Armado

It snuffles along at dusk turning over stones for grubs and roots, its long claws doing the digging its blunt face cannot. At any alarm it tucks head-to-tail into a sphere and simply waits, and most predators, after a while of rolling it about and gnawing the seams, give the whole exercise up as a bad job. It drinks little, wringing moisture from what it eats, and marks its shallow burrow with a musk that says, plainly, that the hole is spoken for and the tenant is not worth the trouble.