Chewing the Cud by Dick King-Smith Page A

animal. His coloring is beautiful, varying from a mahogany to a red so pale as almost to be orange. And there is beauty in his moving, not drip-tongued, drop-eared, draggle-tailed, and half a field in front of thirty couple of hounds,but in the full joy of his freedom, drifting across the ground as light as a hen's feather, his brush fluffed, his ears cocked, and his sharp eyes bright.
    Early one fine morning I drew the bedroom curtains and there he sat on the lawn below, front paws neatly together, white-tipped brush curled around him, muzzle pointed inquiringly up to my window. I don't remember my reaction, can't recall if it was hate — get the gun — or love. What a picture. I only know that when I walked out into the empty garden, there upon the steps of the sundial was a steaming pile of fresh scats, as a memento.

    Our ambivalent attitude towards foxes didn't apply to our badgers because they did our livestock no harm. Not that they would have turned their snouts up at our birds if a fowl-house door had been left open one night, but it just didn't happen. The only damage they did was occasionally to roll in standing corn, leaving billiard table—sized playpens of thoroughly flattened stalks.
    The badgers lived in the Wood. One of the large mounds held a complex of rooms and tunnels driven perhaps ten feet deep under the roots of a little grove of elder and holly, the bark of several of the trees scored vertically by the cleaning of long front claws, and the ground around worn bare and smooth by the passing of many feet over many years. The set (or burrow) had seven entry holes, and the colony, we judged, was a large one, perhaps of several families living communally. Sometimes we were wakened from deep sleep by the racket going on in the Wood, twoboars wrangling maybe, or cubs at mock-fighting play, a cacophony of high-pitched staccato squeaks and chattering.
    At about this time my brother, Tony, had a pet badger called Wilhelmina. She had been given to him as an orphaned cub: a little sow with a particularly wide strip of white down the center of her face, a stripe so wide as to distinguish her forever from all other badgers.
    She was just like a little bluish kitten, probably no more than ten days old. This extreme youth may well have been significant as regards her reactions. Later I heard the story of another, older cub that was given to a doctor who was crazy about badgers. It lived in his garage beside his car and was at all times ill humored, guaranteed to bite everyone and anyone. Denied this pleasure by evasive action, iteventually contrived to make use of a handy pair of steps to climb in through the open window of the car, which it then eviscerated, ripping the interior to small shreds.
    Wilhelmina by contrast was biddable, intelligent, and affectionate. She used her teeth, but only in love bites. Standing upright, so that once she was part-grown, gum boots were no defense, she would bite Tony in the fleshy part of the back of the thigh just above the knee, first in one leg, then in the other.
    At first it was all hard work, bottling such a small baby. And in the early days Tony must have worried that once she was really mobile, she would light out for the wild, and he trained her to a lead. But it wasn't necessary. She reacted in every way like a domestic animal, though the nocturnal habits of her species caused her to be sleepy by day and only really to be wakeful towards evening.
    At that time my brother lived with our parents, now removed to Bitton Hill, a large Victorian house that had plenty of outbuildings, and Wilhelmina slept her days away in a small loose box that had once been home to a donkey.
    But as soon as Tony arrived back from work, the badger would chatter like a magpie until let out, to greet him with the double bite and then to rush off with the terriers for a game on the lawns that could only be called rough-and-tumble. Accepted entirely by the dogs, Wilhelmina would knock them flying