Encounters - Badger

Artwork & Words By Nancy Gerrard (@tired__poet)

Part 2: Badger

The kind of miserable day that reminds you what it’s like to be caught in a long winter. It was August. We found the cub huddled in a heap on the airfield. Indifferent to the rain falling indifferently upon it. I spotted it before Dog did, a ball of fur on the ground, and I worried she might eat whatever it was. But she was wary, and when we got close and she snuck up to sniff it I could see that it was still breathing. The fur rising up and down, up and down. Shallow. Its eyes were closed, its little striped face unmistakable. The Wind in the Willows, but sad and dying and rained on.

I wondered what to do. I had no phone. Probably shouldn’t touch it. Thoughts of putting-out-of-misery. I didn’t have that in me. And it struck me as I watched it that it wasn’t miserable. There was probably pain, but it was peaceful. Lying so unaware under the vast grey sky. No dread, or regret, no worry. I was sad, it wasn’t.

I cut our walk short. When I got home I called Wildlife Rescue. They said someone would be with me in twenty minutes, so I walked back to the airfield.

I could tell it was dead from a surprising distance. It was still, and its fur was now standing straight on end. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up in sympathy. I’ve always been a coward when faced with death in the physical. Even a dry, curled up spider on a window sill is enough to make me sick.

I remembered dozens of flies lying crisp in between the panes of my Granny’s double glazing. The fish on its side in the bowl, unseeing. The foxes by the side of the road on the route I would take every day to work. I couldn’t bear watching them ground down over time. The day we found my cat, rigid in the neighbour’s garden. Watching my dog lay her head on her paws and go still. My fingers, trembling, on the door handle of that door, that room, in that house-

I called the rescue people and told them not to come. I’d avoid that walk for a while. Dog was no such coward and would eat the dead cub whole if she came across it. I couldn’t watch that.