The Heart of the Wild by S.L. Bensusan

Even the residents hardly knew the part of the forest that the badger called his own, the tourists and callers from the nearest seaside town had never seen it. From June to September there were visitors in plenty; they came along the white dusty roads in coaches, carriages and motor-cars; they walked, or rode on bicycles, held picnics in the shadow of beech and oak trees, and often left assortments of glass bottles and paper to mark the spot they had delighted to honour. Sometimes on his nightly rounds Brock would pass one of these places, and would make haste to get away from the neighbourhood, for his scent was exceedingly keen, and he knew the number of the visitors as certainly as though he had been out during the daytime. The fear of man had come to him quite naturally, it was part of his life to dread and avoid this relentless enemy, just as it was his rule to range the woods by night and to retire to his earth when the sun came out of the east heralded by the pageant of the morning twilight.

He had few friends; only the brown owl sometimes paused in her work to pass the time of night, or the fox, whose earth was close at hand amid the thick-growing gorse, would hold a little converse after a good hunting expedition that had closed before dawn woke the rest of the woodland. Then in the moment when sleepy birds were trying their earliest notes and wondering why those strange visitors the cuckoo and nightingale would sing all the night through, when the wood-pigeons were tumbling heavily from their perches, and the shy kingfisher was standing by the edge of his home in the bank of the stream, the brown owl would seek his hollow tree, and badger and fox would seek their homes. The badger's abode was quite palatial. Just where the gorse ended and the trees asserted themselves again, the soil was very light, and there were patches of broom and bushes of pink thorn and hazel. Clear of the roots, the first passage began, with a rather steep slope to a well-cleared chamber in which the badger slept. Beyond this apartment there was an upward slope from which two or three tracks branched to the right, and at the end of the slope was another chamber used as a storeroom only a few feet below ground. To the right of this was another dip that went to the open air, or offered a road by yet another gallery to a point just above the sleeping-chamber. In times of stress the grandparents and more remote ancestors of the badger had been accustomed to use the chamber that was nearest the second entrance, for they could then hear the lightest human footfall. But in the old bad days even this precaution had availed them nothing. Dogs and tongs had been employed by their pursuers, and they had been butchered to give idle folk a few hours' amusement.