Creatures of the Night: A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain

by Alfred Wellesley Rees

For a week or more, the spines sprouting from round projections on the bodies of the young hedgehogs were colourless and blunt, and so flexible that they could have offered no defence against the teeth or the claws of an enemy; while every muscle was so soft and feeble that not one of the little animals was as yet able to roll itself into the shape of a ball. The spines, however, served a useful purpose: they kept the tender skin beneath from being irritated by the chance touch of the mother hedgehog's obtrusive quills.

Soon the baby hedgehogs' eyes opened wide to the pale light filtering between the leaves at the entrance to the chamber, and their spines, gradually stiffening, assumed a dull grey colour. Then, one still, dark night, the little creatures, with great misgiving, followed their parents from the nest, and wandered for a short distance beside the tangled hedge. Presently, made tired and sleepy and hungry by exercise and fresh air, they were led back to their secret retreat, where, after being tended for a few moments by their careful mother, they fell asleep, while their parents searched diligently for food in the dense grass-clumps left by the harvesters amid the briars and the furze.

Henceforth, every night, they ventured, under their mother's care, to roam afield, their journeys becoming longer and still longer as their strength increased, till, familiar with the hedgerow paths, they were ready and eager to learn the rudiments of such field-craft as concerned their unpretending lives.

A glorious summer, far brighter than is usual among the rainy hills of the west, brooded over the countryside. The days were calm and sunny, but with the coming of evening occasional mists drifted along the dingles and scattered pearl-drops on the after-math; and the nights were warm and starlit, filled with the silence of the wilderness, which only Nature's children break. The “calling season” for the hare had long since passed, and for the fox it had not yet arrived; so the voices of the two greatest wanderers on the countryside were not at this time heard.

A doe hare had made her “form” hardly twenty yards from the hedgehogs' nest, and night after night, just when the “urchins” moved down the hedge from the old tree-root, she ambled by on her way to the clover-field above the heath.

Once, a little before dawn, a fox, coming to drink at the brook, detected the scent of the hedgehogs near a molehill, followed it to the litter of leaves by the tree, and caused considerable alarm by making a vigorous attempt to dig out the nest; but, probably because of the dampness of the loamy soil, he failed to determine the exact whereabouts of the hedgehog family; and, after breaking a tooth in his vain efforts to cut through a tough, close-fibred root, he made his way along the hedge, and soon disappeared over the crest of the moonlit hill. But the next night, when the wind blew strong, and the rain pattered loudly on the leafy trees, he came again to the “urchins'” haunt. The doe hare had long since rustled by, and the hedgehogs were busy munching a cluster of earthworms discovered in a heap of refuse not far from the gate, when Reynard stole over the fence-bank, and sniffed at the nest. Not finding the family at home, he followed their scent through the ditch, and soon surprised them. To kill one of the tiny “urchins” was the work of a moment; then, made eager by the taste of blood, the fox turned on the mother hedgehog and tried to fix his fangs in the soft flesh beneath the armour of her spines. But, feeling at once his warm breath, she, with a quick contraction of the muscles, rolled herself into a prickly ball, and remained proof against his every artifice. He was a young fox, not yet learned in the wiles of Nature's feebler folk, and so, when he had recovered from his astonishment, he pounced on the rigid creature, and, thoughtlessly exerting all his strength, endeavoured to rend her in pieces with his powerful jaws. He paid dearly for his temerity. The prickly ball rolled over, under the pressure of his fore-paws, the sharp points of the spines entered the bare flesh behind his pads, and as, almost falling to the ground, he bit savagely to right and left in the fit of anger which now possessed him, his mouth and nostrils dripped blood from a dozen irritating wounds. Thoroughly discomfited, he leaped back into the field, where, sick with pain, he endeavoured to gain relief by rubbing his muzzle vigorously in the grass and against his aching limbs. Then, sneezing violently, and with his mouth encrusted with froth and loam, he bolted from the scene of his unpleasant adventure, never pausing till he reached his “earth” on the hillside, in which, hidden from the mocking gaze of other prowlers of the night, he could leisurely salve his wounds with the moisture of his soft, warm tongue, and ponder over the lessons of his recent experience.

