Even after the lawn had been mown short and smooth, a dark diagonal line remained visible across the largest segment of it. This line led to the place just beyond some brambles, through a hole in my garden fence, where a group of badgers had made their sett: the most direct route there from the copses on the hill above my house where they went to forage for grubs and rodents at night. I’d first noticed badgers in my garden the year before last, when one took a similar path across my lawn at dusk. It looked like an animal surprised at its own ability to run. Soon afterwards, another badger went through my recycling and separated plastic from aluminium: a needless gesture, since it all goes in the same bag in this part of Devon, as dictated by South Hams District Council. The following year, close to Summer Solstice, as I was taking a long cut across the hill overlooking my house to the post office, engrossed in a Garrison Keillor podcast on my iPod, I very nearly trod on a much younger badger, who scuttled away into the thick hedgerow. As the afternoon wore on a mixture of emotions set in: annoyance at my absent-mindedness, elation and that special remorse that only comes with almost treading on a very young creature that resembles a small snouty folk-rock bear. I read up on badgers a little when I got home and discovered that they are omnivores and not, as I first thought on a hasty misreading, ‘omnivoles’, which, being not a real word, does not in fact mean a vole who is in every place at once, which to me seems a shame and a missed opportunity. A couple of foods that badgers especially enjoy, I learned, are peanuts and cat biscuits, both of which I had a decent supply of in the house. At dusk that night I took some of both up to the hillside in bowls and sat in the long grass where I’d almost trod on the badger, determined to make amends. A bonus sight greeted me a few minutes after I arrived and scattered some of the peanuts and cat food: not just the reappearance of the original young badger from earlier, snuffling about on the shorter turf, but a shyer, smaller sibling, in the long grass and weeds a few feet away. Neither seemed hugely bothered by my presence, perhaps not yet being fully schooled in the lesson that human beings are massive bastards. I crouched in the grass and watched the two badgers for a quarter of an hour or so then emptied the remainder of my peanuts and cat biscuits from my bowls, which they duly chomped, the bolder one coming within about a foot of eating from my hand.
Over the ensuing days, without any special effort on my part, my life became very badger-themed. The following week I visited the annual summer Scythe Fair at Thorney Lakes in Somerset. To remind myself about the fair’s imminence, I wrote ‘Scythe Fair!’ on the appropriate day on my calendar. ‘Why does it say “Scythe Fair!” on your calendar?’ my girlfriend asked, and I told her that it was because I was going to a scythe fair. The Scythe Fair featured several stalls selling scythes, old and new, while children romped in freshly scythed grass heaps and competitive unisex scything took place in the central arena, some of it (male only) topless, some of the competitors surprisingly youthful. This gave the place the slight look of a Grim Reaper Hogwarts. Jay, my companion for the day, who suffers from the most virulent hay fever known to man, had not quite allowed for the results of this in his planning, so I took refuge with him and his ever-reddening damp face in the far corner of the fair, away from the scythed grass. Here I got talking to Leslie on the Dorset for Badger and Bovine Welfare Group stall; who was raising awareness about the government-endorsed badger cull, which, based on deeply questionable scientific evidence and with a ludicrously wasteful budget, was moving further into the South West. I told her that I’d recently fed my local badgers peanuts, and she said she went a step further and made peanut butter sandwiches for her local ones every day at dusk. The badgers had come to expect this and, with time, even view it as their right, but one evening when they arrived in her garden with their typical punctuality she realised she was fresh out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer but the only slightly appropriate meal she could find was a dish of oldish ratatouille from her freezer which, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to get around to eating. ‘They loved it,’ she told me. ‘But they ran off with the dish afterwards.’ She paused and a wistful mood appeared to overcome her. ‘I really liked that dish,’ she added. At one of my spoken-word events only a couple of days after this a member of the audience told me about a close friend who’d been bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden at a house party in Exeter, which made me wonder not just about the finer details of the attack but whether I was going to the right house parties. A couple of initial small signs of a sett appeared in my garden a week or so later. The badgers reconsidered and abandoned this but in early spring 2016 the other sett, at the end of the diagonal path in the lawn, appeared. Intrigued, I set up a trail camera not far from its entrance.
Each of the three springs I’ve experienced in Devon has been markedly different from the other two. When I arrived
