The Hedgehog and the Lost Acorn

The hedge along the bottom of the allotments was a good hedge, thick with hawthorn and bramble, and the best nest in it belonged to a hedgehog called Pip.

Pip did not collect things. Hedgehogs, as a rule, do not, having no pockets and no patience for it. But she had one acorn. She had found it in the spring, green and tight in its cup, and rolled it home with her nose for no reason she could have given, and it had lived in the corner of her nest ever since, under the driest leaf. Over the summer it had gone a good deep brown, like a conker, and it was the only object Pip owned, and she was fond of it.

On Tuesday night it was not there.

She had been turning the nest over, which is a thing you do in autumn, pulling out the flat leaves and pushing in new ones, and when it was all fresh and rustling she went to the corner to check on the acorn, and the corner was only a corner.

She looked at it for a while, in case it was a matter of looking.

Then she went out to find it.

The allotments at night were dark and orderly. The bean poles stood in their rows with nothing on them. Somebody’s watering can lay on its side by the tap, catching the little bit of moon there was. Pip went along the bottom of the hedge with her nose down, and looked under every leaf she had pulled out, and found a beetle, and a bottle top, and a leaf shaped almost exactly like an acorn but not, and did not find the acorn.

“Lost something?” said a voice from above. It was the wood pigeon, who slept in the hawthorn and was always glad of an excuse.

“An acorn,” said Pip.

“There’s thousands,” said the pigeon. “Under the oak. Help yourself.”

“Not that sort,” said Pip, and went on.

She looked by the compost. She looked under the shed. She went, in the end, as far as the oak itself, at the top corner, and the pigeon was right, there were thousands, lying in the grass, all brown, all polished, all exactly the same. Not one of them was hers. She could not have said how she knew. She knew.

The moon had moved. There is a point in any search where the thing you are looking for is less in your mind than the thought of your own bed, and Pip had reached it. She went home along the bottom of the hedge, not looking any more, just going.

At the mouth of the nest she stopped.

Something was in the way. Something small and low, in the trodden earth just outside the door, where she had gone in and out that very evening, twice, with armfuls of leaves. She put her nose to it.

It was the acorn. It was on its side, half pressed into the soft ground, and it had been there, she supposed, since she carried the first lot of old leaves out, and she had walked round it, or very nearly on it, a dozen times, in the dark, thinking of other things.

And it had split. Only a little. There was a crack down one side of the brown shell, and out of the crack, no longer than a whisker, white as a root is white, came a root.

Pip looked at it for a long time.

She could have taken it in. She thought about the dry corner and the driest leaf, and then about the crack, and the white thread going down, and she pushed a little earth over it with her nose, gently, the way you pull a blanket up, and left it where it was.

Then she went in, and turned round twice in the new leaves, and lay down.

The allotments were quiet. The watering can lay on its side, holding its bit of moon.

And by the door of the nest, under a paw’s worth of earth, the acorn went on doing what it had decided to do, very slowly, all night long, while the hedgehog slept beside it.