Badger in the Light

It’s like a lamp in the dark field. Not an electric bulb, but a silver flame, always changing shape, pulsing and shifting. But the source of light – the streetlamps on the road – is behind me, sometimes enhanced by the glare of buses shouldering their way through the thin rain.
What seems bright is reflection, the hollow filaments of a badger’s fur knocking back every gleam from beyond the field. And more so than usual – this badger is albino, recognisable by its shape when it pauses to sniff the air, but not by colour or the stripes on its head.
It’s a ghost animal, the faint wisp of a species that might appear in a glass negative. It’s hard for my eye to comprehend it. In the tunnels of the sett, the mirror-like fur would reflect no light, just like the coats of the other badgers. But out here by the road the watching human was transfixed by the gleam.
As a child, I kept a “nature diary” for country walks that at times was reduced to recording horses, nettles and generic “crows”. I loved the idea of “nature” but was blind to it – too inexperienced, with low expectations – and cut off from it. In the 1980s and 1990s intensive farming was still building on the advances it had made since the 1970s, conservation was a far fainter voice than it is even now, and - at least to my eye - animals and plants had not yet made the jump into urban territory. So every time I see something relatively unusual – a newt, a seal, a peregrine – I’m in slight disbelief.
The first time I encountered the badgers in my neighbourhood was a surreal experience. I was making the short walk back from a friend’s when in front of me four dark shapes bolted from the shelter of bushes by the road. Their claws made a strange skittering on the frosty tarmac. The glitter of the ice made it look as though sparks were flying from their feet.
The dramatic effect of movement, sound, play of grey and black in the streetlights, was lessened a little by the way they kept slipping and bumping against each other like Keystone Cops.
As I walked the badgers kept crossing my path, taking a different but intersecting route. Even when I couldn’t see them I could hear the tickertape of their paws.
Every so often I see a badger out in the playing fields by Abingdon Road, down by Eastwyke Ditch, vanishing under a hedge. One dug its way into my garden under a fence and rooted up some bulbs, leaving tell-tale rough hairs snagged on the brambles. All these encounters have an air of secrecy about them. These encounters are like the moment a sparrowhawk shoots out from cover – it can’t be pointed out to anyone else, you just must be looking in the right place at the right time, as if you especially were chosen.
The badgers must always be aware of their observer. Their heads turn towards me, noses lifted. even to their poor sight, my shadow would stand out against the lights. And if the wind is in the right direction, they will be able to smell my human mix of biological and chemical scents.
So with the albino badger. When I first saw it, it was a few metres on the far side of a chain-link fence, sifting forcefully through the leaf litter. The discs of mouldering leaves spiralled round its head.
After a few seconds it turned its face to me, almost a cone of pale fur, with two white eyes. I stood as still as I could. Then it lowered its head and went back to scrubbing through the leaves.
It leapt around from place to place, the shape of its body blurred by its shimmering fur. Once in a while it would turn to look at me. I could see its feet bright against the earth, occasionally its canines.
It was an eerie time, watching this crossover from a sensory world parallel to mine. Eventually the badger reached a track that crossed the grass. It gave up its search and loped, head high above its front feet, over the compacted stones into the scrub on the far side, back towards home. I watched its glimmer push its way among the bramble leaves and turned home too.