But young Frisky Fox didn’t even fight. He just ran away!

Yes, sir, there was something about that prickly ball, about the way the quills rattled as he curled up tighter, that sounded ominous.

It was just this habit of looking the situation over before he leaped that was to make Frisky so much wiser than some of his neighbors.

“Always Leave Porcupines Strictly Alone,” his mother scolded, as he went trotting back after her, crestfallen and shamefaced.

“At the first touch, that fellow would have snapped his tail in your face, and you’d have got a handful of quills in your mouth or some place where it would have been a mighty serious matter.

“Yes, sir-ee! It would have been a mighty serious matter!

“You couldn’t have rubbed them out, for every move you made would only have driven them deeper, what with their barbed tips, till you’d be lucky if they didn’t finish you once and for all.”

“My!” gasped the Red Fox pup.

“Next time,” Mother Red Fox continued, rather rubbing it in, “you’d do well to take your mother’s word for a thing.

“There, now!—Listen to that!”

Frisky pricked up his ears. From back up the slope of Mount Olaf, where he had come so near making a fatal mistake, there sounded a rattling as of dry twigs. It was Unk Wunk shaking his quills.

“Unk Wunk! Unk Wunk! Unk Wunk!” he was muttering over and over to himself. “I just guess people had better leave me alone, if they know what’s good for them!”

And through the moonlit woods, still in their April nakedness, the Fox family could plainly see a dark, round form slowly and deliberately climbing into a birch tree, where it resumed its gnawing.

“Whew! He’s not afraid of anything! Guess I’ll keep away from his part of the woods!” breathed Frisky Fox a bit unsteadily. For he could not help imagining how it would be to have his face full of quills. “But who’d ever think to look at him he could be so dangerous?”

“He’s dangerous only when you attack him,” explained Mother Red Fox, seating herself with the youngsters in a half circle before her.

“He wouldn’t touch you if you didn’t come too near. He never goes out of his way an inch to make trouble. He’s far too fat and lazy. He just simply goes his way in peace unless someone tries to molest him.

“Even then he just waits, all curled up like a burr, knowing there isn’t the least bit of danger so far as he himself is concerned. That is, except when there is deep snow on the ground, and a fellow can sneak up underneath him, and grab where there are no quills.

“Otherwise he knows there isn’t a creature in all these woods but would get the worst of it—with the exception, possibly, of Twinkly Eyes, the bear.”