It’s been a sweltering hot day. This evening, I gave up on my landscape gardening with concrete, mortar and shovel, and set off for the badger sett across the river. The sun glared in my eyes and sweat trickled down my back as I walked along the track from the village, but it was pleasantly cool where it dropped towards the river through a narrow belt of trees.
As I crossed the bridge, the pair of swans which had nested in a pool beside the river were feeding at the water’s edge with their five cygnets, and house martins were zooming about collecting insects.
I walked along the river bank, climbed the style and crossed the meadow to the edge of the wood, looking for the blue haze under the trees as I approached the fence, but there was none. As I crossed the barbed wire, I saw that the blue bells had all gone to seed – a year gone by without seeing Quesse Wood at its best! I felt a pang of disappointment, like going to a museum to see a work of art only to find that the exhibition had been withdrawn and replaced by another of no interest. Never mind, it will be back again next year …
I crossed the boggy ground at the mouth of the valley and as I climbed the bank at the far side, a tawny owl gave a warning call – an early riser as the sun was still well above the horizon, brilliant sunbeams dappling the trees and ground foliage, in which uncountable numbers of insects danced. I quietly made my way along the side of the valley until I was opposite the badger sett, and settled down to examine it closely with the binoculars. I could see the hole from which the badgers always emerged first last year, but it did not seem very well used, and I was surprised by how high the vegetation was, making it difficult to see many of the other holes.
I stood looking at the familiar signs of badger activity around me – flattened vegetation, small holes in the earth where edible morsels had been pursued and extracted – and listening to the bird song. Not a sound from the tawny owls, but plenty from blackbird and robin, collared dove and magpie. After a while, I heard the calls announcing a ground predator, at which I used to look around for a fox, but I have so seldom seen the object of the bird’s alarm that I took little notice. Then into the field of view of my binoculars stepped two such objects.
They seemed like father and son, and while the younger man carried on walking along the woodland edge, the other crossed the barbed wire fence and examined the upper holes of the badger sett. He had on a cloth cap, carried a long stick, and had an appearance, a manner of movement, a body language which expressed ownership. I looked at his lined face through the binoculars and could not say that I recognized him, but I thought of a day about twenty years ago when I met the farmer who owned the next wood along, and talked to him about the badgers that lived in it.
On that day, the farmer talked to me about the wood in a most friendly way, and told me that I could watch the badgers there whenever I liked. Two weeks later, I was crossing the field towards the wood when I saw him on a tractor, and walked in his direction to greet him. He saw me coming, and immediately started towards me, raving about trespass in highly agricultural language. By the time that we were close enough for him to recognize me and for me to get a word in edgewise, he had said too much to retract, and my reminder of our previous meeting was met only by a warning to stay off his land or else! He was holding a thumb bloodied by an accident with his machinery, thus accounting for his ill temper, so I did not hold it against him, and merely made sure that when I went to watch the badgers in his wood, I was myself unobserved.
He finished his examination of the sett, re-crossed the barbed wire and set off across the potato field. I waited for a while, but there would be no badgers coming from the sett for a long while after such a disturbance, so I quietly made my way back down to the river. As I walked back along the river bank, the tawny owls started hooting to each other from the darkening wood above me.