My hedgehog of happiness!
It’s the surprise spring bestseller that’ll leave pawprints on your heart – one man’s enchanting account of how a tiny bundle of prickles called Ninna turned his life around
IT WAS a beautiful late afternoon in spring, vibrating with life – the setting a paradise of green hills, calming valleys and lush fields bordered by trees. But my mission was an agonising one, and the idyllic surroundings could not have been more at odds with my own deep sense of unease.
There was a to-and-fro of butterflies, dragonflies, bees, birds. The busy harmony of the world around me was like a gently insistent argument: here is a perfect place; this is the right thing to do.
Treading carefully along the edge of a field, past some rose bushes, I came to the spot I had previously picked: a long-disused children’s log cabin. Beside it there were blackberry hedges and a stack of wood – perfect hiding places for the little hedgehog in my arms.
I went inside the cabin, put down the box I had been carrying her in and opened the hatch. I left a little food in the shade outside and walked back the way I had come.
In the previous year or so, I had released many hedgehogs back into the wild, so I knew that at the precise moment they realised they were free, their sheer delight was like an advert for the wonders of life; their little eyes sparkling, their every quill and hair seeming to tremble with joy. But that didn’t mean I could bear to watch.
Darkness fell within an hour or two and I returned to the clearing, lighting my way with a torch. Ninna, my first little hedgehog was gone. I never saw her again. Where could she be today? In what corner of the wood is she smiling at the moon? Is she hungry? Thirsty? Does she remember me?
I know I had fallen into humanising her, but for months on end I had treated little Ninna like a daughter. I had thought that keeping her and protecting her was an act of love. Only later did I realise, after much struggle, that love is also understanding, accepting, and respecting another being’s nature. And that true love doesn’t ask for anything in return. AS ODD as it might be for a grown man to pay emotional tribute to a hedgehog, Ninna changed my life for ever. Yet this isn’t the story of a man who suddenly found purpose when he devoted his life to animals. I was already a vet, specialising in cows. Gynaecology and obstetrics were my forte.
But as the years passed, I had become oddly dissatisfied with my work and with my life. I felt sad and directionless. On a whim, I started working at a small animal clinic a couple of times a week.
One day as I arrived, Andrea, the head of the clinic, pointed to a little cardboard box. Nestled i n the corner was a tiny hedgehog, its eyes closed and with pink, hairless skin. The spines were white and soft, a bit dishevelled. They started just behind her tiny ears and ran all the way down her back.
I took the hedgehog and set it in the palm of my hand. I paused to look at its front paws: its slender toes made them look like little hands. She weighed less than an ounce – a little orphan, found by a woman in her garden.
I returned to check on her the next day. I could tell something was badly wrong. I found her cold and whimpering – a constant, tiny wail. It was the chill of life slipping away and death closing in.
I realised I was all that little hedgehog had in the world and I knew I had to save her.
I filled a hot water bottle with warm water and put it beside her. Then I rushed to my laptop – I didn’t know a thing about hedgehogs – and started to search online for help. The first thing I learned was to feed the baby hedgehog milk formula for puppies, and to do it carefully.
I brought a syringe filled with formula to her mouth and fed her the milk drop by careful drop. It took me a good 20 minutes – and she needed it every two or three hours.
It was an exhausting routine, but somehow my desire to help the little creature was so great it cancelled out the fatigue. With proper nutrition, it wasn’t too long before the little one started to thrive.
She slept and ate, ate and slept. I watched her, fascinated and moved. She’d lie on her side, relaxed. Her tiny mouth seemed to form a smile. Usually she crossed her front legs under her chin, the two paws clasped
I was all that she had in the world... I just had to save her
ke little hands. Often when she woke up, she’d stretch nd yawn. She held her front legs ut and at the same time opened her mouth wide and you could see that ttle strip of tongue unfurl, thin as a ose petal. Her nose was a little jewel. With hose tiny nostrils so clearly defined it was as if the hand of a master minia-turist had painted them, only better. As the days passed, fur began to row all over her body, then the dark quills on her back, and the little hedgehog whom I named Ninna ecame my constant preoccupation. She continued to grow and regained er health, whereas I, after so many l sleepless nights and days spent acing between her and my job, was physically wrecked. Like any parent of a new baby, I earned for a night of uninterrupted leep. But I was obsessed. Even when my girlfriend Greta reminded me we’d planned an overight trip to the coast, I insisted we ake Ninna with us. It took me five minutes to pack my ag with a few essentials, and an our-and-a-half to pack for Ninna: her age, her cardboard house, her water nd food bowls, her blanket, a towel,
her meals, her hay, a roll of paper towels. When we finally got on the road, we were flagged down by two police men who announced they were giving me a ticket for having bald tyres. Then one of them peered into the passenger seat. ‘ What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at Ninna, on Greta’s knees under a blanket. ‘It’s a baby hedgehog,’ I answered. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said to the other officer, who was leaning against his motorcycle.
Their heads craning through the window, both of them looked at Ninna in awe as I told them the whole story. They listened intently – then spared me the ticket. Thank you, Ninna!
