I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking his head under like a hedgehog. “He’s not dead yet! Oh, fire again!” cried Madame. I fired, but the gun was empty. So I ran quickly, for a cedar pole. The porcupine was lying still, with subsiding halo. He stirred faintly. So I turned him and hit him hard over the nose; or where, in the dark, his nose should have been. And it was done. He was dead. And in the moonlight, I looked down on the first creature I had ever shot. “Does it seem mean?” I asked aloud, doubtful. Again Madame hesitated. Then: “No!” she said resentfully. And I felt she was right. Things like the porcupine, one must be able to shoot them, if they get in one’s way. One must be able to shoot. I, myself, must be able to shoot, and to kill. For me, this is a _volta face_. I have always preferred to walk round my porcupine, rather than kill it. Now, I know it’s no good walking ’round. One must kill. I buried him in the adobe hole. But some animal dug down and ate him; for two days later there lay the spines and bones spread out, with the long skeletons of the porcupine-hands. The only nice thing about him--or her, for I believe it was a female, by the dugs on her belly--were the feet. They were like longish, alert black hands, paw-hands. That is why a porcupine’s tracks in the snow look almost as if a child had gone by, leaving naked little human foot-prints, like a little boy. So, he is gone: or she is gone. But there is another one, bigger and blacker-looking, among the west timber. That too is to be shot. It is part of the business of ranching: even when it’s only a little half-abandoned ranch like this one. Wherever man establishes himself, upon the earth, he has to fight for his place, against the lower orders of life. Food, the basis of existence, has to be fought for even by the most idyllic of farmers. You plant, and you protect your growing crop with a gun. Food, food, how strangely it relates man with the animal and vegetable world! How important it is! And how fierce is the fight that goes on around it. The same when one skins a rabbit, and takes out the inside, one realises what an enormous part of the animal, comparatively, is intestinal, what a big part of him is just for food-apparatus; for _living on_ other organisms. And when one watches the horses in the big field, their noses to the ground, bite-bite-biting at the grass, and stepping absorbedly on, and bite-bite-biting without ever lifting their noses, cropping off the grass, the young shoots of alfalfa, the dandelions, with a blind, relentless, unwearied persistence, one’s whole life pauses. One suddenly realises again how all creatures devour, and _must_ devour the lower forms of life.