Horror Sleaze and Trash, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont (USA).