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Making a deposit in the Karma Bank
Apr. 1st, 2007 10:47 pmMaybe... But not a withdrawal, anyway.
Last year I posted rather gloomily about a dead badger I'd encountered while walking down to the village. Last Saturday night, just at dusk, Diane and I were walking back from the village when we encountered another one, in almost the same place. Usual expressions of annoyance and unhappiness (but no cry of "Noooooo". I don't do the cry of "Noooooo" and I don't let my characters do it either, it's a silly way to behave, and it fixes nothing either in reality or fiction.)
Then the badger moved a leg. Dead badgers do not, as a rule, move. I whipped off my jacket, wrapped the badger up in it and dragged him (her? - I didn't look) off the side of the road and up to the hedge. Badger moved some more and growled.
Diane got on her mobile to our local veterinary surgeon - no dice, he couldn't/wouldn't come out. She was passed to another vet - again, no dice: this one muttered something about badgers and TB in cattle. I uncharitably wondered if there was some important sports fixture on the TV, but to do the vets in our immediate area justice, they are mostly agricultural, with only a small sideline in small-animal (not wild-animal) work, so the TB thing is a real concern.
We finally decided (Diane insisted) to leave the creature alone to either recover on its own or die in some sort of peace. There was much sensible bactericidal washing of hands and jacket when we got in. On the Sunday morning Diane took a walk up to where we'd left it: no badger. It had got up and trundled away. Either it has died somewhere else, or (and this is my hope) it spent most of Sunday muttering about "getting the number of that truck" then went about its badgerly business.
Folks in the village have since regaled us with tales of the toughness of badgers, so it's entirely possible that the same sort of almost-non-disfiguring vehicular sideswipe that killed Pip and Bubble only concussed the badger, and that we arrived in time to move it out of the path of whatever next vehicle would have finished the job. I like to think so.
Cellphone calls, about one Euro fifty.
Jacket laundry, about sixty cents.
Feeling good about taking some animal alive off that bloody road... Priceless.
Last year I posted rather gloomily about a dead badger I'd encountered while walking down to the village. Last Saturday night, just at dusk, Diane and I were walking back from the village when we encountered another one, in almost the same place. Usual expressions of annoyance and unhappiness (but no cry of "Noooooo". I don't do the cry of "Noooooo" and I don't let my characters do it either, it's a silly way to behave, and it fixes nothing either in reality or fiction.)
Then the badger moved a leg. Dead badgers do not, as a rule, move. I whipped off my jacket, wrapped the badger up in it and dragged him (her? - I didn't look) off the side of the road and up to the hedge. Badger moved some more and growled.
Diane got on her mobile to our local veterinary surgeon - no dice, he couldn't/wouldn't come out. She was passed to another vet - again, no dice: this one muttered something about badgers and TB in cattle. I uncharitably wondered if there was some important sports fixture on the TV, but to do the vets in our immediate area justice, they are mostly agricultural, with only a small sideline in small-animal (not wild-animal) work, so the TB thing is a real concern.
We finally decided (Diane insisted) to leave the creature alone to either recover on its own or die in some sort of peace. There was much sensible bactericidal washing of hands and jacket when we got in. On the Sunday morning Diane took a walk up to where we'd left it: no badger. It had got up and trundled away. Either it has died somewhere else, or (and this is my hope) it spent most of Sunday muttering about "getting the number of that truck" then went about its badgerly business.
Folks in the village have since regaled us with tales of the toughness of badgers, so it's entirely possible that the same sort of almost-non-disfiguring vehicular sideswipe that killed Pip and Bubble only concussed the badger, and that we arrived in time to move it out of the path of whatever next vehicle would have finished the job. I like to think so.
Cellphone calls, about one Euro fifty.
Jacket laundry, about sixty cents.
Feeling good about taking some animal alive off that bloody road... Priceless.