By far the most intelligent and powerful enemy of the young hedgehogs was the farmer's dog; but, as he slept in the barn at night, and generally accompanied the labourers to the upland fields by day, they escaped, for a while, his unwelcome attentions. Foes hardly less dreaded, because of their insatiable thirst for blood, were two polecats living in a hole half-way up the wall of a ruined cottage not far from the hillside farm-house. The polecats, however, were so occupied with the care of a family, that, finding young rabbits plentiful in the burrows on the heath, they seldom wandered into the open fields, till the little “urchins,” ready, at the first sign of danger, to curl themselves within the proof-armour of their growing spines, were well able to resist attack.

The hedgehogs were about three months old, and summer, brief and beautiful, was passing away, when an incident occurred that might have proved disastrous, though, fortunately, it resulted only in a practical joke, such as Nature often plays on the children of the wilds. One calm, dark night, while they were busy in the grass, a brown owl, hunting for mice, sailed slowly by. Now, the brown owl, in spite of proverbial wisdom gained during a long life in the dim seclusion of the woods, is occasionally apt to blunder. Her character, indeed, seems full of quaint contradictions. As she floats through the moonlight and the shadows of the beech-aisles of Dollan, she appears to be a large bird, with a philosophic contentment of mind—an ancient creature that, shunning the fellow-ships of the garish modern day and loving the leisure and the solitude of night, dreams of the past. But, beneath its loose feathery garments, her body, hardly larger than that of a ringdove, is altogether out of proportion to her long, narrow head and wide-spreading talons. Visions of the past may come to her, as, blinking at the light of day, she sits in the hollow of the tree, but at night she is far too wide-awake to dream. And so great are the owl's powers of sight and hearing, and so swift is her “stoop” from the sky to the ground, that the bank-vole has little chance of escape should a single grass-stalk rustle underfoot when she is hovering near his haunt. Far from being shy and retiring in her disposition, the brown owl, directly night steals over the woodlands, is so fearless that probably no animal smaller than the hare can in safety roam abroad.

As the owl flew slowly past the fence, she heard the faint sound of a crackling shell—the hedgehogs were feeding on snails. She could barely distinguish a moving form in a tangle of briars, but its position discouraged attack; so she flew away and continued to hunt for mice. Presently, returning to the spot, the owl was once more attracted by the sound of some creature feeding in the grass; and, detecting a slight movement beside the briars, she swooped towards the ditch, grasped one of the “urchins” in her claws, and rose into the air. Her quarry, feeling the sudden grip of the sharp talons, made a desperate, convulsive movement, and the owl found, to her astonishment, that her grasp had shifted, and that she was holding, apparently, a hard bunch of thorns. Nevertheless, she tightened her grasp; but an unendurable twitch of pain, as the spines entered her flesh immediately above the scales of her talons, caused her to drop the hedgehog into the leaf-mould of the ditch. Immediately afterwards, she herself, eager to find out the cause of her discomfiture, dropped also to the earth, and, standing beside the hedgehog, clawed savagely at the motionless creature, seeking some defenceless point among the bristling spines. At last, her patience exhausted, the owl gave up the ineffectual assault, and glided away into the gloomy night. Unhurt, but for a slight wound inflicted when first the bird descended, the hedgehog crawled back to the brambles, where the rest of her family were still busy with the snails, and joined them in their feast.

Autumn's sere leaves had fallen from the trees, and the hedgehogs had found such a plentiful supply of all kinds of food that they were ready for their winter sleep, when a gipsy boy, the proud possessor of a terrier trained for hunting hedgehogs, set forth in haste one evening from his tent by the wayside above the farm. The boy was smarting from cruel blows inflicted by his drunken parents, who, after unusual success in disposing of baskets and clothes-pegs, had spent much of the day's profit in a carouse at the village inn. Having escaped a continuance of his parents' brutalities, and eluded their ill-conducted pursuit, the young gipsy, in the company of his only friend, soon forgot his miseries as his thoughts turned to a vagabond's rough sport in the stillness of the harvest night. Thrusting a long stick here and there into the briars, he strolled along by the fence, till his dog, diligently beating in line amid the undergrowth, gave a quick yelp of delight, and, an instant later, a curled-up hedgehog rolled down into the ditch. The boy placed the animal in his ragged handkerchief, the corners of which he was proceeding to tie together when the terrier again attracted attention with unmistakable signs of a “find.” For a few brief minutes sport was keenly exciting, but at last all the “urchin” family, with the exception of one member, were captured, and the boy, now thoroughly happy, his pockets and handkerchief heavy with spoil, turned homewards through the darkness. Next morning, the slain hedgehogs, baked in clay among the hot ashes of a fire of rotten twigs, formed the principal item in the gipsies' bill of fare, and the terrier enjoyed the remnants of the meal.