“Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”, those immortal words spoken by Batman in the 1970’s TV depiction of the comic book hero, came back to me this morning as I tried with some difficulty to rescue a hedgehog. Let me explain!
As a kid I was an avid follower of Batman and Robin and their surreal and semi comic antics and I remember with a smile that particular episode when Batman finds a large round black smoking bomb, with the word bomb written on the side, left by The Joker.
As he tries in vain to dispose of it on a busy fishing port, holding it aloft he runs from point to point and every which way he turns he comes across people of virtue he can’t risk throwing the bomb towards, a brass band, a group of nuns walking down the street, singing school children in a park, a baby in a pram and an old fisherman in a boat just off the quay, until finally he finds an open piece of sea and let’s it go, just in time.
My hedgehog situation was a bit like that but not as dangerous! On the way to work, I had set off extra early as I had to make sure I was at an event on time where I was giving a presentation. In the pitch darkness this late November morning, when all hidgiwicks should be getting ready or already be in hibernation, one walks across the road in front of me as I accelerate up a steep hill, a few miles from my village.
I glimpse its small form in my headlights and realise at once it is in dire trouble as each side of the road is concreted up to several feet on either side for quite a distance. It had come down a steep ramp from a large garden and unless it went back up or was a mountaineering hog it was stuck and likely to be squashed. I had to stop.
So, I parked at the top of the bank and leapt from the car but he seemed to be walking fast in the opposite direction, I gave chase in my posh shoes and suit and tie and caught him and tried to get a hold. His prickles felt like little scalpels, so finely sharp! I grit my teeth and held him with a handkerchief as a thin glove as he rolls into a perfect ball covering all of my hand and stretched out fingers, balancing there. He gives no appearance at wanting to be ‘saved’, quite the opposite, in fact he looks disgruntled as only a hedgehog can.
Having secured my hog and being in a bit of a hurry as I really couldn’t be late, I looked for the nearest place to release him into safety. There wasn’t one! I pushed him up a grassy slope under a hedge and he rolled back down and I had to catch him. I considered the driveway he had come down but then see the whole thing being repeated in short time. I tried a small front garden of a terrace house near my car and decide it’s too close to the main road, there was just no obvious safe place to put him where he wouldn’t quickly be back on the road, some days you just can’t get rid of a hog!
I considered taking him in the car all the way to work and then giving him to an animal sanctuary or releasing him there in our office grounds, but that seemed extreme and he would be waiting hungry and confined for hours all the time losing body fat. I felt he needed to stay somewhere near his own patch and to get back out there quickly and feed and find a place to sleep.
Eventually and reluctantly I ran down to the very bottom of the bank and beyond the apron of concrete road channelling where the land gave way on one side to fields and a golf course; perfect, I ran in a hundred yards along a footpath and pointed him in the semi dark toward the distant sea and hectares of open and wooded land, perfect hog territory. Slowly he unfolded himself and toddled off in the generally right direction without so much as a backward glance.
By the time I returned to my car I was 25 minutes later than planned and I noticed my shoes and trouser bottoms were muddied. Then, as I sped off towards my distant calling, I reflected on why I had gone to so much trouble.
Would I have done so in the distant past when it was common to see them squashed on the road and we would come across them often in gardens and parks as they were so abundant? Was it their modern-day scarcity and decline, their relative value, now they had gone from thirty million to one in the space of half my life time, that motivated me? Or was it just an innate animal instinct to save an animal in potential danger coming out? After all, like most people I do love hedgehogs.
Surely it was just it was always and is still now worth helping, at a little bit of your own expense, another little being in trouble? It might have cost me maybe 15 minutes in the end, and I did make it on time, just, but it didn’t cost a life. Whatever the bigger picture of the state of nature, every life counts, human or animal.
Comments