That night, after we had a nice dinner and a romantic walk along the coast, Greta went to bed. But not me. I had a plan.
When I was sure my girlfriend was asleep, I grabbed a hat I always kept in the car, put Ninna inside it and tiptoed out of the apartment, down to the pier and sat down. It was late, there weren’t many people around apart from a couple of fishermen in the distance. My little Ninna’s face popped out of the hat, her quick shining eyes looked around; her nose sniffing the air in search of stories. ‘Ninna, this is the sea,’ I whispered to her. ‘Without me you would never have seen it.’ We stayed there a long time, lulled by the music of the waves and enveloped in the salty air, before creeping back to the apartment. The next day we headed home but I had learned two things: hedgehogs can get car sick and get you off police fines. But what I hadn’t yet learned was that I was humanising Ninna too much. I had fallen into thinking of her as my baby – and that wasn’t good. AS NINNA got bigger I built her a pen outside, but after a while I started finding her walking anxiously around the perimeter, as if she were looking for a way out of a prison.
And so, armed with a good flashlight, I took up the habit of letting her roam outside the yard, down the dirt road that ran through the fields to the edge of the woods.
Ninna would hunt, sniffing out beetles and earwigs and chomping them in the dark.
On one of those walks, Ninna was ahead of me, following a scent at the edge of the forest, when a loud grunt reverberated through the air. I had never heard a sound like it. A chill ran over my skin.
I looked in the direction of the growl and my blood ran cold. An enormous badger was running – really running – in Ninna’s direction, while she continued oblivious.
The badger was upon her. But by then, so was I. In a flash, I reached out and grabbed my little hedgehog and spun around, turning my back to the badger, holding Ninna close to my chest to protect her. I saw the badg- er’s jaws splayed in our direction, and the flash of its teeth.
It grunted again and snorted, and I staggered back along the path. Panting, I listened to the frenetic rhythm of Ninna’s heart next to mine, and I realised how much I loved that little creature.
But hedgehogs, when they’re strong enough to live on their own, must be returned to their natural habitat, and in Ninna’s case that presented me with a huge conflict.
Once I did a test, and it was agonising. I let Ninna leave me behind on a walk one night, and then stopped and closed my eyes – only to find her still there when I opened them again, turned toward me, waiting for me. I ran to her and picked her up, delighted to still have her with me.
But gradually, Ninna’s appetite decreased and she started to become restless and agitated at night.
On c e , I we n t over to calm her down and she tried to bite the hand I was holding out. She was regaining her natural instincts.
She wanted to leave, but by then I’d left it too late – it was autumn and nearly time to hibernate.
I found another hedgehog in my garden one night, scared of my dogs and very likely too small to survive the coming hibernation. I called him Ninno and took him in too.
One day, it struck me to put the two hedgehogs together in Ninna’s pen. I was curious to see how they’d act. I left them alone for a few moments, then returned to find Ninno in a ball and Ninna, all serious and concentrated, sliding her nose underneath him and flipping him in the air, bouncing him all over the pen.
It probably wasn’t the season for romance anyway.
Even so, rescuing another little creature in a pitiful state and gradually watching it come back to life was an amazing feeling, and I knew that I’d found my calling. I developed an idea about setting up a centre to help hedgehogs in t rouble, and I was finally able to turn my house, in north-west Italy, into a specialist hedgehog division of a local wildlife recovery centre. cW
We named it the La Ninna Hedgehog Rescue Centre.
The first patient was in a horrible condition, a very thin female with a serious case of pneumonia and a nasty infestation of ticks. Greta and I could have spent our Saturday night having fun together. Instead, we spent it pulling the ticks off this sick little hedgehog. The days passed, and the patient improved. The first hedgehog to arrive at the La Ninna Centre was safe and sound.
Step by step, patient by patient, the centre grew, but when spring came, I knew I finally had to let Ninna go.
She was starting to eat less, would huff crankily at the other hedgehogs and no one dared get close to her any more.
And so I picked that idyllic afternoon to take her up the spot by the old children’s cabin and opened up her hutch for one last time. As darkness fell, and it was clear she had gone, I returned to the car strangely happy. Not for myself, but for Ninna.
In the weeks and months afterwards, I threw myself into work at the centre. Every hedgehog that comes through its doors has a place in my heart. Each leaves a mark – and I recognise Ninna in the eyes of every one of them.
She is all hedgehogs and all hedgehogs are Ninna.
That unkempt little hoglet that fell at my feet helped me find a part of myself that had been waiting to burst out.
Every once in a while I return to the edge of the woods and sit on the grass and call out ‘Ninna… Ninaaaaa’.
On certain magical nights, the kind stolen from fairy tales, when the trees open up to the wind’s caress, somehow she arrives. Soft, like the music of the angels, in my heart.
An edited excerpt from A Handful Of Happiness: Ninna, The Tiny Hedgehog With A Big Heart by Massimo Vacchetta with Antonella Tomaselli, published by Quercus, priced £14.99. Offer price £11.24 (25 per cent discount) until May 5, 2018. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, P&P is free on orders over £15.
When spring came, I knew I finally had to let Ninna go