“Jared Buzzell, of Lisbon, says he was searching for wild mushrooms Thursday when he saw a porcupine get hit by a car in Minot. Buzzell says he’d heard that a valuable mineral deposit used in Chinese medicine formed in the stomachs of porcupines.
He then cut open the dead porcupine to search for the mineral and instead found the baby.”
I’m trying to follow the progression here. He’s looking for mushrooms, witnesses a fatal motor event involving a porcupine, recalls from the recesses of his brain that there is a certain “mineral” the Chinese harvest from recently deceased porcupines. Having no idea what the “mineral” is or what it looks like, he then makes the decision to go in anyway on an exploratory. The rest is history.