Tommy Nool and I were the best of friends growing up. We were an odd pair, to be sure, but neither of us seemed to notice at the time. Or if we did we pretended not to. You see, there were a lot of things we had in common when we first met, like our age (12 years old), our height (4 foot 7 inches), and our natural curiosity for practically everything outdoors. But I was a poor girl living with my grandparents in the little shack they had built some sixty years previous and he was the rich boy from over the hill who lived in a mansion. Neither his parents nor my grandparents seemed to like the idea of us playing together for a myriad of reasons none of them would ever elaborate on and so he and I continued on meeting together and exploring the forests, river bottoms, and meadows that covered most of that area.

Now, something you need to understand about Tommy was that his excitement for nature was matched only by his ignorance about it. I never blamed him for not knowing it was a bad idea to lick frogs or toads, but why he even thought that would be a thing to do I’ll never know. One moment we were wading out into the pond and catching tadpoles, next moment I look up and there he is, broad grin on his face and a fat toad in his hands, and he goes on and licks the thing. It took only a minute or so for his tongue to swell up so big he couldn’t hardly shut his mouth any more. I managed to get him back to his mansion real quick and they took him off to the hospital to get his tongue deflated. I figured that would be the end of our adventures but a week later he was back at my door, ready and eager for another foray into nature. I made him promise not to lick anymore toads and after he asked me if frogs were okay I made him promise not to lick those either.

In those first few Summer months when we met, and even into the next couple of years afterwards, we kept our explorations relatively close to home. We always assured one another that, as the sun began to sink low over the horizon, that we weren’t suppose to be out past dark, which was more or less true. But the real reason was that neither of us was all that confident just yet outdoors in the dark. It was all fun and games, hearing things moving about you in the woods when it was daylight, but those sounds took on a whole other form once the shadows grew long and deep and suddenly the world was full of all sorts of horrors. That’s not to say that all of those daytime sounds were innocent, though, quite the contrary, but we were young and thought ourselves invincible so long as it was light out.

I remember one time, we’d been exploring a bit farther afield than usual, and we came across a torn up hole in the ground. The hole itself was probably less than a foot across but the mouth of it was more than three feet across. The dirt, roots, and turf that had been dug out seemed to have been thrown all around without much care or concern and it formed a decent mound around the hole itself.

“Whoa!” Breathed Tommy when we came upon it. “What lives in there?”

Tommy was already bending low as though he wanted to just start crawling down the hole to introduce himself to the inhabitants. I had to grab him by the shoulders and pull him back gently to stop him.

“That,” I said, “is a badger hole.”

“Amazing,” Tommy said and he began to move again to stick his head down it. “What’s a badger?”

I grabbed Tommy again and this time I held him firm.

“Badger’s like a small bear that live in holes and want to tear your face off,” I told him, “or really tear any part of you they can get a hold of.”

That was enough to convince Tommy that we needed to go explore somewhere else that day, but the day after he told me he had been doing some research on badgers and he had some new ideas about them.

“They’re really smart,” he told me excitedly as we made our way through the woods, “and they’re incredibly resourceful.”

I couldn’t help but notice that we were retracing our steps from the day before and figured it wouldn’t be long before we would find ourselves at the badger hole yet again.

“Did your research also mention how nasty and ornery they are?” I asked.

“There’s several different kinds of badgers,” Tommy went on, ignoring my question, “and you can tell which kind they are just by looking at their fur!”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “and you’ll get a right good view of that fur when it climbs up your body and gets to chewing on your face.”

Tommy couldn’t be dissuaded though and I knew it would be best if I just let him get it over with while I was with him. That way there’d be someone there to help when he inevitably got into trouble. My only real concern was that I wasn’t sure what Tommy wanted with the badger. It was never enough just to look at something. Like the toad, he often had some hair brained idea about what he was going to do and I could never get it out of him what those ideas were. I don’t rightly know if even he knew what those ideas were, only that there was one stewing in his brain, until the moment came and he just did whatever popped into his mind. Whatever his reasons, he led us through the woods and back to the badger hole, talking about all his research the whole way.

Once we were at the hole I half expected Tommy to try and crawl in but he didn’t. Instead he did something far worse. He climbed onto the ridge of earth just above the hole and he began to stomp.

“I read that this is a great way to get them to come out of their hole,” he told me brightly.

I backed away a few paces.

“You know why they come out when people do that?” I asked.

Tommy shrugged. “It’s like knocking on their front door?”

“More like banging on their walls and windows and asking if the badger would like to eat their feet.”

Tommy stopped stomping for a moment, a look of uncertainty on his face, but it passed and he gave me a broad grin not unlike the one he had on right before licking the toad.

“I just want a quick look at it,” Tommy said and resumed stomping.

It wasn’t much longer before we both started to hear the low, rumbling growls of the badger within.

“You’re in luck,” I said, “it’s a nice one.”

“Really?” Tommy asked, the slight look of worry on his face from the growls turning to relief.

“Yeah,” I replied, “it’s nice enough to give you warning now cut it out and got off of there.”

