irst, 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 ove