"And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There was something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it--a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs. 

For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief-or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. ..."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle