Seeing a porcupine
A porcupine is a slow rodent that cannot shoot its quills but will gnaw an axe handle for the salt human hands leave on it. The things your own hands have worn smooth keep a record of your work too.
What it may mean
Porcupines have a reputation for shooting their quills, which they cannot do; an English writer was already correcting the idea in 1771. Their real habits are odder. North American porcupines crave salt, and in the woods the saltiest things around are often made by people: an axe handle, a canoe paddle, leather gloves, an outhouse seat, all seasoned by years of sweaty hands. A porcupine will gnaw a tool handle to splinters to get at it, reading, in its way, where the work has been. Every household has objects like that: the spoon worn flat on one side, the stair rail rubbed pale, the steering wheel shiny at ten and two. They keep a record of effort that no list does. In Australia, by contrast, an old belief held that a porcupine or anteater near a dwelling foretold a death there.
Depending on how you saw it
A porcupine up a tree
By day a porcupine often rests high in a tree, a dark lump in the branches that most walkers never notice. It climbs slowly and stays put for hours. Where do you rest when nobody expects to find you?
A dog with a face full of quills
Quills come loose at a touch and their tiny barbs work them inward, so a curious dog that noses a porcupine learns a painful lesson, and some dogs learn it more than once. Which lesson did you have to learn the prickly way, and how many times?
A baby porcupine
A porcupine is born with soft quills that begin to harden within a few hours of birth. By the time it can follow its mother, it is armed. How quickly did you grow your own prickles after leaving home, and which ones do you still need?
Why it happens in nature
North American porcupines are slow, largely nocturnal rodents of forests across Canada and the northern and western United States. Each carries about 30,000 barbed quills that come loose on contact but cannot be thrown. They eat bark, buds and leaves, and their craving for salt draws them to sweaty tool handles, leather and road salt on vehicles.
What folk beliefs say
Australia
Australian lore recorded in 1903 held that a porcupine or anteater coming near a dwelling was a sign that someone would die there.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 682. View the page
England
A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1771, quoted by Brand, refuted the vulgar error that the porcupine shoots out its quills to harm its enemy, saying it only sheds them every year.
Source: John Brand; Henry Ellis (ed.), Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (1849), vol. 3, p. 381. View the page
To reflect on
Which object in your home has been worn smooth by your hands, and what does it say about your days?