The Beast of Balbirnie (600 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesLabels: fiction
Rating: 1.9 on 13 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Flash Harry (View user info) at 2008-09-02 10:54:23 EDT
The golf course at Balbirnie Park is a beautifully challenging landscape on the east coast of Scotland. It is a par 71 parklands course of rich greenery, rolling hillocks and cavernous valleys, split through the middle by the babbling water of the River Forth. Its clientele are respectable, affluent and moderately skilful; but for a long time they mostly stayed away from the tee. Fear, and rather understandable cowardice coursed through the membership (or at least those that did not relinquish their privileges altogether), for Balbirnie found itself in the midst of a terrible and brutal creature.
I received a letter to such effect on one crisp, spring morning:
Dear Flash,
I write to you with great urgency. Our golf course has become, in recent years, terrorised by a quite ghastly gang of vermin, and we have reached our wits' end with them. They are making our work here rather untenable, and I cannot tell you how many extra hours' work they afford my team of groundstaff and I. They dig ditches, pot-holes and tunnels in and beneath the golf course, making the greens unplayable and the turf on the fairways treacherous. These bastards steal golf balls, gnaw through trees, empty bunkers of their sand, vandalise flagpoles, deflate the tires of the golf-buggies, and countless other infuriating nuisances.
Then, just last week, a young member of the golf course was attacked by the beasts, disfigured and left for dead. We have tried to deal with them humanely, and indeed had hoped that over the cold winter months they would find another home, but the time has now come for decisive, swift action.
I understand that you have vast amounts of experience in the field of extermination, and your name could not have been recommended to me highly enough; please, for the love of God, come to our aid. You shall find yourself handsomely rewarded, with accommodation and meals in the course hotel.
Yours truly,
Tom Pickle,
Senior Greenkeeper
Balbirnie Park Golf Course
What vicious critter had taken to such barbarous behaviour? I scanned the letter again, and noted that Mr Pickle had neglected to mention the species in question. It was possible, I mused, that he was not particularly certain of this himself. Keen for a closer inspection of this most unusual activity (and with some concern that another golfer might be attacked were I to decline the invitation), I packed thoroughly for all eventualities and left for Balbirnie the next day.
I arrived at the golf course, and found the sweeping curves of the land all but empty. 'Twas not long into the spring, the soft summer greens had just recently replaced the bland winter alternatives, and the first tee ought to have been the scene of a queue; but as it was, I met only Tom Pickle, and a few hardy, weather-beaten golfers. The greenkeeper met me with a gratefulness that belied his fear, and his desperation. I was shown my excellent accommodation, introduced to the club pro (an infantile oaf named Donnelly) and offered for a detailed tour of the course. Pickle suggested we take out some clubs and some balls, so that I might see the hazard areas the golfers were wont to find themselves in, which was an agreeable proposition. If my first impression of Balbirnie was a good one, however, it was soon to be replaced with something more sinister.
I have never been a golfer of more than average skill, and after negotiating the first two holes with a rather miserable three over par, I turned my focus to the condition of the course. I found the greens to be sparse and balding, with slopes and trenches directed towards deep divots and craters, so that almost no matter where one landed the ball it would be difficult to avoid them. Upon examining the damage, and seeing that the earth had been clawed out by something representing small shovels, I racked my brain as to what manner of beast I might be dealing with. A few options came to mind, and I probed Pickle to see what his instincts told him.
"Well Sir," he began in his slow, genial manner. "You don't look like a betting man to me..."
"That sounds like a wager," I smiled.
"But if you were to ask me to lay a bet - and this is without having ever laid eyes on the crafty bastards, mind..." Pickle rubbed his chin and stared thoughtfully into the distance. "I'd say we're dealing with some sort of mutant badger."
The thought had crossed my mind, already, of course (not the mutant part, but the notion that the culprit was a particularly malicious strain of badger). As we teed up on the fourth hole, an uphill monster dubbed 'Mount Frost', I weighed up the evidence in my mind, and spanked a monstrous drive straight into the woodlands to the left of the fairway. Pickle, who must've played this hole a thousand times, pitched a sensible long-iron to the summit of the slope, plum in the middle. With a rueful smile and a silent curse, I went in search of my errant ball, all the considering the mysterious rodent that so terrorised this land.
