The Line Between Us

The badger and I have been arguing over the same strip of ground for three summers now, and neither of us can quite remember why.

The first night, I was crossing the old railway line when I caught his scent on the fence post, thick and musky and deliberate. He had marked what he considered his. I marked it back. That is how these things are done. We did not fight; we rarely do. We simply stood on opposite sides of a drainage ditch, listening to each other breathe, each waiting for the other to lose interest first. He did, eventually. Or I did. It was hard to tell in the dark.

The second night, I found him at the edge of my territory, nosing at the ground near my burrow. I bristled. He looked up, unhurried, and held my gaze the way old rivals do — wary, but not truly afraid. There was a whole language in that look. We had done this before. We would do it again. Neither of us had anywhere better to be.

It was the third night that changed things. I was following the hedge line, as I have every night of my life, when the hedge simply stopped. Where the blackberries had been there was now bare, turned earth, and stakes trailing orange tape, and the flat smell of cut roots. Another row of houses was coming. I could smell the men who had been there that afternoon.

I found the badger sitting at the new fence, quite still, looking at the same thing I was looking at. We did not mark anything. There seemed no point.

The territory we had been fighting over was shrinking under both of us, and it had never once belonged to either.