AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The Forest Club’s wildlife building has been a fixture of this fair since 1961 — the low green building past the poultry barn where the sportsmen’s club keeps the mounted deer, the aquarium of walleye and perch, the snapping turtle in the stock tank, and, for the last four years, a porcupine that came to them as an orphan and has become the single most photographed animal in Pine County.

At approximately 3:10 Thursday afternoon, in front of a full building, the porcupine established that the pen latch had not been fully seated, leaned on the gate until it swung, and stepped out onto the concrete floor.

What followed has been described by every witness this newspaper interviewed as “the calmest emergency they ever saw.” The building held perhaps forty people, a third of them children. Nobody screamed. The porcupine did not hurry. He walked approximately nine feet in fifty minutes, pausing to consider the base of the display case, the leg of a folding table, and a dropped corn dog, which he declined. Two Forest Club volunteers cleared a lane, a third put on leather gloves and then stood there holding them, having realized he had no plan for the gloves, and a fourth went to find somebody who knew what to do.

What they eventually did, on the advice of DNR conservation officer Dan Roux, who arrived at 3:55 and assessed the situation from the doorway for some time, was open the pen gate wide, put a dish of sweet potato inside it, and go stand somewhere else. The porcupine entered the pen at 4:02 p.m. and resumed being an exhibit. Roux’s official comment: “He’s four years old and he lives here. He wasn’t escaping. He was going for a walk in his house.”

The latch has been replaced with a self-closing one — the fourth such latch installed in this county this summer, which the Forest Club notes puts it in the company of a brewery, a bar cooler, and a grain bin, and which it regards as fine company. Attendance at the building over the fair’s remaining three days was, per the club’s hand tally, the highest ever recorded, and roughly two hundred children were reportedly overheard asking whether the porcupine would be doing it again.