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Updated: July 1, 2025
Evening after evening, one of the old badgers would appear at the mouth of the "set," and, with snout uplifted in the archway of the tree-roots, would stay as motionless, but for the restless twitching of the alert nostrils, as were the trees and the stones around his home, while I, not even daring to flick an irritating gnat from my forehead or neck, would wait and long for the philosopher in grey to make up his slow-moving mind.
Their stings failed to penetrate the thick coat and hide of their persistent foes, while a chance stab on the lips or between the nostrils seemed only to arouse the badgers from leisurely methods of pillage to quick and ruthless slaughter of the adult insects as well as of the immature grubs. But Brock never committed the indiscretion of swallowing a full-grown wasp.
There were other breaks and roughnesses on that flat green expanse caused by the vizcachas, a big rodent the size of a hare, a mighty burrower in the earth. Vizcachas swarmed in all that district where they have now practically been exterminated, and lived in villages, called vizcacheras, composed of thirty or forty huge burrows about the size of half a dozen badgers' earths grouped together.
Smallbones and the two youths had very little to do, save to consume these provisions and accept the hospitality freely offered to them at the camp of the Badgers, where Smallbones and the Ancient of the troop sat fraternising over big flagons of Flemish ale, which did not visibly intoxicate the honest smith, but kept him in the dull and drowsy state, which was his idea of the dolce far niente of a holiday.
He demurred a little, he had little time to spare, and though, of course, he could take boat at the Temple Stairs, and drop down the river, he observed that it would have been a very different thing to go home to the old man when he first came back with a pouch full of ransoms and plunder, whereas now he had barely enough to carry him to the place of meeting with his Badgers.
"A cete of badgers, fair sir." "Good, Nigel good, by my faith! And if you walk in Woolmer Forest and see a swarm of foxes, how would you call it?" "A skulk of foxes." "And if they be lions?" "Nay, fair sir, I am not like to meet several lions in Woolmer Forest."
The Badgers now incorporated themselves with another broken body of Landsknechts, and fell under the command of a better and more conscientious captain. Giles, who had been horrified rather than hardened by the experiences of Rome, was found trustworthy and rose in command.
Beautiful beyond comparison were those brief summer nights, silent, starlit, fragrant, when the badgers led their young by many a devious path through close-arched bowers amid the tangled bracken, or under drooping sprays of thorn and honeysuckle in the hidden ditches, or through close tunnels, as gloomy as the passages of their underground abode, in the dense thickets of the furze.
Bulla, like everybody else, appeared to take to me and treated me as an equal, after conversing with me for hours at a time. I was always a welcome guest at any of the bandits' camps and they often made me show off my admired powers on fox-cubs, badgers, weasels and other such wild creatures which they or their peasant friends had trapped alive.
A hundred bloodthirsty badgers, armed with rifles, are going to attack Toad Hall this very night, by way of the paddock. Six boatloads of Rats, with pistols and cutlasses, will come up the river and effect a landing in the garden; while a picked body of Toads, known as the Die-hards, or the Death-or-Glory Toads, will storm the orchard and carry everything before them, yelling for vengeance.
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