In late June, Pepe the porcupine walked out of the woods and started hanging around our field. He was a baby then, and has literally grown up while eating the clover and vegetables we grow. At the beginning of the fall semester, the students were interested in watching him as he lounged around, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him. He became our unofficial mascot, as he was always around. This was sometimes dangerous, such as at night when you didn’t have a light but needed to walk across the field. Stepping on him would have been worse than painful. There were several near-misses, but calamity was always averted. There are claw marks on the barn from when Pepe climbed the corner up to the metal roof, and my strawberry bed was decimated by his insatiable appetite. But other than yelling at him occasionally, we haven’t taken any action.
Last night Pepe took the next step, by crawling into, and spending the night in, a student’s shelter. A shelter with a raised bed, but still the size of a two-person tent. And that student spent the night in there, with Pepe. You’ll see it in our next video. Today Pepe made his way into another student’s shetler. He leaves his mark, urinating and defecating as he goes.
People are beginning to become a little irritated with Pepe. We’ll see where this goes, but in the meantime if you know any good recipes for porcupine, email them to me.
