Another book in the Poppy series. This one is all about the grumpy porcupine, Ereth. It’s his birthday and he thinks everyone has forgotten about it. Determined to do something nice for himself, he marches off into the forest to find salt at a cabin, sometimes occupied by humans. He’s unable to get to the salt and alarmed to find humans in residence, and what’s worse they appear to be hunters setting a line of traps. Then he encounters a fox caught in one of the traps, near death. She begs him to find her kits and tell them what happened to her. Ereth is horrified to witness the fox’s death, and then reluctantly searches for her den. When he finally finds it, the young foxes assume he’s going to now be their surrogate parent, and after and lot of back-and-forth (both with the foxes and his own conscience) he agrees, but only until their father shows up.
The ensuing story is quite amusing, as the foxes and the porcupine have very different ways of living. It’s hard for them to get along (one fox kit definitely does not like Ereth, and makes that clear) and even more difficult is figuring out what to eat. The porcupine can’t hunt and is disgusted at the idea of eating meat- but that’s the only thing the young foxes want. To make things more complicated, there’s all those traps the hunters set, which they must avoid, and there’s a small but determined predator tracking Ereth down, for reasons of his own. I thought the way the animals dealt with finding and disabling the traps was quite clever. And the moral dilemma Ereth faces in the end when he and the fox kits confront not only the humans, but Ereth’s natural enemy, was very telling to their individual characters. In the end, the fox father finally shows up, and he’s not so great as the young foxes had led Ereth to believe. (He’s really full of himself and indifferent to responsibilities). Ereth finally is free of his obligation to the fox family (or is he?) and makes his way back home, where he finds that Poppy and his mouse friends had not forgotten his birthday after all.
I saw a lot of parallels with this story and The Family Under the Bridge, because of the older, reluctant character suddenly having to take care of a bunch of young ones, against his will at first but having a gradual change of heart.
Borrowed from the public library. Completed on 8/8/24.
