By the garden gate the badgers formed a quiet line, as if a barbershop had opened in the grass. Each guest greeted the dew, nodded to the nearest daisy, and combed exactly one white stripe, then waited to see whether the path approved.
We asked at the kiosk by the fence. The vendor said people used to hurry through. Now they pause, because a stripe that has been combed properly does not wrinkle until tea. In the complaints-and-thanks notebook someone had written, in very small letters, “please do not offer a bigger comb.” The park keeper added a note of his own: the small ones already know the width of a polite morning.
The next day a young badger returned to the same daisy, checked yesterday’s parting, and combed a little slower, as if the first attempt had only been practice.