Jolly was a badger

Story ID:	459
Written by:	Gail Lee Martin
Organization:	Kansas Authors Club
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	Greenwood County Kansas USA
Year:	1930
Person:	Jolly and me

Jolly was a Badger

I still remember the day in 1936 when a friend of my daddy’s came by with his pickup load of hunting dogs. We were living in the Phillip’s oil camp. I was in the fourth grade and dogging Daddy’s footsteps. We stepped outside to talk and found the friend had a surprise for me. A baby badger. The dogs had killed the mother badger but George had managed to dig up the badger den and save three babies. My school teacher, Brownie Dillman took one; George wanted to keep one and Daddy said I could have the other, if. Boy that was a big if. I had to have total care of this wild animal that so innocently lay in my palm.

Or course it didn’t turn out that way even though I crossed my heart. The baby wasn’t weaned yet, so Mother had to come up with a bottle with a nipple of sorts small enough for the tiny mouth. We ended up using an old finger from a rubber glove fastened around the top of a medicine bottle with a rubber band. With a tiny hole in the end the little fellow took right off sucking. I named him Jolly because he didn’t seem to mind being an orphan. To my dismay Jolly began to grow rapidly.

Soon it was impossible to keep the badger in any sort of a cage. With his long digger claws Jolly would tear through the wire and wood of our backdoor screen in no time and come into the house hunting me. You couldn’t use a collar and chain to hold him because he just slide his tapered neck and head right out of the collar. Daddy finally fastened a belt around Jolly’s big fat middle, just behind his front legs. Poor flustered Jolly. But we could finally keep him where we wanted him.

The dirt floor of Mother’s wash house was his home now and he soon made a wonderful set of tunnels. I would go looking for him in one entrance and find him watching me from another hole. I’m sure he thought it was a first-rate game. He was always wanting me to set on the ground so he could curl up in my lap and sleep the day away. I couldn’t sit still that long because Mother always wanted the dishes washed or I’d see a butterfly I wanted to chase.

I loved to take Jolly everywhere I went. He was so good at chasing the boys, who lived in our oil field camp. They were such bullies but with Jolly by my side they stayed at the other end of the row of houses. I took him to the garden when Daddy was digging potatoes. I was to pick up the spuds and put them in a basket. Jolly thought he could dig them faster than Daddy and the potatoes went flying only in bits and pieces.

One night Jolly was kidnapped! So were his two siblings. Everyone thought they had been taken for their beautiful pelts that would be worth a lot of money. The irony of that is the broad belts they all wore had rubbed off their fur making the pelts worthless. We never saw Jolly or his brothers again.

I gathered all my friends for a sad memorial service sharing memories my best friend, Jolly the Badger.