Dreamer Easy

"Then there were the martens, which look a bit like weasels only prettier. They were grey with a white front, huge eyes and a big bushy tail. There was one that used to slide open the window, get inside my storeroom and head for the saucepan which had my bread inside wrapped up in a cloth. This marten would take off the saucepan lid, unwrap the cloth and then eat the bread. It wasn't like a rat, which would just gnaw through the cloth. Then it would proceed to unscrew the plastics lids of the containers holding the fat, pull off the zinc covering then eat it. It was amazing. Everything I had it would undo. I tried putting food outside for it but this would often get frozen and the marten would look so let down."

And a stoat: "It came trotting all the way up to me, stood there and looked up. I must have been enormous to it. It just stood there looking at me. Then it suddenly became excited. It ran back to the fence and began swinging on it, hanging upside down and looking at me all the time to see if I was still watching - like a child." (pp 90-91)

"But my childhood love of the natural world had forearmed me with a ready enthusiasm for when I finally came face to face with the honey badger in the wild. Actually, getting face to face with a honey badger is surprisingly difficult. They are blessed with the unique and, I should imagine, bloody surprising ability, if you've just caught one by the scruff of the neck, of being able to turn around inside their own skin. Grab one by the neck, look it in the eye and you'll quickly find that that's not its eye you're gazing into any more and its turned round in its skin so that it can stick its teeth out of its own arse and bite your nuts off. And they do enjoy a reputation for doing just that: tearing off the gonads of anyone foolish enough to provoke them. It might be some sort of bitter reaction to their diminutive scale compared to many other creatures - and, boy can I empathise with that one - or it could just be that they've learned over the centuries that jousting with sinister curved horns, snarling, pawing the ground and banging your chest are all well and good if you're a big, impressive animal want to signal your potency to an enemy, but if you're a small and irritatingly cute-looking thing and want to be taken seriously in the seedier end of the jungle, tearinq someone's bollocks off with your teeth does get your message across quickly."