The soil below me is loamy and dark, soft beneath my small hands and chest. My toes turn inwards, chin resting on my stacked fingers, the bright pink of my anoracked shoulders darting in and out of my peripheral vision as I breathe. It is 1998, or maybe 1999, and as the millennium rushes towards us I am six years old and lying in the dark Yorkshire night looking for badgers.
"You'll see their white bits first," says my father, who has brought me here. We are somewhere below Blackmoorfoot, and there are still setts aplenty in this part of the world. Dad has shown me how to drop onto my tummy and shuffle forwards slowly. At first the cold of the ground makes me gasp, but a few minutes in and it is like I have always been here. The waiting doesn't bother me. But we do not have to wait for long until a shuffling sound comes from my left and a large badger emerges from the undergrowth. Dad is wrong, it's not his white bits I notice first, but the red lifeblood flecked along his snout. "He's had his tea," my father says, turning the terrifying into the prosaic, and Brock shuffles off again.
The memory is fleeting and unreliable. Sometimes I remember my father having a torch on the way up which he turns off when we arrive, a plunge into darkness which I soon realise is not dark at all. Sometimes my younger brother is with us, lying on my other side, sometimes I am alone and privileged as the older child to be out past bedtime and doing something strange. Sometimes I think I remember exactly where we were, but when I ask, my father recalls a different place.
For a few years I was not fully sure I hadn't imagined the whole thing. The more I think, the more details emerge: patterned mittens on a string inside my coat, the bark of a dog, a holly bush in the understorey with bright red berries, stars, but I am unsure whether these are the real memories of a child or the later embellishments of an adult.
But the memory - one of my earliest - stays with me and becomes more poignant as, approaching thirty, I ask Dad about it with a vague idea of taking my eldest child to do the same thing.
"There used to be loads up there in those days," he says, and I feel a spike of surprise that a time in my life now counts as "in those days". "Few years later there were loads of baiters. Went on a while. Don't think you'd find much up there now."
This knowledge does not remove the strong longing I frequently have to lie on the cold bare earth in the dark and wait to see what might shuffle by.
"You'll see their white bits first," says my father, who has brought me here. We are somewhere below Blackmoorfoot, and there are still setts aplenty in this part of the world. Dad has shown me how to drop onto my tummy and shuffle forwards slowly. At first the cold of the ground makes me gasp, but a few minutes in and it is like I have always been here. The waiting doesn't bother me. But we do not have to wait for long until a shuffling sound comes from my left and a large badger emerges from the undergrowth. Dad is wrong, it's not his white bits I notice first, but the red lifeblood flecked along his snout. "He's had his tea," my father says, turning the terrifying into the prosaic, and Brock shuffles off again.
The memory is fleeting and unreliable. Sometimes I remember my father having a torch on the way up which he turns off when we arrive, a plunge into darkness which I soon realise is not dark at all. Sometimes my younger brother is with us, lying on my other side, sometimes I am alone and privileged as the older child to be out past bedtime and doing something strange. Sometimes I think I remember exactly where we were, but when I ask, my father recalls a different place.
For a few years I was not fully sure I hadn't imagined the whole thing. The more I think, the more details emerge: patterned mittens on a string inside my coat, the bark of a dog, a holly bush in the understorey with bright red berries, stars, but I am unsure whether these are the real memories of a child or the later embellishments of an adult.
But the memory - one of my earliest - stays with me and becomes more poignant as, approaching thirty, I ask Dad about it with a vague idea of taking my eldest child to do the same thing.
"There used to be loads up there in those days," he says, and I feel a spike of surprise that a time in my life now counts as "in those days". "Few years later there were loads of baiters. Went on a while. Don't think you'd find much up there now."
This knowledge does not remove the strong longing I frequently have to lie on the cold bare earth in the dark and wait to see what might shuffle by.
