Mr. Cuddles the Porcupine

Yesterday, my brother came into the house and told my sister and me that we had to “come check this out.” He didn’t say anything else before he ran out the door again, and of course my curiosity being what it is, I followed him. We went next door to my grandparents’ house, and everyone was looking at something on the back deck. We went over to see what it was and we see this porcupine! He was just walking around the deck, looking at everything. We sat down at the glass door and watched him for a while. My Pap even called the neighbors and they came up to see him. He pretty much just stayed in one corner and watched everything. At one point he started drinking from a plastic bag that had filled up with rainwater. We have outside cats at our house, and two of them had come up onto the deck and were watching the porcupine, which we had decided to call Mr. Cuddles. We tried to scare the cats off of the deck from inside the house. We, of course, didn’t want to open the door because despite his name Mr. Cuddles didn’t look very cuddly. Eventually we got the cats to leave and went back to our casual observance of our unexpected guest. I wasn’t sure why he was on the deck, especially in the middle of the day, and I thought something was wrong with him. When my Dad got home, he called his friend Jeff, who is a game warden and he said that if it stayed around, they would come and get it, because there is probably something wrong with it. Mr. Cuddles was gone by morning, however, so he must have returned to his home in the woods.