elionwyr: (write hard)
elionwyr ([personal profile] elionwyr) wrote2010-07-31 04:30 pm

Zookeeper Tales: Prickles the Porcupine Part II

(part two)

Prickles, as it turned out, liked to be petted. Which one could do. CAREFULLY. As long as you petted her ‘with the grain,’ so to speak, you could give her the affection she was requesting. And as she approached her 17th year of life – a remarkably old age for a porcupine! – she started to become more social altogether.

We moved the zoo to a better-designed area in the public eye. Once here, Prickles no longer needed to be roused from slumber by banging on a metal container and yelling her name. No, Prickles had decided that the world was pretty interesting after all, and she was very willing to venture outside her cage and take a look around.

Indeed, one way of showing her appreciation for the opportunities to walk around was to squat over a drain and pee there rather than in her cage.

(Well. It was appreciation, or it was bragging. “Wow, monkey…you need to go all the way to the ladies room to relieve yourself? Let me show you one of the ways in which it rocks to be a porcupine!”)

Sometimes we’d offer Prickles a treat – say, a piece of apple – to munch on while she was enjoying a bar-free view. Ever the genteel lady, she would take the fruit in her long-clawed hand and slowly munch on the offering.

…Usually.

Because you see, there was this duck.

I’ve posted before about Duckie the mallard…the fearless tyrannical duck…the crow-killing probably-ate-license-plates duck.

And boy, did Duckie like apples, too.

Duckie had the run of the mammal room at the time, because we’d had an in-floor duck pond installed into this room. And as I’ve said, Duckie feared no man, carnivore, or porcupine.

So imagine if you will, an elderly porcupine contemplating the apple in her claws.

She slooooowly moves her head forward to take a bite…

…and this little fart of a duck comes booking around the corner, grabs the apple, and keeps on running to the safety of the duck pond…

…and Prickles is looking around bemusedly for the apple she could have sworn she’d had a minute ago.

Lesson learned: Ducks are evil.

Prickles eventually got to a point in life where her body could apparently no longer fight off varied small illnesses. She had a bout of worms. She caught colds. And I assure you, there’s very little that’s as pitiful as a porcupine with a booger nose. One of my fondest memories of my ex-husband is seeing him in the cage with Prickles, trying to wipe the snot from her shniffly shnuffly nose.

Prickles passed away many years ago at this point. I still have a box of her quills; I still think of her a lot; and I still miss – just a little – the feeling of her clawed hand reaching out to pull at my pants, asking me to let her crawl up into my lap for a very cautious snuggle.


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