The opening came.  Quicker than you could realize, the hedgehog half unrolled, and side-chopped with his glistening teeth.  Quick, too, and quicker, the venomous, flat serpent head writhed aloft and back-lashed, swift as a released spring; but the hedgehog had ducked, or tucked if you like, more than instantly back into himself.  Followed an infernal, ghastly writhing and squirming of the long, unprotected mottled serpent body as it struck—­too late to stop itself—­simply spines, spines only, that tore and lacerated maddeningly.  Whip, whip, whip! flashed the deadly reptilian head, pecking, quicker than light flickers, at the impassive round cheval-de-frise that was the hedgehog, in a blind access of fury terrible to see; and each time the soft throat of the horror only tore and tore worse, in a ghastly manner, on those spines that showed no life and said no word, and defied all.  It was a siege of the wild, and a terrible one.

Probably this was the first time in his life that anything had dared to stand up to that viper.  He acted as if it was, anyway.  Usually his malignant hiss, so full of hateful cruelty, was enough of a warning.  And those who ignored that did not generally live to repeat the omission.  He seemed utterly unable to understand that anything could face his fangs of concentrated death and not go out in contortions.  And there were no contortions about this prickly foe, only an impassable front, or, if you love exactness, back.

Wild things, unlike man, are rarely given to lose their tempers.  It isn’t healthy—­in the wild.  But if ever a creature appeared to human eyes to do so, it was that snake.  He struck and he struck and he struck, impaling himself ghastlily each time, and using up his small immediate magazineful of venom uselessly on—­uncompromising spikes!

At last he drew back, a horrible affront to the fairy scene, and, in the snap of a finger, the hedgehog had unpacked himself, run forward—­a funny little patter it was, much faster than you would expect—­slashed with his dagger fangs, and repacked himself again in an instant.

The snake, writhing afresh under the punishment, threw himself once more upon the impassive “monkey-puzzle” on four legs, but beyond tearing himself into an even more ghastly apparition than before, he accomplished nothing.  Finally he broke away, and slid off, a rustling, half-guessed, fleeting vision, and there was fear at last in those awful eyes, that could never close, as he went.

Then it was that the quiet, unobstrusive, retiring, self-effacing hedgehog threw off the mask, and hoisted his true colors.  And yet, if one came to think of it, there was no cause for surprise, for was he not a member of the strange, the mysterious, the great Order of Insectivora, which includes among its members probably the most pugnacious, the most implacable, the most furiously passionate fighters in all the wild?  He fairly flung himself, unrolled, and running with an absurdly clock work-toy-like gait, whose speed checked the laugh that it caused, was after that viper in considerably less than half-a-second, his eyes red as the sun they glinted in, his fangs bared for action, his swinish snout uplifted at the tip in a wicked grin.  No beast to bandy words with, this.  It was a fight to a finish, with no surrender save to death.