by Nina Burton
Now it turned out they could show up at unexpected times to feed the many hungry mouths. Sure enough, in the middle of the afternoon I saw the female hunting on the hill. Her great concentration gave me reason to suspect she was a successful hunter – each step blended into the next as if she had already taken in all that lay before her. I’d experienced a similar feeling once along the road, when a roe deer had leapt right between the taut wires of an iron fence. The space its body had to fit through was calculated in a fraction of a second. In the wild, each instant seemed to contain worlds.
Yes, there was a lot the fox cubs must learn, and in their own way they had probably already started. When I sneaked into the carpentry shed to get a screwdriver, I heard them bickering and dragging something around in the crawlspace. A different way of life made itself known beneath my feet as I stood among the well-organised tools. It was a playful test of the world’s potential.
It seemed that the open storage shed had also become a playhouse, for a few ropes appeared to have been used for tug-of-war – unless the fox cubs were just trying to see how long they were. And soon they ventured further from the den, until one evening I heard them beneath me in the crawlspace of the cottage. Soon thereafter I saw them playing right outside the window.
At first there were only two. The number of fox cubs in one litter is thought to be adapted to how many voles can be expected in the spring, although it’s beyond me how the bodies of foxes can predict such a thing. But maybe the vole forecast wasn’t so bad, for soon enough a third cub showed up. Together the siblings practised their mousing pounces on beetles and searched the grass as if a treasure might await them anywhere. Sometimes they nosed at something; sometimes they ate something. Worms, I imagined. Supposedly fox cubs grow fastest in rainy areas where earthworms frequently emerge from the ground.
But they didn’t merely use their mouths to eat, nip or grab one another. They also opened their maws at each other as if to say something, and perhaps, in their own way, that was just what they were doing. Along with flattened ears and a curved tail, a half-open fox muzzle is said to be an invitation to play.
The hierarchy among them probably had to do with their character traits. The one who preferred to stay in the nest was potentially a small female, for fox daughters sometimes stay with their mothers and help with new little siblings. Then they can take over the territory themselves. But for now, it was the small father who watched the cubs play from a distance, while the mother obtained food. Was she simply the better hunter? The next time I saw the family, she was taking the cubs on a little hunting lesson. First, she led them on a jaunt over to the compost, with the motherly cub right on her heels. As soon as she stopped, the cub jumped up at her, and when she turned around it rolled onto its back, all cuddly. The most independent cub, however, wanted to explore on its own, so I wondered how this hunting lesson would go.
The mother fox was admirably patient, and her communication with the cubs was probably eloquent. Some of the forty fox vocalisations biologists have identified are used solely by the mother. In the den they speak softly, with burbling huffs, and the cubs are gently lured out with a mewing purr, while a low, coughing bark is a warning that will send them scurrying down into the den. They’ve also been observed calling for individuals, who respond as if to a name.
So what does fox language sound like? It’s as difficult to describe in words as a human language would be. Sometimes foxes bark like a roe deer, sometimes they hoot like owls, and sometimes they chatter like fieldfares, while the yelping of their young sounds like the cheeping of seabirds. It’s as if they’ve gathered up all the sounds of the wild in order to outwit any simple description.
But the fox family didn’t remain close neighbours. A young gardener would be doing some planting on the property, and he heroically took on the task of burying the cables as well. With that, the fox family moved to a calmer spot. Their new home was most likely located on the other side of the hill, where I later saw the frolicking silhouettes of the cubs. But that the property still was a hunting ground I understood one evening when the mother fox came hurrying by with a baby squirrel in her jaws. After that I plugged up the den with some stout logs.
Yet the clogged hole continued to attract life. One day I found the chunks of wood torn away and the contents of the hole scattered around the pine. It was soft and white. The den had been lined with the fur a new mother fox pulls from her abdomen to bare her teats and cushion her young. When I picked it up I could feel all the tenderness in it. The soil is damp and raw in a hole in the ground, but here it had been dressed in a downy warmth. Perhaps the natural insulation had been complemented with a bit of stuffing from a cushion in the storage shed.
What had happened since the foxes moved out? There were a number of insect legs in the fluff. They seemed to have come from bees, so apparently the hole had been taken over by large earth bumblebees who probably appreciated all that fluff. But who had pried the logs out of the hole and dug out the lining? That must have been someone who wanted to get at the bumblebee nest. Who loves honey and can tolerate the defensive stings of bumblebees? Yes, a badger.
I should have recognised the signs from the start. It was no fox who had rooted in the earth, leaving behind the shells of devoured snails. Certainly, it’s true that both foxes and badgers live off underground creatures, but they have different personalities and habits. Badgers aren’t as agile as foxes, so they must compensate with thoroughness. They dig up rodents just as they do roots, and their nocturnal food-finding rounds are done nearsightedly, their snouts swinging back and forth like a metal detector. They happily slurp up worms with a special spaghetti technique, but all sorts of other edibles go down the hatch as well, from slimy snails and toxic toads to angry wasps and bumblebees.
