After Brock (37 page)

Soon there could be no doubt. Here were three similarly shaped and formed holes, but slightly smaller, more like six inches diameter. At the end of one he could make out a descending passageway; no doubt if you edged along through it, you would arrive at the very same chamber as through the first opening. Nat would examine the first more closely but from an oblique angle. Remembering his successes with London foxes, he was wary of putting himself about too comprehensively, and was faithful to his wariness even at the cost of uncomfortable bodily contortions.

All round the hole, he saw, was a pattern of parallel lines, the work indubitably of the same sharp claws responsible for the pile of earth. Then, raising his head he saw the same pattern repeated, only much more deeply etched, on the rock fissure itself. Next he noticed several little bundles of dry grasses, placed by the entrance surely deliberately. Why, I'm an archaeologist but of the living, said Nat to himself, or a discoverer of some remote tribe, and somehow this was a pleasing thing to think, when all these months, until the Great Plan occurred to him, he'd been feeling rather bereft of satisfying pictures of himself. (His good A's had made strangely little difference here.)

How orderly, how well cared-for it all was. Nat had arrived, he felt, at a secure outpost of true civilisation kept up (over centuries, not to say millennia) in territory that – those peaks so stark now against the gathering dark – was capable of turning inimical, hostile.

The evening was virtually windless. And warm too, especially considering the altitude of where he was. Good, very good! No elemental reasons for any anxiety… I shall shift myself over to a slab of stone on that little rise just there, said Nat to himself and maintain a position that allows my scent to float way, way above the levels of the animals emerging from the bunker beneath. And I'll just wait and wait and wait.

Which is what he did. From where he was stationed he could look down onto a line of weather-stunted hawthorn trees march-ing, evenly spaced and still laden with berries, towards a little stream now silvering in the valley as dusk perceptibly thickened. What remained of the day's sun was blocked from his view by a gaunt, desolate-seeming ridge on his left. It was a waiting, in-between time. Still too light apparently for these badgers underground, preparing for their night activities well below, and dark enough for natural objects that only a short time ago had seemed comfortingly dependable in their distinctness to be cam-ouflaged.

What is it that I really am doing up here in the Berwyns? Nat asked himself as, oddly, he hadn't done most of that day. Have I some deeper purpose behind all my carefully worked-out strate-gies and my flight into the unknown? Perhaps something you only attain when you've broken free of other people's definitions of your self and what you can or cannot do: the getting of grades, the finding of jobs, the building-up of businesses…

Typically, it was while his thoughts were taking him away from his – interesting and dramatically new – surroundings and into surely rather pointless speculation that the very first badger did venture into the open, from that first hole, the one closest to the crevice. And here she was – for Nat, like his dad before him, knew the first badger out any evening to be invariably a female – lifting her shining white-striped head into the air. Up went her snout, she sniffed the air, once, twice, thrice, as one ascertaining there was no danger nearby. (Either she failed to detect Nat's presence, he having placed himself so judiciously and motionlessly, or she didn't rate him as danger!) This done she must have given a signal (some combination of shuffle and the lowest of grunts) which this time quite eluded him, keen though he was, because next – and this time Nat saw it all – out came two rather smaller animals. Were these her cubs? They had sturdy little legs, and short, strong, low-held tails, and markings were definite enough. But there was something about these creatures that suggested they hadn't yet arrived at a maturity of either feature or movement.

At their arrival a snorting noise issued from the sow-badger, a pleased but purposeful sound, even an authoritative one, a kind of nasal cough. Then off the three went, at a trot, down the very path that Nat had come up. But they branched off from it some fifty yards later, onto a little track that he hadn't been aware of. This, it was apparent from up here, would take them to the stream.

So badgers had appeared only to disappear! Just his luck! But just as he was lamenting this, two more badgers came out of the sett. Not literally simultaneously, but in such quick succession, that this was how it seemed. These newcomers must have heard and attended to the sow-badger's signals and trusted her, for unlike her, they gave no apprehending, interrogative sniffs into the air, but, in no time at all – why, get this! – were rolling about on the earthen plateau below the main entrance. They gave the loudest grunts of the evening so far, and turned themselves over and over, revealing their somewhat squat bodies to be remarkably elastic, blissfully contracting and expanding (so it looked) as if to usher in the night with all its invitations and rituals. This, no doubt of it, was fun and games, there were rules to be followed but there were also moments of total and merry abandon. The animals might have been himself and Josh and their mates, a summer ago, down on the beach at Whitstable. Theirs were the wriggles and half-leaps and backward turns of purest enjoyment, and Nat could see the pair knew each other so well that theirs was a veritable unison of antics. And he started to make a verse out of his observation:

