The Old Badger Game

This happened last year east of the Powder River country, somewhere in the Wyoming breaks. It's not much of a story, the kind of thing you might hear on a sluggish afternoon in Pee Wee's.

Three old bachelor badgers lived a certain distance from one another in a piece of rough ground in the back pasture of Frank Frink's ranch. The badgers were concerned with food, sunbathing and property lines. Their territories came together in a stony outcrop that faced south and where the scenery flung out like an opened fan. Here, in the morning sunshine, the three badgers met and exchanged remarks on the vagaries of life and recent wind speeds in the whistles, grunts and growls that pass for communication among them. One of the badgers had held down a teaching job at the university up in Bozeman for a few years--creative writing or barge navigation--but had retired to the ranch. Two of the trio, including the university badger, were stout and ordinary. The third had a reddish tinge to his fur but was as ignorant as a horseshoe.

The Frink ranch started 114 years ago with some Texas longhorns and a restless pair of cowboys blackballed out of the Lone Star State for their sympathies with the LS cowboy strike of 1883. After that, the place rolled through a dozen sets of hands until it came to Frink.

Frank Frink took an interest in immortality and fountains of youth, eternal flames and the like, and because he had convinced himself that he was going to live, if not forever, at least to be 200, he was conservation-minded and absolute death on overgrazing. He was constantly shifting his cattle to different pastures and had an immense and complex chart on the pantry door that showed the schedule of short-term grazing he had worked out. One delicate pasture with live water held cattle for no more than three hours before they were hustled off to coarser grass.

Frink was always shorthanded. You ranchers know how hard it is to get good help. He found it just as hard to get bad help as he skimped on pay in favor of saving up for his long twilight years. At roundup time he was shorthanded and begged his wife to help drive.

"Oh, all right," she said, "but I'm telling you right now that I need a new winter coat, and after we ship the cattle I better get it."

"Haaah," said Frink, who had heard of the coat before.

On the circle drive, the rancher's wife came out of a draw, and as she trotted past a saltbush, a badger appeared.

"Good-looking badger," she said aloud, imagining herself in a coat of the same red hue. Not necessarily a fur coat--faux fur would do or even tweed with a monkey-fur collar.

Toward dawn the three badgers congregated at the stony outcrop.

"Have a good hunt?" asked one of the ordinary badgers.

"Not bad," said the other. "You?"

"Fair. How about you, Red?"

"Well, Great Badger Almighty, the rancher's wife has fell in love with me. I suppose she'll be pesterin me all the time now."

"What? What are you sayin?"

"Aw, she seen me over in the salt-bush draw, says, 'That's the handsomest badger I ever seen. I'm crazy about him.'"

The other badgers laughed and made coarse jokes about possible and impossible sexual conjunctions between the red-haired badger and the rancher's wife. Inevitably the talk turned to the story that went back to the 1880s of a desperate cowboy who forced himself on an ill-tempered grandmother badger and the violent consequences that still tickled a low sense of humor.

"I haven't got time to lay around," said Red, and he ambled away, taking a route through a deep draw where a number of noxious exotics, including a monstrous teasel plant, grew. He dragged himself through the teasel bush until his fur was sleek and shining.

"She should see me now," he said to the teasel.

Frank Frink and two of his cronies came out of the kitchen door, their hands full of ginger cookies shaped like steer heads with frosting eyes. The rancher stopped dead.

"Look at that. There it is again."

"What?" said Crisp Braid, scanning near and far, seeing nothing unusual.

"In the ditch. The biggest goddamn badger I have yet saw. Make a rug half as big as a steer hide. This is about the 10th time I've sawn the bastard. Havin coffee the other mornin and I look out the window over the sink, there's this bugger layin on a rock all spraddled out, takin its ease and airin its balls like it was in a hammock. I went for the 30-06, took a shot and missed. Know what he done? Kicked dirt at me. Damn these cookies or I'd run get the 06 now." He ate two steer heads at once and choked a little, the sound enough to send the badger into the weeds.

"How's that love affair, Red?" asked one of the dull badgers a few weeks later. "Got her down yet?"

"No. Rancher caught on and he's crazy jealous. Can't get near her he's jumpin up after a gun."

The university badger remarked that that was how the old badger game went--what seemed imminent somehow never came to pass. Life, in short, was a shuck. But then, he'd been denied tenure and was a little sour on things.