Here was a dilemma. How do you shoot a badger when you can make it out as no more than an enlargement of a dustbin? The creature had its paws on the rim, its head down, as it searched nastily and avidly through our rubbish. It would be licking at scraps of pâté and perhaps gnawing old bacon rind or the bone from a gammon. It was wild nature and probably gassable but only by the appropriate authorities. Then again (was there a chill in the air for all the time of the year?) were badgers dangerous—not only by transmitting disease, but actively, toothily, clawily dangerous? Would a wounded badger attack? Would a tickled-up badger or one with young (were there young with it?) go for my throat? The situation was not simple and was further complicated by the absurd. I was wearing an old pair of pyjamas and the cord of my dressing-gown was gripping me a little above where the pyjamas should have been gripping me but were too ancient for their elasticated top to do so. They were performing as they always did, even in contrary conditions. If I was losing weight, they slipped down. If I was gaining weight, they slipped down. I had the loaded gun in one hand, my torch in the other and no third hand for my trousers which now fell suddenly under my dressing-gown so that I only just caught them by clapping my knees together. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger. I recognized uneasily the hand of what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce.

There came a fresh sound from the dustbin. I began to shuffle forward in a complex manner, the gun in one hand, the other hand partly holding the torch in my pocket and at the same time hooked into my trouser top. A sudden breeze rattled the branches noisily in the orchard. I reached the dustbin at the exact moment when the badger, it may be, alarmed by the sudden sound, froze in its probing act. I faced it across the bin. The badger looked up and uttered the only really “strangled cry” I have ever experienced outside fiction. This cry was the beginning of a high sound expressed in the funnies as glug or gulp. The dawn-lit face of Professor Rick L. Tucker rose before me beyond the further rim. I ought to have been embarrassed for him but I wasn’t. He had bored me and intruded, he had shown every sign of prying, of making a professional meal of me. Now I had caught him in the act of the unthinkable. I spoke very loudly. If this woke up the whole world, I implied by my decibels, why should I conceal the fact that I had found a full professor of Eng. Lit. rifling my dustbin?

“You must be very hungry, Tucker. I’m sorry we didn’t feed you better.”

He made no sound at all. I could see the kitchen door was open behind him. I had no free hand with which to point. I gestured with the airgun and that commanding gesture tightened my finger (unaccustomed enough to guns, these days) round the trigger. The gun went off with a report that in daytime would have seemed no louder than a cork popping but in the dawn sounded like the first shot of D Day. Tucker may have given another strangled cry for all I know, but all I heard was the shot, its echo and the cries of what sounded like all the birds for miles. Tucker turned and moved clumsily as a badger into the kitchen. I hobbled after him, switched on the light, shut the door and stood the gun beside it. I sank on to a stool on one side of the kitchen table and, as if an interview or a continuation of the last one was inevitable, Tucker sank on to a stool across the table from me. My own farcical situation and incompetence changed my irritation into fury.