But, speaking of coats, I want to introduce you to a still more rapid worker in the soil, who wears a coat of mail. He is called the armadillo. There used to be a species of armadillo in western Texas. Whether there are any there still I don't know,[19] but go on down to South America and you'll find all you want. The woods are full of them, and so are those vast prairies—the pampas. The plates in the armadillo's coat of mail are not made of steel, of course, but of bone. These bony plates are each separate from the other on most of his body but made into solid bucklers over the shoulders and the hips. The armadillos have very short, stout legs and very long, strong claws, and how they can dig! They can dig fast in any kind of soil, but in the loose soil of the pampas they dig so fast that if you happen to catch sight of one when out riding and he sees you, you'll have to start toward him with your horse on the run if you want to see anything more of him. Before you can get to him and throw yourself from the saddle, he'll have buried himself in the ground. And you can't catch him; not even if you have a spade and dig away with all your might. He'll dig ahead of you, faster—a good deal faster—than you can follow.
[MR. ARMADILLO'S REMARKABLE NOSE DRILL]
For all he looks so knightly, so far as his armor is concerned, the armadillo is timid, peaceful, and never looking for trouble with anybody, but once aroused fights fiercely and does much damage with his long hooked claws. His chief diet is ants. These he finds with his nose. He locates them by scent and then bores in after them. You'd think he'd twist it off, that long nose of his; he turns it first one way and then the other, like a gimlet. And so fast!
The armadillo dislikes snakes as much as all true knights disliked dragons. That is, he doesn't like them socially; although he's quite fond of them as a variation in diet. He'll leap on a snake, paying not the slightest attention to his attempts to bite through that coat of mail, and tear him into bits and eat him.
Another armored knight that eats snakes and that other animals seldom eat—much as they'd like to—is the hedgehog. If you were a fox, instead of a boy or girl, I wouldn't have to tell you about how hard it is to serve hedgehog at the family table. One of the earliest things a little fox learns in countries where there are hedgehogs is to let the hedgehog alone.
"Hedgehogs would be very nice—to eat, I mean—if they weren't so ugly about not wanting to be eaten."
We can imagine Mamma Fox saying that to the children. Then she goes on:
"The whole ten inches of a hedgehog—he's about that long—are covered with short, stiff, sharp, gray spines. He's easy to catch—just ambles along, hardly lifting his short legs from the ground. And he goes about at night—just when we foxes are out marketing. That would be so handy, don't you see; but the trouble is about those nasty spines of his. Try to catch him and he rolls up into a ball with all his spines—they're sharp as needles—sticking out everywhere, and every which way. And—well, you simply can't get at him, that's all. So just don't have anything to do with him. It's only a waste of time."
Hedgehogs live in hedges and thickets and in narrow gulches covered with bushes. They do their share of ploughing when nosing about with their pig-like snouts for slugs, snails, and insects, and when they dig places for their home nests. These homes they line with moss, grass, and leaves, and in them spend the long Winter, indifferent to the tempests and the cold.