We’ve had the sharp-quilled beasts in our neighbourhood ever since our arrival here on the farm nearly eight years ago, and my mom has regaled me often enough with tales of pulling quills from multiple dogs’ muzzles during her many years in residence. Recently, Jake, our golden retriever, not a barky dog, stared pointedly at the deck railing, then at me, then back at the railing. An intrepid porky perched there, then scrambled onto the Manitoba maple that overlooks the south deck. The next morning, the creature was gone, and so was a lot of the bark from the lower girdle of the tree.

A few days later, while I worked upstairs in my studio in the early evening just as the sun was setting, the silence was interrupted by an unfamiliar series of noises somewhere between a cat’s meow and a ewok’s squeak. Flashlight in hand, I stepped outside onto the upper balcony. Nothing out of the ordinary. But then I spotted two unusual lumps in the nearby maple tree, a particularly gnarly tree that my grandfather had planted as part of a windbreak in 1946.