Girl Meets Porcupine

On rare occasion “first meetings” of import are captured in photograph.  Perhaps you recall the photographs of a stiffened and somewhat baffled President Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley—Elvis wearing a purple jumpsuity thing and a belt more conspicuous than the WWE wrestling championship belt.  We have all seen the ubiquitous photos of a nervous father meeting his newborn boy or girl for the first time in a photograph captured by another family member.  Yesterday, by sheer luck, I happened to be there with my twice-as-smarter-than-me-phone when CM met her first porcupine.

A beautiful, though cautious, moment as girl met porcupine.  At first, the porcupine ignored CM and her smartphone and me with mine.  But once my shadow drew too near for comfort, the porcupine began to waddle off.  A porcupine has top speed something akin to a baby crawl.  Fortunately, I managed to snap a pretty clear image of the slow-motion flight to the tall grass.

According to CM, the porcupine “had a cute face.”

I captured the image while we were hiking at Missouri Headwaters State Park.  This is the very place in Montana where the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson rivers all join at once to form the Missouri River.  The temperature yesterday reached a balmy sixty degrees by midafternoon.  I am also posting a photograph of the sun above the Gallatin Valley.

--Mitchell Hegman