It began, as these things do, with a drip.

Arthur was a badger of settled habits, and one of the most settled was that he slept on his left side, in the second chamber of the sett under the beech bank, with his nose pointed at the wall. He had slept that way for eleven years. The wall was a good wall, packed hard and dry, and it had never once done anything to deserve being looked at, which was why he liked it.

The drip landed on his ear.

He did not wake up at once. A badger asleep is a heavy thing, and it takes some persuading. The second drip landed in the same place. The third landed on his nose, and he opened one eye, and lay very still, and waited, and the fourth landed, and he was awake.

It was raining. He could hear it now, once he listened: a long, patient, all-night sort of rain, the kind that is not going anywhere, drumming on the beech leaves overhead and running down the bank. And somewhere above him, through a good deal of earth that ought to have known better, some of it had found a way in.

Arthur moved along the bed.

This was the sensible thing to do and he did it. He moved along about the length of himself, to where the straw was dry, and turned round, and settled, and shut his eyes.

Drip.

It had not moved. It was not going to move. It was a small sound, in a quiet room, and it landed every few seconds on the exact spot where his ear had been, and now that he knew it was there he could hear nothing else. He could hear the space between the drips. He lay and waited for each one, and each one came, exactly as he had expected, which was somehow worse.

“Right,” said Arthur, to the wall.

He got up.

In the dark of the second chamber, which was no darker to him than the day, he stood under the place and put his nose up and found it. There was a wet patch on the ceiling the size of a paw. In the middle of the wet patch was a root, a beech root, thin as a finger, that came down through the earth a little way and went back into it, the way they do, and it was along this root that the water was coming. It was gathering at the lowest point of it, swelling, and letting go.

Roots carry water. Any badger knows that. This one had carried it for eleven years and kept it to itself, and tonight, for reasons of its own, it had changed its mind.

There was no mending it from below. You could push earth up at it all night and the water would only come round the side. If you wanted to stop a drip you went to where it started, and where it started was up.

Arthur went up.

The main tunnel ran up and out under the roots of the big beech, and the rain met him at the door. It was heavy and cold and straight down, and the bank below the tree was running with it, every leaf a small spout. He stood in the mouth of the sett a moment with his shoulders getting wet, because there was nothing else to be done about his shoulders, and then he went out.

He worked it out by walking. The chamber was there, under the bank, about the length of three badgers in from the door and a little to the left, which put it beneath the flat part where the ground levelled off before the tree. He went there, along the bank with the rain in his face, and stood on it, roughly, over his own bed.

And there it was. The trouble. Not a hole, nothing so dramatic, but a dip: a shallow place in the ground the size of a dinner plate where, over years, badgers coming and going had worn the earth down a fraction, and a fraction was all the rain had needed. Water was standing in it. He could see it, black and shivering. And at the lower edge of it, where the beech root broke the surface like a knuckle, the water was going down alongside the root, quietly, steadily, as if it had been told to.

“Ah,” said Arthur.

The mending was not difficult; it was only wet. First he cut a channel: a groove with his front claws, from the lip of the dip down the slope to the left, away from the sett, and the standing water felt the new way and went, in a little rush, and was gone down the bank. Then he filled the dip. He scraped earth into it from higher up, where it was firmer, and pushed it down with the flat of his paw, and scraped in more, and trod on it, and scraped in more, until the dip was a low mound with its top a whisker higher than the ground round it, so that anything falling on it would think again and go elsewhere.

A small wet head came out of the leaf litter beside him and considered the work.

“Evening,” said the mole. Her name was Hazel, and she lived, as moles do, more or less everywhere. “Leak?”

“Was.”

Hazel looked at the mound and the channel with her nose, which was how she looked at things. “You’ll want a stone on that,” she said. “Water’s patient. Earth on its own, it’ll have that down again by spring. Stone, it gives up.”

Arthur, who had been going to think of the stone himself in a minute, said, “I know,” and went to find one.

There was one at the foot of the bank, flat, the size of a plate, that had been in the way for years and was now, it turned out, exactly the right shape. He got it up on its edge and walked it up the slope the way you walk a barrel, and laid it over the mound, and pressed it down, and stood back.

It looked like nothing. It looked like a stone on a bank. That, Hazel said, was how you knew it was right, and she went back into the leaf litter, and was gone.

Arthur stood in the rain a little longer, looking at his roof from the outside. The rain fell on the stone and ran off it. It ran off the mound. It found the channel and went down the channel, to the left, away, and did not so much as glance at the root. He watched it do this three or four times, to be sure, and then he shook himself, hard, from the nose back, and went in.

The tunnel was dry and smelt of earth. He was tired now, the good sort of tired, the kind you get from having done a thing rather than lain there thinking about it.

In the second chamber the wet patch was still wet, because earth does not forget quickly. He stood under it and listened. The root hung there. A drop gathered at its lowest point, slowly, much more slowly than before, and let go, and landed on the straw.

He waited.

The next one took a long time. He had almost stopped waiting for it when it came. The one after that did not come at all, or if it did, he was not there for it, because he had gone along the bed to the dry end and dragged the wet straw out into the passage and shaken a new lot down from the store, the good stuff, from the top, that smelt of last summer, and spread it, and pushed it about with his nose until it was right, and lain down on his left side.

His nose was pointed at the wall.

The wall was there. It had not moved. It was a good wall.

Above him, outside, up through the earth, the rain went on, all night, on the beech leaves, down the bank, over the stone, and away down the little channel to the left, where it had been told to go, and went.

Arthur slept.