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stash of porcupine quills on the trail at Potter Woods in southern New Hampshire

On a difficult section of trail I manage to fall, and when I get up, my friends have to pull porcupine quills off my pants! An impossible coincidence: I've never seen a porcupine kill before, and manage to find one with my butt. The pointy black end of each quill has microscopic backward-facing barbs that make it easy to penetrate and hard to remove.

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