I can give you my word, though, that the vole was not happy one bit.  He appeared to be between the Devil and the deep sea.  He had no confidence in the deep sea, or any other thing that he could think of in his world.  Moreover, the deep sea, besides keeping all the air off, was most horribly bristly, even on the belly.  Wherefore that vole made haste to quit station, so to speak.  But in a second, it seemed, before he could clear himself, that unspeakable serpent’s hiss appeared to sound in his very ear, and the deep sea, folding upon itself, made the poor vole yell as if he had touched off a live-wire.  He had not, of course; but it was like being struck with a dozen pins at once.  He would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins, and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst.

And that saved the vole, probably.

Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course.  It was simply that the viper, shooting his every inch round the corner in the effort to grab the vole’s hindlegs then or never, had hit, full pelt and nose first, the nice little array of pointed arguments carried on the back of the neck of a hedgehog, snuffing under the clod, pig-fashion, for spiders.  The hedgehog, whose phlegmatic disposition and special armament allowed him the luxury of never being surprised at anything, promptly and literally shut up, so that long before the viper thing had unhooked his nose and was waving his forward part about over the hedgehog, with murder in his eye and death behind his flickering tongue, looking for a place to strike home, old hedgehog was rolled up, and snuffling and snoring away inside there, like an old man chuckling when he has just cried “Mate!” at chess.

This trying position continued for perhaps five minutes.  It seemed like five days to the wretched bank-vole.

Then the slow temper of the funny old hedgepig smoldered gradually alight.  His eyes grew red in the foxy head of him, his snout “worked,” and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster.  He made up his mind to fight.  And the extraordinary combat began.  Lit by the blood rays of a setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper of the snake’s scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the hundred-spiked hedgehog, that duel started.

Peering out of a peep-hole in himself, the hedgehog waited for an opening.  It was no blunderer’s game, this.  Death was the price of a slip.  He knew, however, and accepted the risks deliberately—­a plucky enough act, when you come to think of it, for a beast no more than a foot long and one and a half pounds heavy.