The tables were turned now.  The shoe was on the other foot, or, to be precise, the foot was on the underside.  That is, the owl had got the foe where he lived, below water-line, if I may so put it, where, like a battleship, his armor did not run, and he was soft and vulnerable as any other beast.  Moreover, he had not trained himself in the art of throwing himself upon his back, as the owl, who was like a cat in this particular also, had apparently done, and since he could not prance on his hindlegs, unicorn-fashion, forever, he had to come down again, belly and throat first, on that infernal battery of talons and beak.

And he got it all right enough.  I give you my word that spiny one got it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to behold.  What happened to him underneath there in those few brief, terrible seconds no one will ever know—­and that, we may guess, is as well perhaps, for there is no sense in dwelling upon horrors.  What he did, in the short time he was given by Fate, is a little more clear.  Butting madly down, oblivious of all things, even that unspeakable fish-hook beak, grappling like a thing demented—­and I think he was nearly that—­he bit deep, deep down, through feathers and skin and flesh, home—­once, twice, and again.

Then, blindly, brokenly, smothered in blood, red-visaged and horrible, he half-rolled, half blundered free of that frightful clinch, and instantly rolled up!  ’Twas his habit, the one refuge of his life, so long as he breathed; his last, and usually, but not always, his first, hope.

The owl struggled somehow, in a cloud of her own feathers, to her feet.  The beautiful, fan-like, exquisitely soft wings flapped and beat frantically.  There came a peculiar musky sort of smell into the air.  She rose, all lopsidedly, perhaps two yards, flapping, flapping, flapping with frenzied desperation, before toppling suddenly, helplessly, pathetically, as the big pinions stopped, and she collapsed sideways back to earth again, where, blood-smeared and glaring, lit by the merciless, cynical moon, she crouched and coughed—­as I live, coughed and coughed and coughed, a ghastly cough like a baby’s, till it seemed as if she would cough her heart up.

Then silence—­that wonderful, mysterious, waiting, echoing, listening silence of the woods at night—­shut down, and darkness swept over all.

When dawn came stealing westward silently over the still canopy of leaves, both combatants were still there; and they were still here, too, when the sun, silting in through a rift in the foliage, found and bathed them.  The owl was crouched as she had been when the moon left her—­crouched, and with her wings just a little open, like a bird about to take flight; but she had already taken wing on the longest flight of all.  The hedgehog was, too, just as the moon had left him, rolled up in a spiky ball, apparently asleep; but his sleep, also, was the longest sleep of all.  And over them both, in the heavy silence, could be distinctly heard that horrible “brr-brr-brr” of flies that told its own story.