Landed by Tim Pears Page B

ate supper with his grandparents then said he felt like a wander, walked up the track till out of sight then cut back over the shoulder of the hill to the wood, just in case his grandfather was not viewing TV but having a smoke outside.
    The boy sat downwind and watched the entrances to the sett, and saw the animals emerge from their burrows. It seemed to be a colony of six adults and three large cubs. He saw no discernible difference between male and female; the cubs stayed close to one adult, presumably their mother, even if they no longer suckled from her. The animals came up out of the ground and the adults directly set off, in various directions, along well-worn paths.
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    Back in Welshpool Owen bought a camouflage jacket from the army surplus store and paid a visit to the small town library he’d not been to in years. He hunted along the shelves, found natural history books, but not what he wanted. Kept browsing. Eventually one of the two women at the desk asked what he was looking for.
    â€˜Badgers,’ Owen said, shy eyes cast down.
    â€˜You want a book about badgers? Let’s see what’s available and order one, shall we?’
    It came a week later – newly published, Owen this copy’s first reader – and the boy stared at the pages and soaked up their contents like a sponge, to his mother’s amazed witness: this was something new. Owen told his mother that badgers were close relatives to weasels, polecats, mink, martens, sable,
otter. Omnivores, he said. ‘They’ll eat mice, rats, moles, shrews, hedgehogs and rabbits,’ he recited in his voice of grit and oil. ‘All kinds of insects. Daddy-long-legs. Beetles. They’ll eat frogs, toads, snails and slugs. In the autumn there’s blackberries, strawberries. Fallen apples, pears. But you know what their favourite food is, Ma?’
    â€˜I don’t.’
    Owen scrunched up his face, an expression of delighted disgust. ‘Worms.’
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    He couldn’t wait to get out, every weekend, and his grandfather was glad of him, the old man’s right hip hurting now, bone grating bone. Inside his flesh, under his skin, you couldn’t get at it. The boy’s young wiry legs scampered up on to the tops, checking the sheep. His grandfather considering a quad bike. He had a catalogue and chewed through it, full of resentment. Went on the waiting list for a hip replacement operation.
    Owen’s grandparents gave him a little money for the chores he did; he resolved to save it all up for a pair of binoculars. Aimed to have them by Christmas.
    With the summer holidays Owen was out there the whole time, a young farmhand. After an early dinner with his grandparents he went off, always up the track and skirting around to the wood, the pattern set. The badgers spent almost all night foraging for food and Owen followed them as and when he could, taking care to keep beneath the breeze: badgers lacked the good eyesight of foxes, but their sense of smell was many hundreds of times keener than humans’.
    Owen watched one pad across pasture with its nose to the ground, sniffing for worms, whipping them up quickly, snapping the whole worm into its mouth. Worms were full of water,
and gave badgers all the liquid they needed if they caught the number they required: two hundred in a night.
    It was a damp July, and continued into August, food plentiful, and the badgers returned to the sett. The cubs were almost as large as the adults now: one chased a fox off. Owen saw them grooming each other, and sometimes sharing food brought back, members of the group jostling each other like comical rugby players, barging one another out of the way with their ample flanks. He began to perceive the pecking order, at least those at the top and bottom. One slunk around in the background; if he or she came close to shared food any one of the others would turn on it, bite it if it didn’t scarper fast enough. The clearly dominant