after the ramblers from London, had each seen Lady Howard's coach. I set my cup down on the bench and prepared to listen closely.
'I often go across the moor, you know. I have friends in Moretonhampstead and Widdecombe, and there's roots and things growing on that side and not this. So on a nice day when I don't have too many animals needing my eye—my 'patients,' as Daniel calls them—I'll take a sandwich and a bottle of tea and pay a call on my friends.'
Both of the places she had named were a good fifteen or twenty miles across some fairly rough countryside. 'Do you do the trip in a day?' I asked in surprise. Having seen her totter about, I doubted that she could cover more than two miles in an hour, and that on even ground.
'Oh, I stop the night there, dear,' she reassured me. 'Sometimes two nights, and come back the third day. One of Daniel's children feeds the beasties.' As if that was all that might concern me. 'But as I was saying, I was on the moor one day last summer when I heard the saddest little cry, it'd make your heart break to hear it. It was such a tiny noise, I had a time finding what was making it, until finally I found the poor wee thing in the shade of a standing stone. It'd been trying to dig a hole in the ground to hide itself in, but it hadn't a chance, even if it had been whole and strong.' She seemed not far from tears at the pathos of the thing.
'A hedgehog,' I said.
'That it was, a young Tiggy, would fit into your hand. I thought for sure it would die, it was that sorely treated, I decided all I could do was make it comfortable and sing to it until it passed on. So I popped it into my coat pocket and sang while I walked, and I took it out when Igot to Widdecombe, fully expecting to have to borrow a spade and bury it.
'Only, don't you know, the little face looked up at me, so trusting, I just knew it would pull through. We gave it some milk with a drop of brandy in it, set its little leg—the back one, on the left—and wrapped it with a splint made from a nice smooth corset stay cut down to size, and I pulled together the great tear in its back with a piece of silk embroidery floss—green, it was; quite striking—and put it into a little box with some cotton wool near the fire.
'And in the morning it wrinkled its little nose at me, asking clear as it could, 'Where's my breakfast?' '
'Was it all right, then?' I asked. Not perhaps the most professional of investigative enquiries, and certainly not the question Holmes would have had at that point, but I did want to know.
'Not very good, you understand, but it lived. I did have to take off its little foot with a pair of sewing scissors, I'm afraid. It was too badly crushed to save, and the infection would have killed it.'
I winced at the picture of two ancient ladies bent over the kitchen table doing an amputation with a pair of scissors, and moved quickly on to the proper questions. 'What had caused its injuries, do you know?'
'Now that's just it, dear,' she said, sounding approving. 'It was something moving fast—a cart-wheel, maybe, or a boot—that squashed the poor thing's leg, but a dog had at it, too.'
The hair on the back of my neck stirred. 'How do you know that?' I demanded.
'Which, the cart or the dog?'
'Both.'
'Well, dear, I know that whatever it was squashed Tiggy had to be moving quickly, because if poor little Tiggy'd had a minute's warning he'd have curled up tight and been flattened right across, not just one stray leg. And the dog I know because any wild creature would've had more sense, and once tearing at Tiggy that way he'd either have stayed to finish him off or taken him home to feed his babies.'
Unlikely as it seemed, this was a witness after Holmes' own heart, and I took my hat off to her. Literally.
'What pretty hair you have, my dear,' she exclaimed, and reached out to pat it lightly. 'I had a cousin once who had strawberry blonde hair just like yours, and she was bright as her hair, too.'
I had to admit that I was not feeling particularly bright, and asked her if she had seen any hoof marks or cart tracks.
'I'm afraid I didn't, dear. The ground was dry, you know, and it takes something pretty heavy to make a dent.'
I found it hard to imagine the turf of the moor dry and hard, but I had to defer to her greater knowledge of the place. I then asked her about the precise location of the hedgehog's unfortunate accident. I offered her my map, but she waved it away, saying that her eyes found such fine work a difficulty, so instead she described her route subjectively—the hills and flats, a tor gone by, a stream crossed, the morning sun in her eyes—and I eventually decided on a stone circle below a rise that seemed to coincide with her description. I folded up the map and replaced it in the breast pocket of my coat. She seemed not to have finished with me, however, and sat with her head at an angle and an expectant look on her face. I thought perhaps she was waiting for my final judgement, which I did not think I could give her.
'I have to admit, I don't know enough about the habits of hedgehogs to say if I agree with your ideas,' I began. Her face instantly cleared and she began to nod in understanding.
'Then you won't know the real question here, and that is, 'What was Tiggy doing there?' '
'I'm sorry, you'll have to explain that.'
'Tiggy doesn't live out on the moor, dear. Tiggy likes the woods and the soft places.'
'And there aren't any?'
'Not in two or three miles of where I found him.'
'What if some animal had carried it? Whatever gave it the bite, for example, or a big hawk?'
'Well, that's possible, I suppose, dear,' she said, sounding very dubious. 'But I was wondering if it wasn't more likely that Tiggy was accidentally taking a ride on whatever it was run him down.'
THIRTEEN
—A Book of Dartmoor
When I took my leave from Elizabeth Chase, the good witch of Mary Tavy, my mind, to borrow a phrase from Baring-Gould's memoirs, was in a ferment. It was still only midday, and Lew House little more than two hours away; I decided to take a look at the place where she had found the injured Tiggy.
I found it without difficulty—there are not so many stone circles on the moor to make for a confusion—but I was not quite sure what to make of it. The site was typical of its kind, upright hunks of granite arranged in a rough circle on a piece of relatively flat ground and surrounded by the moor's low turf, broken here and there by stones and bracken. A double row of stones (one of Randolph Pethering's 'Druid ceremonial passages') lay in the near distance, and a moorland track (the Abbot's Way?) ran alongside.
As Elizabeth Chase had indicated, the most curious part of the hedgehog affair was why the animal should have been out here in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree: The little beasts are lovers of woods and the resultant soft leaf mould under which to take cover, a far cry from this blasted heath, which even a badger would have been hard put to carve into a home.
I pulled from Red's saddlebag the cheese and pickle sandwich and bottle of ale that I had asked for that morning at the Mary Tavy inn, and carried them over to a stone that had once, by the looks of the hollow in the ground at one end, been upright. I laid out my sandwich and opened the bottle with the bottle-opening blade of my pocket knife, and ate my lunch, enjoying the sun and my prehistoric surroundings, and most especially the delightful image of a hitchhiking hedgehog.
An almost lighthearted air of holiday had set in. After all, I had more or less completed my assignment, with an unlikely but glittering gem to carry back to Lew Trenchard and a mere handful of houses between here and the edge of the moor at which to carry out the formalities of my enquiries. My sense of taste had returned, I could very nearly breathe the air, and the sun was actually shining. I stretched out with my head on one stone and my boots on another, and rested for ten minutes before gathering my luncheon debris and swinging back up into the saddle.
'Home, Red,' I said to him, and endured a few hundred yards of his trot before pulling him back to his usual amble.
This time when he shied, I was ready for him. Unfortunately.
Given a negative stimulus of sufficient strength, one can train even the most stubborn animal to avoid a given
