“Why,” asked Emile, “has Uncle Paul put those animals in the garden and told us to leave them alone if we happened to come across them?”
“No doubt to make war on harmful insects,” answered Louis. “Stop, look there! One of them is turning up the earth with its little black snout. Ssh! Let’s keep still and see what it’s after.”
The children crouched down behind a row of peas so as not to be seen. The hedgehog, now scratching with its paws, now rummaging with the tip of its snout, which resembles that of a pig, finally unearthed a big, fat white larva which had probably been clinging to the root of a lettuce plant. The children ran to look at the captured game. The hedgehog, thus taken by surprise, hastened to roll itself up into a ball bristling with spines. In the disinterred worm Jules easily recognized a June-bug larva, one of that ravenous and destructive race that Uncle Paul had already told them about.[1] [[50]]
In the evening, when they were all gathered together, the hedgehog naturally became the subject of conversation.
“Several years ago,” said Uncle Paul, “as I was returning home one evening at a late hour, I chanced upon two hedgehogs coming out from a pile of stones. I tied them up in my handkerchief so as to bring them home and let them loose in my garden. Ever since then they have never failed to render me certain services that you can appreciate by examining the jaws in this picture.”
“Pointed teeth like those,” Jules remarked, “were never made for browsing grass. The hedgehog must feed on prey. Its teeth are just right for crunching June-bug worms such as I saw dug up in the garden this morning.”
Jaws and Teeth of a Hedgehog
“Notice how sharp the points of the teeth are,” resumed his uncle, “both in the upper and in the lower jaw. Those two rows of teeth fit into each other when the animal bites, and they plunge like so many fine daggers into the captured victim’s flesh. With this complicated dental mechanism evidently the hedgehog cannot triturate tough food; it must have a kind of diet that is soft, juicy, capable of being reduced to marmalade by a brief chewing. The animal is therefore preëminently a flesh-eater. Several other species, particularly the mole and the [[51]]shrew-mouse of these regions, have, like the hedgehog, teeth tapering to conical points and interplaying in the two jaws. Their food, too, is about the same as the hedgehog’s. All three—hedgehog, mole, and shrew-mouse—live on small game—insects, larvæ, slugs, caterpillars, worms. They belong to the group of mammals known to naturalists as the order of insectivorous animals, or, in other words, the order of insect-eaters. On and under the ground they carry on the same kind of hunt that bats do in the air. In their way of living bats, too, are insectivorous; but their peculiar bodily structure causes them to be placed apart in the order of chiropters. Thus the mammals furnish us two orders of helpers: the chiropters, which hunt on the wing, and the insect-eaters—the insectivorous animals properly so called—which hunt on and under the ground. To the latter belong the hedgehog, the mole, and the shrew-mouse.
“The hedgehog, the largest of the three, requires the largest and most plentiful prey. Tiny vermin are disdained, but a June-bug larva or a good fat mole-cricket is an excellent find. When they are not buried too deep he digs with his paws and snout to unearth them. You have to-day seen my hedgehogs at work in the lettuce bed. All night they go prowling about the garden, sniffing and rummaging in every nook and corner, and crunching no small number of my foes without doing me much harm. In them I have two vigilant watchmen who make their [[52]]rounds every night for the greater security of my growing vegetables. However, despite the interest I take in them, I must, to be candid, acknowledge their faults.