It's a children's book about small animals that act like humans so everything should be fluffy and cute, right? Well, leave it to an experienced hunter and park ranger to make dangers terrifyingly realistic from an animal's perspective... or plain creepy if human-like behavior gets combined with animalistic brutality.
The animals, especially as per the original illustrations, are written to have unchanged appearances and physiology from their real-world counterparts, yet their behavior is very human-like and often on the disturbing side. Examples include:
An amoral swamp rat who doesn't mind ducks getting killed by hunters because they're stupid enough to get lured by their tame counterparts, and who also orchestrates the genocide of an entire grebe colony just to get another bunch of hostile birds out of his way.
Birds of all available species gathering to draw out and lynch an eagle owl for killing their young at night (the idea is revisited in The Hungry Bear Cub).
A pine marten who sounds like a cold-blooded bounty hunter.
Red Mouth. A viper lurking in the field, she would hypnotize small birds like sparrows with her unmoving stare until they get weak and fall off the branch, then swoop in to devour them whole.
Red Mouth's death. Once Quickfoot has injured her and broken her spine, she escapes to her hole. He alerts the nearby ants which invade her lair and eat her alive. At his request. That's right, the otherwise peaceful and docile hedgehog protagonist conspired to have his enemy eaten alive by ants.
The kidnapping of the two by the golden eagle, the aerial battle and falling into the swamp.
The golden eagle was planning to drop them on the rocks to break Sluggy's shell. This is Truth in Television.
Great crested grebes are timid, duck-sized birds. Pretty hapless for humans, right? Obviously not for two turtles, a hedgehog and a rodent, to whom the whole thing looks like a full-scale battle.
To an ornithologist, great crested grebes look like sleek, red-eyed punk rock stars dancing around the lake. To a rodent-sized animal? Horned devils with Red Eyes, Take Warning, especially when they get territorial.
One illustration shows the water rat jumping onto a grebe's back and biting its neck. To a kid it looks cool, like one of those scenes with the hero jumping onto an enemy vehicle to hijack it. To an adult? Terrifying. Especially if you happen to be a bird enthusiast and fond of grebes.
Terrifying as they seem, the grebes themselves become subjects to this when Sharpnose sends the herons to raid their colony en masse. Doubly so if you know that this particular species is endangered and that nowadays bird photographers are forbidden from sharing the location of even a single nest for fear of scaring the birds away from the area.
Sluggy almost getting crushed to death in the jaws of Mram the she-wolf. And that's after she spent a day lost and flipped on her back, courtesy of the fox.
The forest birds forming a Lynch Mob against the eagle owl. Leading them is the black woodpecker. At the end, the owl is half-dead and barely manages to drag himself away, until Mram finishes him off.
Quickfoot comes across a ferret which stores live frogs in his lair by biting off their motor nerves to paralyze them. What's unsettling in the wild animal talking about nerves, like he really is a surgeon as the chapter title calls him.
