Badgers
Badgers are the great diggers of the basin country. They live in setts, warrens of tunnels and chambers dug over generations into banks and wood edges, and where they dig into a flood bank they weaken it. Basin dyke reeves pay for their heads; Reedfolk, who read ground for a living, take an old sett as proof that the ground it is in has not flooded within a lifetime.
Appearance
A badger is the size of a stout dog but low to the ground, broad and heavy, with short powerful legs and long digging claws on the forefeet. Its body is grizzled grey, its legs and belly black, and its long head is white with a broad black stripe running back through each eye to the ear. It has a small tail and a flat, shuffling walk.
Badgers are seldom seen, since they come out after dark, but they are often heard: snuffling and grunting along the hedge, a shrill scream in a fight. A sett has a heavy, musky smell and great spoil heaps of earth and old bedding at its mouths.
Habitat and Range
Badgers live in the hedgebanks, wood edges, and dry rises of the Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath, and in the foothill banks of the Headwater Marches. They need soil that drains and digs well, and they like the made banks of dykes and embankments for the same reason.
Behaviour and Temperament
A badger eats worms above all, and grubs, roots, fruit, eggs, and young rabbits. It forages at night along the same paths for years. Badgers live in clans in one sett, which the clan digs and extends over many lifetimes; some setts are older than the villages near them. They are shy and peaceable, but a cornered badger bites hard and does not let go.
Life Cycle
Cubs are born in late winter deep in the sett, two or three to a litter, and come out in spring. A badger may live ten years or more; the sett lives much longer.
Uses and Dangers
Badger hair makes the best brushes, and the fat is rendered for salves. The danger is to the banks. A sett dug into a flood bank leaves tunnels the spring rise finds, and a dyke that fails in the rise often fails where a badger dug. Dyke reeves in the Basins pay a coin for every badger head brought in, and dig out setts in the levees each autumn.
Lore and Belief
Reedfolk pilots and flood-keepers say a badger never digs where the water comes, so a sett with spoil heaps grown over with old trees marks ground that has stayed dry a long time; an old sett suddenly abandoned is a warning. Basin farmers say a badger’s foot carried in the pocket stops cramp. Basin children are told the badger keeps the old earth’s memory, which is closer to Reedfolk thinking than the farmers know.
Dyke reeves pay a bounty on badger heads, and in a flood year the sett-diggers and the boys who hunt them are the most hated and the best paid on the bank.