Earl is a man who knows his animal droppings. With just a glance, he can tell the species that did the dropping, what it had for dinner, its probable age and relative state of health.

If he fell into a coma, he could awake blindfolded and know the season and exact time of day, simply by listening to the birds.

His friends claim he was raised by bears. In fact, he had been raised by his father. Close enough. His father looked like a bear and was just as wood-crafty as any creature who had ever pawed its way through the forest.

Before Earl learned to walk, he had begun to learn the ways of the animals. Strapped papoose-like across his father's tree-trunk chest, they would trap, track and hunt together. By the time he killed his first deer, (at age eight-- a six-point, from 20 yards with a bow), Earl knew more than many grown men.

By the time he was deep in his thirties, Earl still had not married and had no children. To keep his father's tradition alive, he tried to pass his knowledge along to nieces and nephews, instead. Emily was his favorite-- not because she showed great promise as a hunter, (She thought it was Yucky!)-- but because she was interested and asked good questions.

When she came to visit, Emily would clamber onto his shoulders and insist that they go for a hike. From her perch, she showered questions down upon him.

"What kind of birds are those?"

"Why do bugs live under rocks?"

"Why does poison ivy make you itch?"

"Do squirrels bite?"

"What do fish eat?"

"What makes animals die?"

That question had been raised when they had come upon a skeleton, lying beneath the trees at the edge of a field.

"Sometimes they get sick", Earl explained somberly. "or hurt themselves, just like people do. Since they don't have doctors, they have to get better all by themselves. If they don't, they die. Mostly though, animals die because other animals eat them for supper."

This startling revelation caused the 'Oooo! Yucky!' expression to flash across Emily's face.

"What kind of animal was this?", she asked, pointing at the bones. "Did something eat it for supper?"

"No.", said Earl. "If it had been supper, the bones would be all scattered around-- like what happens to the turkey bones at Thanksgiving dinner. This is a deer skeleton. It probably starved."

Earl paused long enough to glance over his shoulder at Emily. "...and you probably want to know why, don't you?" She shook her head and he continued.

"Long ago, there were wolves and mountain lions in these woods and they ate the deer-- mostly the old or weak ones, since they were the easiest to catch. Then people moved here and chased the predators away. With nothing around to eat them, the deer herds got bigger, and bigger and bigger until there wasn't enough food for all of them."

"So if the mountain lions don't eat them for supper, that means there will be too many deers in the woods, right?.", asked Emily.

"Yes", Earl chuckled, "There will be too many 'deers'."

They continued their hike and all would have been well, had they not stumbled upon one of nature's great mysteries-- a situation so puzzling that not even the knowledgeable Earl could figure it out. What they stumbled upon, was a porcupine.

Earl rarely saw porcupines. They were extremely shy and there weren't many of them.

Emily listened intently as Earl explained how the porcupine's spines had tiny jagged hooks on the end and how it would roll up in a ball and point them out like spears if any other animal tried to eat the porcupine for supper.

"So what animal DOES eat porcupines for supper?", she asked.

"Well... NO animals.", he explained. "Porcupines have the best defense in the forest. No other animal can get near them."

"Not even mountain lions, if they still lived here?", she asked.

"Not even mountain lions.", he explained.

"Then why aren't there too many porcupines-- y'know... like the deer?"

Earl scratched his head, then he shook it around a bit. It was the only time she had ever asked him a question that he couldn't answer, and the truth was-- he hadn't a clue.

When they got back home, Earl headed straight for the encyclopedia with a pile of questions about porcupines. They were the largest rodents in North America, it said, but aside from that were not remarkably different from any other rodents. They bore an average number of young after a gestation period of not-abnormal length. They had similar life expectancies, were found in the same regions and ate the same types of food.

"If mice, rats and rabbits had no predators, the woods would be CRAWLING with them!", thought Earl in frustration. "So why shouldn't the same be true of porcupines?"

He got to bed late that night but was no closer to an explanation. For that, he would have to wait another eight months.

It was the following year, in the wee hours of an early spring morning that Earl awoke with a start and a sudden understanding of why the predator-free porcupine population remained so small.

It was the sound of porcupine love-making that had awaken him-- an almost-human sound made by the understandably-reluctant male:

"OW! OW! OW! OW! Ow! Ow! Ow! ow! ow! ow!.....".