Badger, Badger...

Below is an extract from a series of short stories I've been writing in order to simultaneously teach children about a certain animal and also to introduce them to a certain literary style. This is the third in the series, which marries 'badgers' to American gothic...

Eubank awoke with a twinkle in his eye, a spring in his step, and a badger on his face. ‘Aaaaargh!’ he said, and rolled off the bed onto the body of his lover. What was she doing on the floor? He soon noticed that she was covered in badgers and that only the top half of her body was still there. Where was the other half? Quite a fat badger was also laughing in the corner of the room. Laughing in the way that badgers do. He had his answer.

Without a thought he took a swing at the portly mammalian [or mustelidae], all the while struggling to hear himself think over that sickening badger-laugh. ‘Shut up, you nocturnal butcher!’ he suggested ‘Go back to your sett, which is where badgers live!’

Badgers are susceptible to roundworm infestations. They can catch and carry rabies and are believed to transmit bovine tuberculosis

‘I don't like you.’ said Fat Badger. ‘And when I don't like something, it dies.’

‘You’ll find things aren’t so black and white with me!’ Eubank quipped.

And just as soon it was over, in a frenzy of fur and yelping.

And there were bodies. Oh, how there were bodies. He looked over the badgers around him. The one by his leg. Dead. The one by the window. Dead. The one by the dressing board. Sleeping. He stood on its head and looked away. Dead.

Finally, he made his way by over to the fat badger who’d been laughing at him earlier on, however counter-intuitively. He wasn’t moving. For a moment Eubank thought he might be hibernating, but then he remembered that badgers don’t hibernate, although they have been known to become torpid for a matter of days when the climate is sufficiently cold.

He walked away. He’d taken no joy in slaughtering anything from the phylum Chordata, and that was the phylum that badgers were from. Chordata.

Although badgers are called carnivores they mostly eat fruit, nuts, and earthworms, which are technically meat, but don’t have souls.