d 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.

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 f