A hedgehog is about the size of two cupped hands, round-backed and short-legged, with a pointed, whiskered snout, small dark eyes, and short round ears. Its back and sides are covered in thousands of short, sharp spines, banded brown and cream; its face and belly are covered in coarse brown fur. Threatened, it rolls itself into a tight ball of spines with nothing showing.

It trots along with a rolling, purposeful shuffle, faster than it looks, and snuffles, snorts, and grunts loudly as it feeds, so that a hedgehog in a garden at night sounds much larger than it is. It smells earthy.

Hedgehogs live in hedges, garden edges, orchards, and wood margins wherever there are worms and beetles: throughout the farmed country of the Basins and on the terraces and orchard walls of the Folds.

A hedgehog wanders far each night, eating slugs, snails, worms, beetles, caterpillars, fallen fruit, and the odd egg. It is solitary, unafraid, and slow to learn danger. In autumn it fattens, and through winter it sleeps rolled in a nest of leaves under a hedge, a woodpile, or a terrace step.

Young are born in summer, four or five to a litter, with soft white spines under the skin that harden within hours. They follow their mother in a line on her rounds. A hedgehog may live four or five years if it survives its first winter.

They give the garden its best pest-keeper and nothing else. Some poor households in the Basins bake them in clay for food. They are harmless, though their spines carry fleas.

Halflings leave a dish of water or milk at the store-room door so that the hedgehogs will keep the garden; a fold commons whose hedgehogs are thriving is thought to be keeping its proportions well. Basin Humans say hedgehogs steal milk from sleeping cows and carry fruit off on their spines, neither of which they do.