there was no cause for surprise, for was he
not a member of the strange, the mysterious, the great Order of
Insectivora, which includes among its members probably the most
pugnacious, the most implacable, the most furiously passionate fighters
in all the wild? He fairly flung himself, unrolled, and running with
an absurdly clock work-toy-like gait, whose speed checked the laugh
that it caused, was after that viper in considerably less than
half-a-second, his eyes red as the sun they glinted in, his fangs bared
for action, his swinish snout uplifted at the tip in a wicked grin. No
beast to bandy words with, this. It was a fight to a finish, with no
surrender save to death.

The bank-vole had already fled; but it was in the direction that the
fight finally veered that he had gone, and so, peeping from between the
weed-stems at the mouth of a hole, he saw all. He saw the viper, his
head swaying to and fro, come sliding along, making for that very hole;
he heard the sudden quick rustle in the grass behind that followed,
beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce. He watched the
snake's head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last
desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an
awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog's
razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and,
trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think,
the awful last threshing flurry of the viper that followed.

Later, when the moon peeped out of a hole in the clouds, and the
bank-vole peeped out of one in the bank, together--and his beady eyes
were not much behind the moon for brightness--when the tiny, long-eared
bats were imitating black lightning overhead, and a single owl was
hooting like a lost soul seeking a home, away in the black heart of the
woods, the bank-vole witnessed the burial of that hated viper. It was
not a big affair. Only one person--the hedgehog--took part in it, and
he was singularly unhurried, for he ate that poisonous fiend all up,
beginning at the tail, and thoughtfully chewing on from side to side to
the head--twenty inches of snake--as if he, the hedgehog, had been
inoculated in infancy, and was poison-proof.

Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there,
rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the
moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and
came out