In the undergrowth, but away from the well worn tracks used by the creatures as they stole out to feed, I had chosen three hiding places, representing in their relative positions the corners of a triangle the centre of which was the main entrance to the “set.” I was thus able, whatever might be the direction of the wind, to lie to leeward and obtain a clear view of the principal opening, while I incurred but slight risk of detection, unless the rabbits or the wood-mouse crept into the brambles.
It was during the last week of watching that my patience received its best rewards. Almost regularly then, as the shadows deepened before moonrise, the rabbits stole out, and, sometimes with no hesitation, sometimes after much cautious reconnoitring and sniffing the air and “drumming” alarm signals on the mound before their door, hopped along the paths towards the clover-fields outside the wood. Soon after the rabbits appeared, the wood-mouse timidly peeped around the corner of the entrance, and, seeing nothing of his enemy, the brown owl, disappeared, with a rustle, among the dead leaves that filled a hollow where the old, disused workings of the “set” had “shrunk.”
On several occasions, the vixen led forth her cubs long before the badgers came in view, and while the light yet lingered on the crests of the neighbouring hills. The little family went away silently to a dense furze-brake about a hundred yards distant on the lower edge of the wood, and, till the sun had gone down, remained close-hidden in a lair that I afterwards discovered amid the long grass in the heart of the thicket.
More frequently, however, I saw nothing of the vixen till nightfall, though the cubs, impatient of confinement, now and again visited the mound outside the “set,” and for a few moments played together on the bare soil thrown up by the hard-working badgers, as, in spring, they enlarged their breeding chamber. But, in the first calm hour of night, when the red afterglow had faded from the hills, and the moon, ascending cloudless in the southern sky, cast long, mysterious shadows down the aisles of the wood, the fox-cubs and their dam came boldly out, and, instead of moving off towards the furze, adjourned to a rill close by, whence, after quenching their thirst, they repaired to a glade above the “set,” and in this favourite playground frisked and romped, unremittingly guarded from danger by their devoted mother. My presence unsuspected, I watched them, little dim figures, flitting to and fro.
When they had gone far up the winding pathway to the cornfields, and the silence was no longer broken by their low cries of dissembled rage and fear, I sometimes lingered in my hiding place; and as on the grass I lay, looking towards the stars that twinkled between the motionless leaves of the trees above me, my thoughts went back to a time long before our village had been built beside the river; before Giraldus Cambrensis had journeyed hence with the pilgrim band towards Sant Dewi's shrine; before the great Crag of Vortigern, across the near dingle, had resounded with the blare of the trumpets of war; before even, in the primitive hut-circle on the opposite hill, wild little children had played about the twilight fires kindled in readiness for the home-coming of the weary hunters—a time when the fox, the badger, and the tiny mouse had nightly journeyed through the woods, and the call of the gaunt wolf to his mate had weirdly echoed and re-echoed in the valley, startling the innocent hare in the open waste above the slope, and the busy beaver on the dam below in the pool at the bend of the river.
The badgers—or “earth-pigs” as the country folk have named them—were the original occupants of the “set,” unless, however, the earliest excavations had been made by the ancestors of the old doe-rabbit now inhabiting a side apartment. The foxes and the wood-mouse might have been looked upon as interlopers, but they often played the part of scouts and sentinels, quick to give alarm to the tolerant, easy-going badgers, in case of imminent danger from the visit of a dog or a man to the neighbourhood of their retreat.
The badgers were more irregular as to the time when they left the “set” than were any of the other inhabitants. Perhaps they suspected a human presence, because of some peculiar vibration in the earth through a false step of mine. Perhaps, during certain conditions of the atmosphere, a taint—borne from me, on a wave rather than a current of air, to the wide archway beneath the tree-roots in front of the main entrance, and then drawn down into the draughty passages—was detected by them immediately they passed beyond the stagnant atmosphere of the blind-alley where they slept. Evening after evening, one of the old badgers would appear at the mouth of the “set,” and, with snout uplifted in the archway of the tree-roots, would stay as motionless, but for the restless twitching of the alert nostrils, as were the trees and the stones around his home, while I, not even daring to flick an irritating gnat from my forehead or neck, would wait and long for the philosopher in grey to make up his slow-moving mind.
With regard to the badger's habit of staying for some time in the doorway of his home, it may be mentioned that years afterwards, when one night I compared my notes with those of a companion who had hidden near the main opening of the “set” while I had watched by a hole higher in the wood, I found that each entrance had, simultaneously and for long, been occupied by a vigilant badger; and, as both animals were full-grown “greys,” I concluded that parent badgers not unusually took ample precautions against surprise before allowing their cubs to venture out into the night.
Once away from the “set,” the old male badger seemed to lose suspicion of any obnoxious presence. Then, lumbering after him, every member of his family would appear in full view on the mound, and, with little fits and starts of pretended rage and fright, would roll over and over each other, rush helter-skelter back to the underground dwelling and out again, and round and round the tree-trunks. A favourite trick, indulged in by young and old alike, was that of raising themselves on their hind-legs close beside a broad beech-trunk near the “set,” and then, on tiptoe, stretching out their fore-claws to the fullest extent and scratching vigorously at the bark.
This trick irresistibly reminded me of an incident connected with a shooting expedition to the moors, when, one evening, after much gossip in the ingle-nook, I accompanied my jolly host to the barn, and there, much to the merriment of all concerned, acted as judge, while, by the light of a lantern, the farmer measured and recorded the height of his wife, as well as of each of his six children and his servants, against the oaken door-post, and finally insisted that he himself, a veritable giant, should submit to the test, and gave orders for a chair to be fetched that “mother,” a stout little woman of some sixty inches in height and, also, in circumference, might mount to the level necessary for “chalking his mark.”