‘Yours are the wriggles and half-leaps and backward turns…'

No two ways about it. Day was over, discarded. Its colours had ceased to stand out any longer against the sky, but had surrendered themselves up till next morning to the darkness now in charge… The two youthful badgers proceeded to lose themselves in their own liveliness for far longer than Nat chose to measure by his watch, though when he did eventually look at the luminous dial, three-quarters of an hour had gone by. For here were the sow and the two cubs back uphill from their drink. He positively had to check himself from stepping forward to greet them. Momentarily the boy-badgers (as Nat now called them to himself) stopped their frolics, then, seeing approval in the sow's benevolent beady little eyes, resumed them. One of the returning cubs picked up a bundle of withered grass in its mouth and disappeared with it, back into the hole, showing perhaps a natural bent for sett husbandry. But ‘it' (sex was impossible to determine) was back almost straightaway.

Again some signal to the tunnels beneath the ground must have been given – but how by so small a member of the tribe – for now other badgers started to come outside, and were joined by some from the second biggest exit/entrance just below Nat's stone. The clan had gathered, Nat reckoned – for with so much movement of such a lively kind, counting was hard-to-impossible – that at least a dozen animals assembled.

   

Nat breaks off from his memories abruptly. The voices in the shop below – his dad's and Luke Fleming's, which have been in colloquy for quite a few minutes – are, all of a sudden, clearer, louder, nearer. A decision has surely been reached, even the method of turning it into the best words for its object has been agreed on. Very soon the men will walk over to the staircase up to his bedroom.

What can Nat do but continue with his thoughts? ‘Were you ever, any of you, aware of Nat Kempsey, Human Being, so careful to remain out of sight and even scent? Did you somehow sense my good will, and bask in it? No, I don't think you did, even though it's a great idea. But there's one possible exception, though this animal didn't do any basking…'

   

‘That exception. My very last night I placed myself closer to the sett even than I had done before. Sleep left me, though not quite fully, in time for me to see your mass return home for the day, your work (digging and eating enough earthworms, sometimes 120 per badger, to add to your fat and to help you through oncoming winter) and your revels (all those games I watched with such relish and admiration) truly done. Over in the direction of England, beyond the shale and bare mountain-shanks, I saw in the sky's sandwich-like layers of green, rose and yellow the first stages of dawn. I surely wouldn't be seeing another one break in the Berwyns – not for many years, at least. Then I looked down. I saw a young badger, clearly a straggler from the group, running really quite fast up the path towards the sett's main entrance. I must hurry, I must join the others at once, he (for I was sure it was a ‘he') was obviously saying to himself. Then he stopped, only inches away from his destination, tilted his head so that his stripe was brilliant in the lessening darkness, and his snout began busily to quiver. He must, he surely must, have sensed my presence. And judged it benign, for he went back inside after a satisfied little shake of his body, away from the dangers of dawn into the happy security of his fellows and the earth in which they had their being.

‘I felt that badger was myself.'

Nat raises himself up into a sitting, receiving posture. His father and the journalist are mounting the ladder-like stairs, and he must be composed and dignified, ready for them.

   

Paul Binding has lived in South Shropshire for twenty years. He has worked as a literary editor and a university lecturer, and is a frequent freelance contributor to newspapers and journals. His interest in the culture of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, about which he regularly writes articles and reviews, makes him a frequent visitor to both. Animals are of the greatest importance to him, and he cannot imagine a life without their company.

Novels

  

Harmonica's Bridegroom

‘A disturbing dark novel and an auspicious debut' – Brian Moore

‘A carefully husbanded talent with skill and sensitivity' – Jonathan Keates

   

My Cousin the Writer

‘Paul Binding has produced an original masterpiece… an exquisitely crafted novel' – Zelda Longmore in
The Spectator
 

   

Memoir

   

St Martin's Ride

‘One of those rare masterpieces… Literary art of a very rare kind' – Sir Stephen Spender

‘A book as profound as it is beautiful' – Theodore Zeldin 

   

Literary Criticism

   

With Vine Leaves in His Hair: the role of the Artist in Ibsen's Plays

‘Richness of insight and style… The more you read this book, the more you are convinced of Ibsen's depth and humility.' – Murrough O'Brien in
Independent on Sunday
.