Wild Animals at Home

Excerpt: ...one gets within camera range. The Badger is such a subterranean, nocturnal creature at most times that for long his home life escaped our observation, but at last a few paragraphs, if not a chapter of it, have been secured, and we find that this shy creature, in ill odour among cattlemen as noted, is a rare and lovely character when permitted to unbend in a congenial group. Sturdy, strong and dogged, and brave to the last ditch, the more we know of the Badger the more we respect him. Let us pass lightly over the facts that in makeup he is between a Bear and a Weasel, and that he weighs about twenty pounds, and has a soft coat of silvery gray and some label marks of black on his head. He feeds chiefly on Ground-squirrels, which he digs out, but does not scorn birds' eggs, or even fruit and grain at times. Except for an occasional sun-bath, he spends the day in his den and travels about mostly by night. He minds his own business, if let alone, but woe be to the creature of the plains that tries to molest him, for he has the heart of a bulldog, the claws of a Grizzly, and the jaws of a small crocodile. I shall never forget my first meeting with Old Silver-grizzle. It was on the plains of the Souris, Pg 114 in 1882. I saw this broad, low, whitish creature on the prairie, not far from the trail, and, impelled by the hunter instinct so strong in all boys, I ran toward him. He dived into a den, but the one he chose proved to be barely three feet deep, and I succeeded in seizing the Badger's short thick tail. Gripping it firmly with both hands, I pulled and pulled, but he was stronger than I. He braced himself against the sides of the den and defied me. With anything like fair play, he would have escaped, but I had accomplices, and the details of what followed are not pleasant reminiscences. But I was very young at the time, and that was my first Badger. I wanted his skin, and I had not learned to respect his exemplary life and dauntless spirit. In the...