“No,” Tommy said defiantly, “I want to –

Whatever Tommy had wanted to do I never got to find out since right at that moment the badger came busting out of its hole, spun round, and began climbing up Tommy like a squirrel going up a tree. The only difference was that trees didn’t dance around waving their arms and try to push the squirrel back down. Tommy’s attempts were complicated by the fact that the badger was snapping its jaw at him, though seemingly determined to get at his face and unconcerned by Tommy’s hands.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Tommy screamed so high and loud that he made my ears hurt. I could only imagine how it was for the badger being so much closer to Tommy, but if it was bothered it didn’t show it. Tommy kept swiping the badger down and then the badger would just climb right back up. It was like watching the same few seconds of video over and over again, forward and then backward and then forward again.

“What do I do?” Tommy cried out to me between the badgers attempts to eat his face.

“You don’t stomp on its hole,” I shouted back.

I had already found a decent sized stick on the ground and moved to Tommy as quickly as I could. He’d really only been under attack for a couple seconds but already the front of his pants and shirt were being torn to ribbons by the badgers claws each time it ascended. I wound up like a baseball player getting ready to hit a home run and waited for the badger to reach Tommy’s midsection. Once it was in position I let fly with the stick and smacked the badger hard across its head. I knew enough about badgers to know my strike wouldn’t hurt it, but that it would distract it from Tommy. Sure enough, the badger dropped from Tommy and turned on me.

“Run!” I shouted to Tommy and he didn’t need telling twice.

He was gone and getting farther away every moment. I hung back a bit, keeping the badger at bay with my stick until it was clear it wasn’t going to follow, and then I turned tail and ran as well. Most days I could beat Tommy in a footrace, but I didn’t catch up to him that day. He had the fear of the badger in him and it lent him such speed that I was only able to find where he’d gone by following the trail of snapped branches that he’d apparently just run straight through without breaking stride.

Tommy’s path ended at my grandparents home, a common retreat for us, and he was being tended to by my grandmother inside while my grandfather paced outside. The moment I saw him, and he saw me, I knew I was in for it.

“What d’you lead that boy into this time?” he demanded of me.

“This was all him,” I said, holding my hands up and shaking my head. “We found a badger hole–

“You was playing with a badger?!”

“Not me,” I said, “now let me finish!”

My grandfather crossed his arms and tapped his toe which was his way of letting me know I had one chance at convincing him I wasn’t at fault.

“We found it yesterday and I had to literally drag him away from it. He was practically trying to stick his head in there. Then today he was determined to go back there and he was going on about researching badgers and there was no way I could have stopped him then. He would have gone without me if I’d let him, so I followed. Well, he got on top of that badger hole and he began stomping and I warned him plenty but he kept at it and sure enough the badger came out and started trying to eat his face. Well, I had a good stick ready and I walloped it good enough to get it off Tommy. He’d finally gotten a sense of why badgers was not good to be messing with and so he turned tail and ran straight here. Seemed to have busted every branch at face height on his way here. I followed soon as I made sure the badger didn’t have a mind to follow us.”

My grandfather looked from me and then to the front door of the house where he’d surely last seen Tommy and then back to me.

“Come inside,” he said and waved for me to follow. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not but I obeyed.

Inside, Tommy was lying on our couch with my grandmother sitting beside him on one of the kitchen chairs. She had her pot of ointment she kept handy for cuts and things and was dabbing it liberally all up and down Tommy’s legs and chest where the badger had clawed him. When we came in, my grandmother looked up and just shook her head in amusement.

“You know what this boy’s telling me?” she asked before noticing me, peeking out from behind my grandfather.

“Oh, I have a pretty good guess,” my grandfather said in a sing-song sort of way.

They both shared a look of stifled bemusement.

“I hear you been dancing on a badger hole,” my grandfather remarked as though he were talking instead about some new hobby Tommy had picked up.

“I wasn’t dancing, sir,” Tommy replied sheepishly and he didn’t meet my grandfathers eyes.

“Well I’m led to believe that my granddaughter here told you that stomping on one was about the most foolish thing a person could do,” my grandfather went on, “and I’d hate to learn that you hadn’t yet learned that she knows a thing or two about these things.”

“I did some research,” Tommy mumbled.

My grandfather bristled somewhat, though it was clear to me that it was more for show than a real threat. Tommy looked pitiful enough with his torn clothes and cuts all up his front. Still, Tommy wilted even further.

“You been doing some research?” my grandfather spoke the last word as though it was the silliest sounding thing he’d ever heard of. “Listen to me, Tommy, if you want to go reading some book or watch some movie that lists off someone facts about badgers, that’s fine. But if you be running around out there with my granddaughter, you best learn to trust her and do as she says or else your likely to wind up in even worse shape than you are now, you understand me?”

“Yes sir,” Tommy nodded.

“Badger’ll chew your face off soon as look at you,” my grandfather concluded.

Everyone was silent for a moment and my grandmother resumed her tending to Tommy’s injuries which, thankfully, were turning out to be mostly superficial.

Tommy’s parents weren’t pleased when they saw him that evening, bandaged up as he was and his clothes torn to pieces. I’m not sure to this day how Tommy ever convinced them to let him come back around again after that but, like with the frog, he was back at my door a week later and ready to go exploring. He still got his hair brained ideas, but he was slower to act on them and usually checked with me first.

As usually happens, we eventually grew older and matured and went our separate ways but I’ll never forget my good friend Tommy and our various adventures through those woods. My grandfather still chuckles sometimes to himself about dancing on a badger hole whenever Tommy’s mentioned.

(Photo by Gary M. Stolz, USFWS)