When that good man Andy Barclay sent a veritable anthology of cuttings, book excerpts and many, many ideas, some time ago, there was included an item from a book published, he thinks, about 1945, in which Brian Vesey Fitzgerald, a name well known to many, wrote about a badger's funeral, one that he had actually witnessed. It was a fine clear night in June and he settled down behind a bush to observe the comings and goings of a badger family he knew to inhabit the nearby sett. Unusually, he thought, it was the sow who first came out. The observer immediately knew she was excited, for the hair of her back was "running up and down, forming tiny wavelets" and the hair of the back, he tells us, is the barometer of the animal's emotions. She raised her head and uttered a cry - "the first real sound I have ever heard from a badger." A weird half-whimper, half-howl. Then she moved to a disused rabbit warren about 20 yards away and he could hear her grunting and digging. She came and went several times after. Suddenly another badger came into view, smallish, definitely not the male that Vesey Fitzgerald had seen often with the now agitated female. And then she uttered a thin sound, a kind of whistling, raising her head and bringing her nose back to the ground. Then the male, exactly opposite her, went through the same performance. This was repeated until the two noses were touching.
Then both went down into the sett and the male soon came up, dragging the body of the old male across to the rabbit warren. Soon sounds of scratching were heard, confirming the writer's guesses: "Father was being buried." Our watcher had taken up his station about nine o'clock and it was now after 4 a.m. But how, he asked himself, did the young badger know? Had he been summoned by that first great cry of the female? The human ear, anyway, he reckoned, could not hear it at any such distance as the nearest sett, which was five miles away. And the female was certainly expecting him. Had she been to his home to tell him? It seemed unlikely for more than one reason.
But how had her helper learned? "Was it sound, or scent, or instinct, that indefinable quality?" Two mornings later our man was at the sett. He went to the rabbit burrow and shovelled the earth away. The badger was there and crawling over his body were thousands of ants. The smell was bad. "I pushed back the earth."