Walking along a country lane in north Staffordshire yesterday morning, I was confronted with a shocking sight. It was a bright, shiny morning with a glimmering promise of afternoon heat in the September sky and the smell of newly cut hedgerow tickled our nostrils awake. We were on our way, on foot, to the town of Newport in Shropshire about 5 miles away to get a new handlebar stem for Alan's bicycle. The old one had met is end in a lock gate out of Audlem a few days earlier: I had been bleary eyed and at the tiller when, uncharacteristically, I had failed to pull off one of my legendarily smooth virtuoso-lock-entrances and clipped the side of the boat just enough to cause the bikes to grind across the roof. Their groans sounded like a metallic cry of “Oh no, not again”, briskly ended by a nice clean “snap” as Alan's handlebars were unfussily decapitated from their frame.
So we were bikeless this particular morning, and padding along a country lane, eating damsons off the trees, feeling a bit like two of the Famous Five in an Enid Blyton book. Then suddenly up ahead I see what I take, naturally, to be a small bear trying to nose its way into a hedgerow. I put on my glasses. It still looked like a small bear; big, broad furry arse, stocky legs and blunt ended paws with generously sized claws. And it still looked as though it were trying to force its way into the ground below the hedgerow. This is a strange thing for any bear to be doing, granted, especially since this particular bear seemed to have temporarily forgotten that its best burrowing tools were its flat, clawed paws and seemed instead to be attempting to dig using the top of its head. The bear appeared to be somehow levitating its hind legs above the ground, and was holding this unlikely position with such poise and skill that I could see no movement coming from it at all, not even breathing. The bear was dead. No wonder it hadn't scuttled off in fright as Alan and I crunched our was down the gravelled road towards it. Two more steps and I could see that it wasn't a bear at all. Of course, all along I had known that it wasn't a bear, but seeing the white and black stripes on the head of this thickly furred, stocky, dark brown creature made what I was seeing become suddenly real, like that feeling just at the top of a roller-coaster: All the way up the slow track to the summit you know that what you will be looking at is a very big drop that may not, but probably will reunite you with the ice cream, blue candy-floss and jar of unidentifiable “pebble” sweets you ate earlier. Nevertheless, you make animated conversation with your mum or sister or friend all the way up because you don't really want to give thought to what is going to happen. As I approached the badger, this remarkably large and luxuriant creature lying unceremoniously dead in a hedge by a roadside, its hind legs stiff with rigor mortis and sticking up in the air like an obscenity, the sight sent me over the summit, leaving my tummy behind. Though stiffened and awkward, the badger lay there with no lack of grace. Its fur was sleek and shone in the morning sun, its sheer physical bulk imposing, surprising, marking the space the creature once occupied in the everyday of this world. The sun-bleached seedheads of the grass bobbed playfully on its head as if just coaxing it would wake it up again. The body was still intact so death must have occurred the night before. The shock of seeing a dead animal has not diminished these last two months, although I have seen amongst others, an owl, squirrel, mole, water vole, rabbit, cat, sheep, pheasant and hare, countless other small birds, all dead. But this creature, so whole, so beautiful on such a perfect, golden-warm day seemed like an outrage.
I had been waiting as darkness fell on many nights to see a badger in the next field. Earlier this week Alan and I found a network of sets - the large, round holes in the ground with entrances scored by large claws could only have been badger residences. Finally I had seen one. And even though it was no longer alive, it had a majesty and beauty that somehow meant I was not sorry to have encountered it.
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