The sun is pooling on the badger sett as I creep in. The nettles are high, so I position myself above the bowl of this large, ancestral citadel.
On the high chalk, sett entrances are worn smooth and white as luge runs through doorstep ramps of scree; badger paths are half-pipes that curve this way and that, with edges like a porcelain roll-top bath. It is so dry. The previous night’s rain has been recorded in an emulsion of chalky padding over a patina of spent bluebell leaves.
Gradually, the birds stop singing and the pheasants finish coughing. The light goes, the wood quietens, a bank of cow parsley seems to glow with residual light and there is an unsettling whiff of something dead. I wait.
In recent excavations, these great earth-movers have kicked out an old wire snare and a plastic chemical bag sporting a still-bright logo from the 1960s, when it would have been weighted with earth and used to block exits before the whole sett was gassed.
The unpleasant stench again. Badgers are controversial animals and rumours of them being shot illegally resurface regularly.
The nettles in front of me, salted and spotted with cherry blossom, dance before my eyes, then waggle furiously, like a dog’s tail. A face, a V of bright stripes, floats below me, bodiless in the dark, with the same lambent light pulled up from the chalk bed that infuses the cow parsley. It turns, the silver-grey lozenge of its body trailing like a moonlit cloak slung over its shoulders. The badger stops, balances on three legs and scratches audibly, then shakes, sending a white cloud of powder around it. Another convex face appears from the earth, then two more in quick succession. Each scratches, shakes and goes on its way, down the luge runs, one left, one right, to vanish into the night.
As I step away, the smell again. I hadn’t noticed a colony of cuckoo-pint at my feet. The cowl lantern of the plant has begun to wither, revealing a spadix that emanates a faint, phosphorescent glow, and a rotting-meat smell to attract pollinating insects. The badgers endure.
