The Bryanston Bestiary

Julia calls our time here the "Best Life," and rightly so. Bryanston just propels us from one pleasure to another. Rowing practice, tea time, team teaching, morning runs along country lanes, and drinks at the Head's house. It all seems too good to be true - a scholastic Camelot.


Thankfully, we have found a chink in the armor: badgers. They are the "short-legged, heavyset omnivores in the weasel family" scruffling through rubbish bins all over Bryanston. Translation: These suckers are bigger than a breadbox and ugly as homemade sin.

Of course, the grounds and surrounding acreage teem with wildlife of several (if not all) shapes and sizes. Rooks nest in the one tree where they won't be fired at by local farmers, pheasants warble and flap in alarm if you jog past their covey too quickly, and squirrels dart from tree to majestic tree, pleasantly small and skittish.

None of the local fauna, however, excites as many stories or powerful emotions as the badger.

The conversation last Friday evening had been chatty and jovial until we inquired about the weasel's cousin. Spectacles were swiftly adjusted, eyebrows were furrowed, and our interlocutors grew deadly serious.

We learned that despite their proximity to the school, badgers are staunchly feral; they are the illiterate lumberjack of rodents. They are allegedly "only violent if cornered." Most importantly, they move more quickly than one would assume.

Later that very night, I saw one galloping / undulating / scrabbling up a hill. Approximately the size of a runty thirteen-year-old, its talons glinted in the moonlight.

A somewhat braver colleague, who had actually named this badger "Phil," suggested that, in the event of a confrontation, I simply drop-kick it. Right. Like I'm going to drop-kick an animal the size of Julia.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Suffice to say, although I have left the land of poison ivy and copperheads, I still have to keep a watchful eye out for Nature.

By the by, I find that the advice for encountering the great outdoors runs close to the advice for teaching a class. Say it with me now: They are more scared of you than you are of them.