Chewing the Cud (13 page)

I don't want to moralize on the rights and wrongs of foxhunting. There are reasons why the fox should not be a protected species. In those days the protection that the Woodlands foxes enjoyed during a season of hate was due to my poor marksmanship. But it's worth remembering the loving side of the relationship. The fox is a beautiful 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, it
eventually 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 and they'd return the compliment and not a harsh word was spoken.

By the time she was eighteen months old, Wilhelmina was sleeping in an old coach house where my grandfather had kept his wood-turning lathe, and she was free to come and go during the night. Unfortunately this meant that others were free to come in, and at her first season a big boar badger sought her out. It was not her sexual condition that excited him, rather was he offended by her state of domesticity and her treacherous alliance with man. He gave her a terrible beating and nearly killed her.

Wilhelmina recovered and, in due course, came on heat for the second time. And now she left for good to seek her wild fortune, and the stable yard never heard that magpie chatter again.

Two years later, Tony was driving home late at night, going fast up the long, winding drive to the house. He saw the badger that suddenly crossed the road but, try as he would, could not avoid it. It was a sow, with a stripe down its face so wide as to distinguish it forever from all other badgers.

My closest contact with a badger at Woodlands Farm was of a nature so unlikely as to be unbelievable. Many years ago I put the incident down on paper and sent it off
to a journal called
The Countryman.
I did not even receive the courtesy of a note of rejection.

It was my morning to milk, a peerless morning towards the end of June. Going out to fetch the cows, my way lay across a seven-acre field called the Big Ground. This had been cut for hay the previous day, and the tight uniform swathes of grass lay bluish and shining in the risen sun. Suddenly, out in the middle, I saw a badger. By chance I had no dog with me that might harry it, so I ran, fast, to see if I could get a closer look before the brock could leg it away to the safety of the bordering Brake. Not only did it not run away, it took not the slightest notice of my panting arrival but continued to snuffle about in the cut grass with as much unconcern as though I had still been in bed. It seemed the most comprehensive snub. Embarrassed, I took off my hat and with it patted the broad bottom. I began to murmur inanities.

“Hullo, old chap! What's the matter, then? Don't you speak to strange men? Sent me to Coventry, have you?”

But indeed this was the unkindest cut of all. The badger would not in any way acknowledge my presence, it simply moved, achingly slowly, towards the shelter of the woodland, my hat beating an unavailing tattoo on its backside. It found a hole in the hedge and disappeared.

Two mornings later, at the very same time in the very
same place, I saw two badgers. With the nonchalance and élan of a man on hat-slapping terms, I ran gaily towards them. My friend! I thought. And his friend! Asinine words formed themselves ready for my smiling parted lips. “Hullo again! Wanting some more of the same treatment, old fellow? And have you brought your girlfriend?” But at a short hat's throw from the pair, it became suddenly obvious that this was a case of mistaken identity. With a horrid chorus of noises, squeaks, chatterings, and fierce piggy grunts, all unmistakably menacing, both badgers rushed madly at me on their short legs with mouths agape, and my camaraderie was forgotten as I fled at top speed.

It's a perfectly true story. But you can't really blame the editor of
The Countryman.

W
e've owned so many dogs over the years, but two unforgettable individuals at Woodlands Farm were Anna the dachshund and Susie the terrier. Anna's speciality was maternal love. Very early on, her name was usually corrupted to “Nanny,” and the sight of any nursling brought her running. You could hear the crackle of her starched apron as she fussed and fidgeted, certain of the incompetence of the real mother, of whatever breed, and longing to get her paws on the little darlings. And it wasn't
only puppies that she tried to foster. Kittens were well received in a cat crisis. She did not need to be in milk, she just came into it at the drop of a baby — as when she did her best for Blodwen's two piglets.

Her other tour de force was in holding her water. She may have been a bit short for a dachshund, but she must have had a very long bladder because, in wet weather, which she abhorred, she would lie doggo for twenty-four hours. Chucking her out in the rain did no good, since you could not make her do anything. In fact it was a most unwise move, because her resulting wet feet went straight upstairs and onto the nearest bed.

“Have you seen Nanny anywhere?”

“No, but it's raining.”

“Oh well.”

And we would know that under one or other eiderdown there would be a small unmoving lump, in instant hibernation. But she wasn't a lie-abed in good hunting weather. Then she went to ground, often in company of Susie, after rabbit or badger or fox. She sometimes spent so long in the bowels of the earth that the search party would be called out, Myrle and I and the children and Gladwyn roaming the woods and fields, endlessly shouting her name, a fruitless exercise since she never answered to it.

The only hope of finding the needle in the haystack was
to happen upon that day's chosen spot and hear her, only faintly at that because her bark was shrill and feeble. Once she was gone for forty-eight hours. We had drawn a complete blank at all the usual places, the big set and favorite earths and buries in the woods and round various fields, the long, densely bushed embankment of the railway that ran along Woodlands Farm's southern boundary. Fearfully we searched the tracks and then the verges of the main road but found nothing. We'd pretty well given up.

On the morning of the third day, Myrle said, “I'm going to try to make my mind quite empty and see what comes into it. Don't say anything.” And she shut her eyes. After a minute she said, “She's in the Little Ground.”

The Little Ground was a two-acre piece of grass at the bottom of the farm, seldom frequented by dogs. I was skeptical but luckily said nothing. For as we walked across it, there, right in the middle, was a freshly dug rabbit bury and coming from it a familiar squeaking.

It wasn't even a proper hole, just a deeper than usual version of the nest burrow, or “stop,” that an outlying doe makes to have her kittens in; and by lying flat and reaching in to the full extent of my arm, I could just grab hold of Anna's tail. I pulled her out, plastered in earth, and on our knees as though to give thanks for this safe delivery, we prepared to greet her. She gave herself a
shake and, without a glance at us, went straight back down.

The story of Susie's entombment is much more horrific, but then the story of Susie's life consists of a series of incidents each one of which would have killed a lesser dog. Keats may have been half in love with easeful death, but Susie went the whole hog, head over heels. She began at a tender age. A French bulldog of my mother's took one look at her, picked her up by the neck, and shook her like a rat. Bulldogs lock on, and by the time Susie was rescued, the bite had pierced the salivary gland. This in due course festered, and the sepsis looked likely to put an early end to her. However to the surprise of the vet, she survived this first and, had we known it, comparatively minor brush with the last enemy.