The Myth of Wile E

About Those Hedgehog Hunters

You've probably been thinking, "Hedgehog hunters? What sort of hunters are they?" I sure would be.

Then again, maybe you weren't wondering about the hedgehog hunters at all. Maybe you got hung up on that bit about the "birders"—alarmed by the notion of nouns getting verbed, and then re-nouned.

Either way, I can't say I blame you.

Well, about those hedgehog hunters. The very first time I ever saw the hunting party—a man, a woman, two small kids of ambiguous sex, and a dog—they were sneaking through the woods all hunched over the way people walk under a helicopter. They all—well, everyone except the dog—carried knives and buckets and were peering under trees and ferns, checking and rechecking their route against a hand-drawn map. The kids' faces and hands were streaked purple from berries, and their hair was confettied with leaf crumbs and pine needles and maple tree whirligigs. You'd think they'd smashed open a piñata full of autumn. I tried to say hello, but they froze and then took off like shy forest creatures. Everyone except the dog, who paused first to pee on a tree stump and wag his tail at me before bounding away.

A few days later I saw them all again and pretty much the same thing happened, except this time they dropped their map as they ran.

Curious what sort of treasure could be buried in my woods, I picked up the map. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make much sense of it. It seemed more concerned with natural landmarks than the usual map things like roads and bridges. In one corner of the map was a cluster of triangles that seemed to represent Murphy's Christmas Tree Farm, a place that had been abandoned many years before I bought my home, and now had spruces the size of telephone poles. On another part of the map someone had drawn a jagged circle that seemed to mark the burn area from the last forest fire.

Dark clouds were gathering overhead, and I was worried that when the hunters returned, their map would be nothing but soggy pulp. Luckily, I found an empty plastic water bottle and placed the rolled-up map carefully inside it like a message tossed into the ocean.

I left it where the hunting party had dropped it, next to a huge hollow tree. By morning it was gone. (The bottle, I mean, not the tree. Trees tend to stay put, more or less.)

The next time I came across the hunting party, they froze as if playing Red Light, Green Light—but they didn't run. I saw they had their map. They saw that I saw. They nodded shyly. The dog decided to investigate me. Wagging his tail, he bounded up to me and sniffed at my shoes and pant legs.

The man whistled, but the dog ignored him, too busy analyzing my socks. Probably this was the doggy version of looking up my personal information on a supercomputer database. Apparently there were no red flags or outstanding warrants, because the dog sat down and raised a paw for me to shake. I hesitated. While I liked dogs, I didn't like to shake with them. Who knew what you might be agreeing to?

"Pesha!" the man said sternly. The dog sulked back to his family, leaving our deal unresolved.

I asked the family what they were looking for.

The older of the two kids mumbled something to the rest of the family, and there was a hushed debate in a language I'd never heard before. It sounded like an old recording played backwards.

Finally, the man and woman nodded to the older kid, who I was fifty-eight percent certain was a girl. Her clothes were several sizes too big, rolled up into thick cuffs at the ankles and wrists, and her dark hair resembled a messy version of Moe's from The Three Stooges.

The girl said something to me that sounded like hyetch hocs.

"Hedge . . . hogs?" I asked.

The girl nodded shyly.

"You're hunting for hedgehogs?"

The girl nodded again.

"Hmmm," I said, secretly hoping they did not manage to catch any. I mean, it's not like there weren't plenty of other things to eat just lying around all over the place. To demonstrate, I reached into my pocket and offered the family a handful of my homemade hickory nut/dried berry trail mix.

In return, the girl held something out to me like she was presenting a daisy. It was a kind of pale butterscotch-colored mushroom. Instead of gills, its underside was covered with what looked like hundreds of tiny pointed bristles or teeth. I was a bit wary about the idea of eating something that might bite back, but I smiled and thanked the hunters anyway.

A week or two later I saw them hunching through the underbrush again, and I asked them if they were still hunting hedgehogs.

Once again, they conferred, before the older kid shook her head and said to me something that sounded like vatterfalse.

It took me a minute. "Waterfalls?"

The girl nodded and smiled. She was at that age when some of her teeth were missing and some were growing back askew, giving her a jack-o'-lantern grin.

"Hmm," I said. I pointed off to the northwest, where I knew of a stream that had occasional pretentions of being a river. It had some rapids here and there, or maybe not "rapids" so much as "moseys." There was sometimes a teensy bit of a waterfall where the stream trickled over a pile of rocks. Granted, it was no Niagara Falls, but you could probably give an action figure a terrifying ride in a paper boat if that was your thing.

The girl squinted off in the direction I was pointing and said something to her parents. They said something back. They all sounded a little skeptical, but maybe trust gets lost in translation.

A few hours later I was out picking apples when I saw them again. They were in very good spirits. I asked if they had found the waterfall, such that it was.

"Mini vatterfalse!" the older kid said.

I told her I was sorry it was so small.

She shook her head. "Mi-yenny."

Then she grinned at me with all her seventeen-and-three-quarters teeth and showed me her pail, which was so full of some kind of tendrilly white fungi she could hardly lift it. Everyone else's pails looked equally weighed down. Even the younger kid's, who was maybe five years old and barely as tall as a fire hydrant. The dog did not have a pail, but he seemed elated too, bouncing around like a sports fan who believed he'd helped his team win the pennant.

The father made a big production of giving me one of the tendrilly things. It looked like a Koosh ball. I wasn't sure what he intended for me to do with it, but he rubbed his stomach in the universal sign for "good eating."

Then the parents glanced at each other and nudged the girl, prompting her. It seemed she had been designated Family Spokesperson.

The girl shyly said to me, "True fools?" The whole family's eyes turned to me expectantly.

"True fools," I agreed sympathetically, unsure if I was included in this assessment.

The girl shook her head. "True fools?" she said again, slower this time. She swooped her hand in the general direction of the woods, like a game show spokesmodel trying to sell me some trees.

I shrugged and shook my head, an answer that seemed to cover a lot of bases.

They sighed, and moved on.

Each time I saw them it was pretty much the same. I'd ask what they were hunting. The older kid would give me some crazy answer, like "yellow feet and black trumpets," or "lobsters and oysters," or "hens and chickens," or even "cauliflower." I wasn't sure if the poor girl was touched in the head, or if she was just having me on. Then she would ask me, "True fools?" and everyone's eyes would get really big as they waited for me to say something. And I would shrug. Because on matters of foolishness, who was I to judge?