The thing, whatever it was, came straight on in a more or less zigzag line, till the cat could make it out dimly in the moonlight, a blotched, roughly egg-shaped form, less than a foot long, so low to the ground that it appeared to be running on wheels, and covered all over with prickles, like a Rugby ball into which tin tacks had been driven head first, the sharp ends pointing outwards and backwards.  Its head was the small end, and much lower than its back.  Its eyes, little and pig-like, set in a black cowl, gleamed red in the tired moonlight; and its face was the face of a pig, nothing else—­just pure pig; insolent, cunning, vulgar, and blatant.  Occasionally men name a wild beast correctly, and this little beast could only have one name—­hedgehog:  It was obvious on the face of it.

But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said, nothing about pigs, real or only so called.  She had killed a shrew once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan, Insectivora—­far removed from the pigs, really—­and that is the nearest she had got.

She had never heard of hedgehogs, and never, never met a beast that walked through the wild as if he owned it.  And, more, he expected her to get out of his way, which she did with feline and concentrated remarks; and he—­by the whiskers and talons!—­the fool exposed his back—­turned his back openly, a thing no wild beast in its senses would do, unless running away.  And that, for a cat who had waited close on two hours for baby business that didn’t turn up, had got most unfashionably drenched, and had, moreover, in her time, tackled more than one grown-up rabbit, which was considerably larger than any hedgehog—­that, I say, was, for the silver tabby, too much.

She sprang.  Rather, she executed two bounds, and somewhat unexpectedly found herself on top of the hedgehog.  I say “unexpectedly,” because she had hitherto bounded upon wild-folk who contrived mostly not to be there.  This one contrived nothing, except to stop still.  And the cat executed a third bound—­off the hedgehog, and rather more violently and more quickly than the first two.  Also, she spat.

When she had got over the intense pain—­and cats feel pain badly—­of sharp spines digging into her soft and tender forefoot-pads, she stopped, about two yards away, and glared at the hedgehog as if he had played off a foul upon her, and she was surprised to see that he was no longer egg-shaped, but rolled up into himself like a ball, so to speak, and utterly quiescent. (I wonder if she remembered the little wood-lice that she had so often amused herself playing with in idle hours.  They rolled themselves up just like that.  Perhaps she thought she’d come upon the Colossus of all the wood-lice.) Anyway, after she had spat off at him all the vile remarks she could think of for the moment, without producing any more reply than she would get from the average stone, she came back, drawn with curiosity as by strings.