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From thence we find our hedgehog, still wandering devious, but with always a direction, just as an ant has, heading his way down-ditch to a farm, and all the way he ate beetles mostly, but with slugs and worms thrown in. Now, those of the wild-folk who approach the farm, even by night, do so with their life in their paws, and most of them know it.
At that instant, or the next, she might fall upon his back, anyway, without anybody shooting her. Indeed, the betting seemed a good few hundred to one that she would. Very few human beings know the full meaning of the word "still" not even bluejackets! but most of the wild-folk do. They have to. So did the thrush, but never before had he kept so utterly, stonily, frozenly, strickenly motionless.
Hence she was a public danger, even to wild-folk she usually left alone, and just now she was looking for our thrush, who she had seen fly down and vanish. There he was, however, bang in the open, unshielded by any cover, motionless on one leg, looking upwards, and, to all intents and purposes, not there.
Wild-folk have a habit often of going temporarily insane when they first find themselves trapped, because the trap represents to them the most supreme, the most unbearable, of all terrors loss of freedom; and freedom is to them more than life, especially to birds, and more especially still to those whose lives are dedicated to the wild, free sea.
The reed-buntings some people might easily have mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white mustaches said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice. And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch was.
You could hear them pass now a faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky, "Keck! keck!" and was gone. It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move. None of the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far out over the marsh, unperceived.
If great events were really at hand, it were well to be forewarned, and Nanna, thanks to the dash of wild-folk blood in her veins, would be both hawk and hound upon such a trail. So Esmay contented herself with an admonition to caution, and helped the impatient one to depart, stealing down with her into the great hall, in order to rebolt the outer door.
In that position, even peering closely, you would never have seen him, unless, like ourselves, you knew he was there. But he was drawn together, drawn in all his muscles like a tense spring, and though this his persecutors could not know he was recovering from his hurts rapidly, with the wonderful power of recuperation of all the wild-folk, who pay their price for it in clean, hard living.
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