From the distance afforded by books, I was vaguely familiar with the badger lifestyle. As the featured speaker on one of the summer radio programmes I had even played their bubbly mating sounds. Like foxes, badgers communicate with sounds we associate with other animals – they can cackle, grunt, chatter, growl, yelp, snort, hiss, scream or whimper, depending on the situation. They can also purr like cats to their young, or chirp like songbirds or coo like doves. A frightened or wounded badger can squeak, howl or emit a heartrending wail.
Their extensive repertoire of expressions notwithstanding, badgers have a pretty reclusive nature. Like foxes, they search for food alone, and when badgers meet they generally either ignore each other or grouse. Conflicts are quick to arise between dominant individuals; males will bite each other in the rear, while females go for the face. Yet they stubbornly live together, for there are advantages to sharing a burrow.
I knew where the local badger den was. It lay in a rockfall off towards the road, and from a thicket of wild roses nearby I had once heard a roaring sort of hiss. It was not what you expected to hear among roses, but judging by the sound I was not welcome to investigate.
The den, or sett, was thought to house eight badgers, and was thus medium-sized. Other setts could be several hundred years old and have up to forty underground rooms, connected by tunnels. Shared dormitories are only used during hibernation, when everyone has to keep each other warm. In the warmer parts of the year, they all want their own private space – like in multi-family housing. Compared with the simple dens of foxes, these setts are magnificent.
The well-to-do badger home Kenneth Grahame pictured when he wrote The Wind in the Willows was certainly a comfortable one. Kind Mr. Badger could invite his friends Rat and Mole to sumptuous dinners and offer them comfy guest beds, and along one of his corridors was a living room with a cosy fire. This children’s-book idyll doesn’t quite match up to a badger’s life in the wild.
True, a certain level of comfort is necessary in the sett, because badgers spend three-quarters of their lives down there. But in lieu of cosy fires, the cold walls of the burrows are covered in moss and leaves, and in some cases they’re even
said to have been wallpapered with found sacks. Since the soil is hardly sterile, both bedstraw and bedrooms are switched out at regular intervals, and when winter is over there’s a big spring clean. Those at the top of the hierarchy roll up kilos of grass, while others remove any remnants of food from the sett. The floors are then covered with fresh grasses and ferns, and if there’s any fragrant wood garlic at hand it can help keep vermin in check. Should one of the badgers have died during the winter, an earthen wall is quickly erected around it to make a grave. The common latrines are located slightly apart from the sett, preferably near the edge of their territory so the musty odours send a message about the members of the group to strangers.
It must be said that badgers prefer to be tidy. Yet they can’t get rid of all the underground parasites that find their way into their fur, so an important part of badger life is scratching oneself. Since the others won’t help, badgers are forced to perform acrobatic manoeuvres that loosen up their limbs before the night’s wanderings, and as such even undesirable little bed mates have a purpose.
There was something about the down-to-earth badger that aroused tender feelings in me. Linnaeus considered them bears, and people later believed them to be related to skunks. But in fact they are mustelids. Though they don’t share the litheness of the weasel or the aquatic life of the otter, they are able to climb and swim when needed. Still, their true home is in the earth. It’s their element just as the air is the birds’ and the water the fishes’. Roots dangle like broken electrical wires in their nests, for their greatest protection is darkness. As humans spread out, the wilderness shrinks; we have become ever more difficult to escape, and more and more animals flee into the night. The coyotes of California, the brown bears of Alaska, the leopards of Gabon and the lions of Tanzania have all begun to be nocturnal, and this is also true of the elephants of Kenya, despite their poor night vision. The night is becoming their final outpost.
Within the night is a frightening enigma. When darkness falls, we turn on lights and close the door against what takes over outside – the eyes of predators glowing in the shadows, sounds we don’t understand. Primeval-looking bats use echolocation to see hidden worlds, and woodlice that breathe through gills creep forth to transform something wilted into soil. They are all at home in the very darkness we flee from. But because they’re also part of life, we might encounter them sooner or later.
Of course, there’s also a poetic element to a summer night. When the ground cools, the Roman snails seek green leaves or a partner with whom to perform their gentle mating. Scents linger among calming breezes, brushing by the antennae of moths. Dusk might be followed by the purring flight of nightjars or the cascading notes of nightingales. It’s a delight to spend nights like these outside.
The gardener had just buried the electrical cables, which would transfer their energy underground. I myself had remained in the cottage with my papers, so I could lean into early-summer poetry. Something inside me must have responded to the wilderness, for my senses were sharpened beyond the social buzz. As I wrote, I thought I could hear the sound of wings or a low rustle. I looked up from my papers. What was going on out there?
A gentle light drew me out, and on the steps I was met by an apricot moon. Then I discovered something blinking at my feet. I bent down to pick it up and found a female glowworm in my hand. Her emerald-green taillight had just illuminated to guide a male.
Between the moon and the light of the glowworm, it was an enchanted evening. Even the rocks seemed to have come alive, for one of them was moving slowly behind the blueberry thicket. But wait – that was no rock. Something that looked like an African wizard mask appeared.