My ball had pitched into one of those patches so common to forests which lay parallel to a fairway. The ground was heavily trampled and thick with leaves and muck, while my eyes were drawn to half a dozen imposters which turned out to be pale rocks or white flowers or careless litter. I was beginning to turn downhill, with the suspicion that my ball might have rolled back among the foliage, when I stopped deadly still and gripped the seven-iron tightly in my grip. Not ten feet away from me, sticking out from the foot of a coarse, overgrown bush, was a hairy, twitching paw.
I turned around to look for Pickle, but I was too far into the trees for him to see me, and I daren't yell for him. Resolved to continue alone, I trod gently towards the bush, staring all the while at the animal's protruding foot. Nasty claws grew from the wiry, grey fur on it, and in terms of size I might've expected to pull out a giant rabbit. The paw was easily larger than my own palm, 'twas thickly and powerfully padded. With a steady hand, I reached out with the seven-iron and pulled the leafy curtain in which it was surrounded aside.
The scene was enough to make my jaw clench, my ears hum and my knees buckle; for it was a scene of horror. Nausea was coupled with realisation as I slowly came to terms with both what I was confronted with, both here and in the days ahead. Pickle ought to have sounded out a bookmaker, for he was right in one respect: the beasts which haunted his golf course were indeed badgers. But this was not a strain of badger one expects to find in Scotland: it was (and I was fairly sure of this from the moment I laid eyes on the unfortunate carcass) a honey badger.
Honey badgers are powerful, thickly built, fierce carnivores. Intelligent, violent and notoriously aggressive, the appearance of this one stunned me; not only in its presence, but in how it was presented. Honey badgers, as their name suggests, have a great appetite for beehives, and this one's sweet tooth had led to its demise (well, just about; the beast was still alive, albeit dying, when I came across it, until I snapped its neck). The animal's head was deeply encased in a beehive, which had begun to rot. In such circumstances the badger can be stung to death by the livid honey bees - and sure enough, there were hundreds of them littered around the bush, and buried in the invader's fur - or, if it gets his head stuck, suffocate.
This badger made for a pitiful introduction to the beasts of Balbirnie, with his head stuffed irretrievably into the beehive, and the breath of death on his lips. I snapped his neck with one well-placed swing of the seven-iron, and dragged the body a little into the clearing, before yelling on Mr Pickle to join me.
We took the dead badger back to the clubhouse, where I removed the beehive, definitively identified him, took prints of his paws and established (roughly) his age. This was a young one, despite his commendable size. There were bigger, fiercer animals out on the course, and now that I knew they were honey badgers I stiffened my resolve to remove them from a position wherein they could cause harm.
User Reviews
Submitted by Replen (user info) at 2008-09-03 15:07:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Good, but being a bit sesquipedalian in places spoiled it for me.
Submitted by TheGoat (user info) at 2008-09-03 06:37:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
really enjoyed this
Submitted by Nellypaal (user info) at 2008-09-03 05:05:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Nice.
Submitted by Littlebint (user info) at 2008-09-03 04:08:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Ah the evil Honey Badger
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-09-03 03:59:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by X54 (user info) at 2008-09-03 05:00:48 BST (#)
Ranking: 2
Hopefully there's more to this. Isn't there some breed of dog that hunts badgers? Dachshunds, I think, as improbable as it seems.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is more in my head, but whether it makes an appearance in written format is a matter for my levels of laziness to decide.
Ah, hunting dogs, interesting...
*scribbles mental note*
Submitted by Aadarm (user info) at 2008-09-03 01:30:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Caddy Shack with badgers.
Submitted by X54 (user info) at 2008-09-03 00:00:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Another good one, Flash! Hopefully there's more to this. Isn't there some breed of dog that hunts badgers? Dachshunds, I think, as improbable as it seems.
Submitted by Adamdidit2u (user info) at 2008-09-02 14:55:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You're gonna get fucked up. Them bastards are nasty little shits.
How are you typing with missing fingers?
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-09-02 12:25:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by BobSandwich (user info) at 2008-09-02 11:33:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Banjo (user info) at 2008-09-02 11:08:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I love golf ! Bottle of buckie, steaming jackey drunk by the 18th and ripping the ass out of my jeans jumping a barbed wire fence to go for a piss behind a corrugated iron hut.
Perfect round of golf.
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-09-02 10:59:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
-2 TYPOS
Submitted by SgtHartman (user info) at 2008-09-02 10:58:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
+2 Harry