Dear Readers, I picked up Interrupted Journeys by Adrian Potter purely out of curiosity – for once, I hadn’t read reviews or heard any fanfare about its publication. But what a fascinating read it is! Adrian Potter retires from his job as a teacher in West Yorkshire, and soon finds himself part of a team who look after the ‘Badger Phone’. He travels out to road casualties and trapped badgers, but also gradually becomes the ‘Badger Man’, travelling the North of England with his two colleagues, Pam and Derek (and later, Adam).
“Derek is an ex-miner. It was his custom, like so many of his workmates, to chew tobacco underground to stave off thirst. The long-term result was that his teeth were ruined and the bulk of them fell out, and he can no longer bite into an apple. And the habit of doing without fluid all day stuck – while out badgering, which is what he does all the hours of daylight, almost every day – although he quit the tobacco. ‘Do you want a swig, Derek?’ I say, offering him a drink. ‘I’m alright’ is the inevitable negative response’.
The badgering habit sticks, and Potter becomes fascinated with the live animals – he buys some land with a resident badger sett, He is also intrigued by the process of decay that sets in when the animals are dead, so probably not a book to read during breakfast.
And then he becomes involved with foxes – injured foxes, dead foxes, foxes in the wrong place, orphaned foxes.
‘ The owners of a private wood were concerned when they discovered what they took to be small badger cubs above ground one freezing cold April morning. There were four tiny, dark creatures on the scant woodland floor outside a hole, and they were behaving rather strangely. ‘Those aren’t badger cubs’, I said ‘they’re fox cubs’. Very young cubs are not especially foxy. Their coats are woolly and chocolate brown rather than russet; they have short faces, blue eyes and puppy-dog tails. At this stage a fox cub might be compared to a larva, dissimilar to the imago form, while an equivalent badger cub is comparable to a nymph or, in the parlance of popular culture, a ‘mini-me’. These fox ‘larvae’ were squabbling with pathetic ferocity over the meagre remains of a dead crow, which they were probably incapable of assimilating, and were quite oblivious of their surroundings…..The only conclusion to be drawn was that the vixen – perhaps both parents – had come to grief and that these cubs were orphans. On such a bitter day they were sure to die. ‘
Fortunately, Potter and his colleagues are able to find a fox rescue organisation who can look after the fox kits, and they are reared to adulthood and released in a safe place. A happy ending in a story with a lot of unhappy endings – most road traffic victims are euthanised, or already dead when Potter arrives. But still he continues, because there is a gap here – there is no one organisation that looks after injured or displaced large mammals, and Potter is often the link between the police, animal rescue centres and vets. He constantly goes the extra mile – clambering up steep banks in search of wounded animals, lifting corpses out of the road, organising people so that animals can make a dignified escape when trapped.
Towards the end of the book, after a year in which he deals with over two hundred mammal casualties, and after five years of concentrating on badgers, Potter finds himself becoming ‘the deer man’ – roe deer are often victims of road traffic accidents, and sometimes deer calves are left orphaned and alone.
‘I gravitated towards deer for a number of reasons. There wasn’t a deer group, no one had a duty towards these animals. I could make the responsibility my own. Deer – specifically roe deer – seem to me to be the most mysterious and wildest of our larger beasts. The least known and the least considered. I wanted to get as close to them as I could in order to feel alive. And I needed to be defined by something different and exciting. To say I was a retired teacher, to myself or to anyone else, was never going to be enough. I was a self-styled ‘conservation and animal rescue voluteer’, but that was still a bit vague.’
And this one reason that this book is so interesting to me – it isn’t just about the animals, intriguing though that is. Potter is very honest about his motivations for being the ‘badger/deer/fox man’ – he is searching for meaning, and for a way to feel truly alive. Aren’t we all, in a way? I really loved this book – not only did I learn a lot about our wild mammals, but it also made me think about our motivations as human beings. And Potter writes like a dream. Highly recommended!
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