I was more curious than afraid. The banding of light and dark reminded me of the slice of each day when nocturnal animals relieve diurnal ones. This was where we found ourselves, the badger and me.
Some have interpreted the striping on the badger’s face as camouflage to blend in with nature. Others have seen it as a way to appear threatening, as a badger will hide its face to show submission. Biologists have also categorised a dozen physical positions badgers assume to address situations such as danger, defence, invitations or aggression. But the badger before me neither ruffled up its fur nor crouched down, and the eyes that met my own were calm.
What a remarkable creature there was before me. Although badgers have been persistently hunted, there’s a lot we don’t know about them, and their two-toned pelts reflect a paradoxical nature. They’re independent, but they live in groups. They’re shy, but they will bravely defend themselves and their families. They’re nocturnal, but they have poor vision, so most of those we see are bloody lumps at the side of the road. Yet I found myself sharing the evening with a pair of living eyes.
To make eye contact with a wild animal is to challenge it. Our eyes met with unambiguous curiosity. Perhaps I myself was an enigmatic sight in the moonlight, or perhaps my posture indicated that I wasn’t frightened yet, only surprised. Some such encounters only become possible once you relinquish control, and in this case we had both done so. Only when I moved did the badger back cautiously in among the rock and blueberry bushes. That heavy, rolling motion was part of the presentation.
This encounter would have become unavoidable, sooner or later: I had come to realise that the paths through the blueberries had been made by badgers. As creatures of habit they stick to their well-trodden paths, and what’s more one of them led to the writing nook and down into its crawlspace. We had unknowingly been sharing the path; it was ours during the day and theirs during the night.
But late one evening, when I was absorbed in my papers, that boundary of time was crossed once again. Deep in thought, I was leaving the writing nook when two badger cubs unexpectedly popped up in front of me. Our view of one another had been blocked by the corner of the building and the blueberry bushes, so none of us were prepared for the encounter.
There is no playbook when it comes to an unexpected situation. The surprise might unleash small fireworks of impulses, as they did the first time the fox cubs found themselves faced with me, and the same thing happened now. One cub awkwardly tried to back up on the narrow path, doing the best it could with its pudgy badger body. The other, though, approached with nearsighted interest. Apparently, it had not yet learned about perils of life nor the brawly nature of badgers. For my part, I cautiously retreated to the writing nook and told myself I was doing so out of consideration. We were on their side of the day, and there was probably a badger mama nearby who might misunderstand this whole thing. It would have been enough to stomp my feet if I felt like moving on, but instead I closed the door and left the night time in peace.
Two moths were dancing stubbornly against the windowpane. My desk lamp was reflected in their eyes, so after a moment I turned it off and lay down in the bunk. The badgers were probably rooting around for underground life out there, but almost everyone else was asleep since our side of the planet had turned away from the light. Squirrels snoozed in the trees; fish slumbered out in the sound. As in the Indian ceremony I had once been permitted to share, many lives were connected in the dark.
Dreams can create inner scenes in the most varied of realms, twitching the legs of both fruit flies and dreaming dogs. One researcher who watched a sleeping octopus change colour believed it was catching a crab in its dreams. At night, after all, different worlds can collide even among the convolutions of our brains. When sensory input is dulled, the traces of the day may be collated undisturbed, allowing playful images to unfurl. Moving pictures can make their own connections in three-dimensional layers, far beyond the rational line of A to B. Oftentimes the night shows me solutions to the problems of the day.
Now I wanted to dig down into the layers beyond language, for I was tired, and tired of thinking in words that kept me awake. Where were my dreams? How do you lure them in? I thought I could hear steps in the darkness, but that was my own pulse carrying on through the night.
/>
At last I fell asleep for a while, until a thudding sound woke me up. It arose neither from my heart nor from any leaf-eating roe deer. It was the badger cubs topping off their wild night out with a wrestling match against the wall. They stopped when I peered out the window, and one began to nose at the doormat instead.
I smiled to myself. A writing nook with dark badger tunnels beneath it was almost too obvious a psycho-analytic symbol. But it had never been my own psyche I wanted to explore; rather, I was interested in what I had in common with others. Yes, even with badgers. Although I lived with words, my brain was guided by the same mute processes as those of the wild ones outside. The expression of the subconscious has at times been called intuition, or instinct, but it’s far more than automatic reflexes. It’s something as ancient as life itself, and it can still give rise to something new.
Perhaps at its very deepest point a creative life shares something with animals of the night. There is a fox-like openness to multiple possibilities and a sensitive ear for every fleeting nuance, although even that can take a badger-like nature to detect. The wild is many-faceted. It is shy and bold, solitary and playful, and it is responsive to those humans who search it out. After all, we too are children of the Earth.
Chapter Six
The Guardian Tree
I had understood one thing at last: the quiet nature of the property was deceiving. Life and communication were always around me, although most of it passed me by. It was telling that I had always encountered the animals around the cottage when in an attentive state of solitude. Upon the return of my lively family, the creatures carefully kept their distance or became background noise.