During the night, a story a quarter of a mile long had impressed itself on the farm track. On the previous day, the soles of so many booted feet had quilted the soft, sparsely grassed ground down the centre with an untidy mass of there and back, turn to admire the view, swivel to chat. At some time between sunset and sunrise, the mishmash of treads had become overstamped by something else – the distinctive footprints of a purposeful and prudent traveller.
In less than a metre of its journey, it was possible to replay a tiny moment in the life of a badger, an animal that – judging by the close clustering of prints – had been walking. Its rolling locomotion was written in the outlines of feet turned slightly inwards. Hardly a big stride gallop – more of an introspective potter.
There was so much to read in a single print. That left front foot came down hard, but it did not strike first where we might expect. This beast had thrown its weight on what we would think of as the ball of the foot. Its broad kidney-shaped landing pad had thumped into the clay, impressing a smooth-sided crater almost a centimetre deep. The badger’s foot rolled forward to sink its middle three toes just as far into the earth, the outer toe making a shallower indentation, the inner toe barely registering. And then the defining visual feature left by this JCB of an animal: the thick, long claws that can mine worms, tunnel out rooms and corridors at will, and rake a wasp nest out of hard-baked summer ground. Four near-parallel slashes above the tips of its toes completed this goblin foot.
I stood up, then continued following the badger’s path. Did darkness light its way that night? Or did memory and its acute sense of smell teach it to steer a dry middle course, holding to the rise between puddled ruts? It never once slipped into the muddy-watered moats on either side, though I slid and sloshed in there often enough.
The trail ran out at an infill of rubble, where perhaps the dull pad, pad became a clatter of claws. Right or left? Either way, a steady plod.
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