Many of the forest's creatures were watching this strange new creature -- this porcupine! -- when Bowser the Hound caught wind of the scene. "Bow, wow, wow!" shouted Bowser in his deepest voice. Everybody ran! -- everybody but the porcupine. He kept on coming down the tree just the same. "I'll teach that fellow a lesson," said Bowser to himself. "I'll shake him, and shake him and shake him until he hasn't any breath left." Bowser made a rush at him, and instead of running, what do you suppose the stranger did? He just rolled himself up in a tight ball. Bowser stopped short. Then he reached out his nose and sniffed at this queer thing. Slap! The tail of the stranger struck Bowser the Hound right across the side of his face, and a dozen of those little spears were left sticking there just like pins in a pincushion. "Wow! wow! wow! wow!" yelled Bowser at the top of his lungs, and started for home with his tail between his legs, and yelling with every jump. And this is the way that Prickly Porky the Porcupine made friends.

Author Biography

Thornton Waldo Burgess (1874 - 1965) was a conservationist and author of children's stories. Burgess loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years in books and his newspaper column, Bedtime Stories. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column.