Memoirs of a Porcupine Read Online Free Page B

the reality of life on earth, constantly flitting here and there, that’s who the children of the North had laid their traps for, the little humans, in the middle of nowhere, had these bowls, propped up with a piece of wood, and round them they tied a long piece of string you could hardly see, and they hid in the undergrowth about a hundred metres off, and, drawn by the seed left round the bowls, the poor things jostled and chirruped up in the tree tops then would suddenly all drop to earth at once, without setting up some lookouts to tell them if something was up, then the kids would tug the string of their silly traps and the sparrows would suddenly find themselves imprisoned under the container, but what was strange, dear Baobab, was that none of them had any sense of the danger, which would have been obvious to any animal, even the ones with no common sense at all, it didn’t occur to the birds for a moment that it was a bit strange to find a container sitting in the middle of nowhere, that seeds lying on the ground, untouched by other birds, might be a bit suspicious, I never got caught out myself, otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you now, and so my fellow porcupines, indoctrinated by the governor, were convinced I would get caught in one of these traps, ‘the drum is made from the skin of the fawn that strays from its mother’, our Australopithecus was wont to say, thinking I wouldn’t understand what he meant, and this remark created a great stir within in the group, some of my colleagues
repeated it everywhere they went, imitating the patriarch’s gestures, teasing me, even, calling me ‘the fawn’, until one day I got so irritated by their jokes, which did not seem in the least bit funny to me, I explained that the fawn was the young of a wild animal, a deer, a buck or roe, whereas I was in fact a porcupine, and proud of it too

once it becomes the harmful double of a human being, an animal has to leave its natural milieu, its family, so my separation from the members of our group occurred down in Mossaka, but considering that porcupines are reputed to be solitary animals, we were fortunate to live in a community, and every evening the old governor held a meeting, made a few general remarks, I could tell he was covertly talking about me, saying no one was irreplaceable in the forest, that he’d known a few jumped up porcupines in his time, he knew how to put them back in their place, and when I didn’t react, he became more pointed, muttering things about ‘the fish that proudly dallies in the feeder stream one day ends up salted on a slab in the market’, he hastened to remind us that I was an orphan, without him I wouldn’t have been a live porcupine at all, he said my procreators were as stubborn as me, that they left this earth shortly after my arrival, I was scarcely three weeks old, our governor boasted of how he had taken me in, along with his female mate, now deceased, and he went into how I used to defecate the whole day long, I was a lazy good for nothing, scared of baby lizards, and the others all laughed loudly, and it was from him I learned about the ways of my parents, it seemed they liked to mingle with the human race,
they’d disappear by night and go wandering among the humans in Mossaka, returning at dawn the following day, tired out, with red eyes, muddy paws, and spend the whole day sleeping like dormice, the governor couldn’t understand it, I had begun to piece their lives together bit by bit, I no longer doubted it, they were harmful doubles, I reached this conclusion the day I felt the call of young Kibandi myself, I accepted the idea that I was descended from a line of porcupines whose destiny was to serve humans beings, not for better, but for worse, for the very worst, and each time I heard the governor talking about the death of my parents it made me angry, he claimed to have tried to spy on them one night, to find to