Close Encounters of the Second Kind.
1:-)... Badgers
I regularly fished at night in the Cheshire Meres, after big bream, tench, carp, roach or anything else worth catching, often alone but sometimes with a couple of experienced friends. One night, a friend of a friend decided he would join us. Not an experienced fisherman, he had never fished at night before. I suspected he had never fished before in the daytime either, as he seemed unsure as to how to handle the equipment. As dusk approached, he erected a tent a few yards behind us, obviously not convinced that we really did fish all night. To cries of wimp and worse, he settled down in his tent for the night, after copious assurances that he would not snore and scare the fish. All went quiet as we sat in our folding chairs and he lay in his sleeping bag. About eleven o'clock all was so still that an owl thought that I was a fencepost, landing silently on my head. I instinctively reached an arm up and the owl flew off noiselessly across the lake in search of smaller prey. I could not identify the species. Even had it been daylight, my ornithological identification would have been insufficient. Don't think it was a barn owl though, looked too dark in its colouring.
Later on, about midnight, all hell broke loose in the tent: Screaming, grunting, swearing: one collosal nightmare, on a par with the extinction of the dinosaurs, was taking place behind us under the canvas. I tried never to use light at night, for fear of scaring the fish, even learning to tie hooks on in complete darkness, but now I shone the torch towards the tent to see a badger just as it started to run away from the incident. What had apparently happened was that the badger, one we had often seen pass by us in the previous few weeks, had walked into the tent, across the sleeping bag, and having placed its foot in an open mouth, then forced its way out through the back of the tent. Well, the guy, whose name I have long forgotten, but he was a native of Stoke-on-Trent, spent the remainder of the night in his car. He never fished with us again, neither during the night nor during the day. Our assurances that this sort of thing happened all the time did not seem to convince him that he should return to the Mere the following week.
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