What he saw was the owl on the ground, flapping her great, soft wings about, within a foot of the nicely, neatly, nattily roofed-in nest where he and his lifelong wedded wife thought they had hidden cunningly their four soft-bristled, helpless babies.  What he thought he saw was the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing infant owls’ food, or “words to that effect.”  And the hedgehog, like most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too.  Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be away—­attending to the last rites—­shall we say?—­over the form of an expiring young rat.

The little pig’s eyes of him went red in his funny, bristle-crowned head, and just as a clockwork toy charges, so he charged, with a quick, grunting rustle and far greater speed than any one who knew only his usual deliberate movements would have given him credit for.

The owl had only time to turn her cat-like face and—­hiss.  But though that hiss would have been good enough as a bluff to frighten creatures who wouldn’t upset a snake for anything, she was out of her reckoning upon this occasion.  The hedgehog, who dealt in snakes as a game-warden deals in tigers, had no nerves that way.  He just sailed in under the baffling, great, flapping wing, and, ere ever the bird of the night could spring aloft, had struck.  It was a ghastly form of warfare, this low running in and wrenching snap.  It landed right under the armpit, so to speak, and left a nasty round hole.  And it is worth noting, by the way, that precisely the same sort of hole, and in the same spot almost, but lower and farther back, was to be seen upon the body of the deceased young rat that Mrs. Hedgehog was even then attending to—­the trademark of the hedgehogs, that hole.

All the immediate world of the night wild, watching from grass-tuft and root and burrow, heard the rasping tap of the owl’s beak hammering helplessly at the spines on the back of the hedgehog, now beside himself with rage.  Not one of them, too, that did not jump with terror—­engrained by the bitter experience of hundreds of generations—­at her fiendish scream.  Then, in a flash, that owl was upon her back, wielding hooked beak and stiletto talons, as only she knew how to use them; and the hedgehog, who had, in the blindness of his rage, run in to finish the job, shot up clean on his hind-legs, taking the clinging, flapping owl with him, while, for the first time that night, he uttered a cry other than a grunt—­an odd, piercing little cry, vibrant with rage, or fear, or both.  This was rather odd, because ordinarily the hedgehog is a dumb beast, who suffers “frightfulness” in grim silence.