The badger hole 3
By Strega

Josh stretched after hours on a thinly padded truck seat and waved as the semi pulled away. He had hitchhiked more than a a thousand miles to get to Oregon for his second summer getaway. Last summer he'd hitched all the way to Pennsylvania and stayed with an aunt for a few weeks, this time he was even further from the college and the endless cornfields of Illinois. Another few hundred miles and he'd be to the Pacific, with a friend's couch to crash on and the promise of plentiful seasonal employment as the tourists headed to the coast.

As the truck faded into the distance he hoisted his pack and looked around. The driver had dropped him off at a gas station a mile or so outside some hick town or other. The sagebrush of eastern Oregon had a beauty of its own and he smiled as he set off along a trail toward the distant town. It was cool for a June afternoon and he'd hike until he found a nice spot and camp out for the night. His phone said there was a sports club in town and he'd head there and shower in the morning. For now he just wanted some alone time in the high plains.

He passed a mostly fallen-down ranch fence and lost sight of the road behind him. Someone must come out here judging by the trail and the occasional bike track told him it was used by off road bikers if nothing else. There was a whole lot of nothing out here away from the road and there wasn't a single house in view. It was quiet, the kind of quiet you only got out here away from everyone. Josh knelt to look at a long-clawed track pressed into the soft dirt next to the trail. A badger maybe? He'd passed several burrows that looked much too big for ground squirrels and thought they were probably dug by coyotes or groundhogs - assuming they had groundhogs this far west - but this was badger country too.

As he stood, something glittering on the ground nearby caught his attention. A wide sagebrush blocked a clear view of the thing and he stepped away from the track, eyes out for rattlesnakes until he could see what it was.

It was a cell phone, just lying there fifty from the trail. Josh looked around for anyone else but he was alone out here. At the base of a big sagebrush nearby was another broad burrow mouth, and Josh kept a wary eye on it as he walked toward the phone. Coyotes hardly ever attacked people but it did happen and if it was a badger den he didn't want to get in the sights of one of those notoriously bad-tempered mustelids.

With his attention split between the phone lying there temptingly near and the burrow his eye was not on where he placed his feet and Josh let out a startled yelp as the ground gave way under him. He dropped through a thin crust of earth into a deep dirt-walled pit, carrying with him so much loose soil that he landed half buried in the stuff. The suffocating weight of loose dirt pinned him to the earthy floor and as he tried to get his hands under him to dig his way out a further landslide came pouring down and pinned him firmly beneath its weight. Josh grunted and struggled to breathe, much less escape, and struggled in a panic as still more loose earth poured down on him.

The fall had torn his pack away and he had landed buried to the waist, with the soft walls of the the sinkhole or whatever it was crumbling in on him. As though directed by some malevolent hand the wall behind him collapsed and he was pinned from the neck down, panting under the weight of earth. Light filtered down through the floating dust and he stopped struggling for a moment, too exhausted to do more than take in his surroundings. The ends of roots protruded into the cavity and between the roots were one, two - no, at least half a dozen tunnels each as wide as his shoulders. There was a scrabble of claws behind him and something landed atop the dirt that pinned him. He was able to turn his head just enough to see the face of the large and very fat badger than had dropped from yet another tunnel onto him.

Glittering eyes in a pointed muzzle looked him over, its nose inches from his ear, and as its chops drew back in a snarl Josh tried and failed to heave himself free of the dirt. It pressed in from all sides and the more he struggled the tighter it packed itself. There was no leverage to be had and he was as thoroughly trapped as though wrapped in rope, arms pinned to his sides by the cool dirt.

His backpack lay a few feet away, dislodged by the fall. If he could just get a hand free - but no, he couldn't move anything below his neck and the badger 's weight was helping pack the dirt down. It waddled down off the mound, finding an open space between Josh and the wall. Ten feet overhead was an opening the size of a man's shoulders but down here there was more space. As the falling dust settled he could see the claw marks where the fat little beast had dug. He was in a subterranean den it had dug that had come so close to the surface that it would not support his weight.

For a moment the badger sat looking at him and he remarked at how portly the little thing was. Even the long fur on its flanks didn't conceal the rolls of fat and its short little legs barely kept its rotund body off the ground. At the best of times a badger is a turtle-like tank of a beast and this one was genuinely fat.

He had stayed silent to this point lest he provoke the thing but it showed no sign of going anywhere and as lonely as the trail above was it was his best chance for rescue. He was just sucking in a breath to yell when the badger stepped forward. Reflexively he tried to pull away from it but the earth yielded no more than it had before. Josh suddenly remembered a video he'd seen a while back. A badger had been caught on camera burying a whole dead calf, taking days to excavate a pit and burying the thing so it could snack at its leisure. Was that it? Was it going to wait for him to die under the weight of the earth and then feast at its leisure?

He was partly right. It was going to eat him all right, but it wasn't going to wait. Josh watched with mounting alarm as it padded closer. Its claws were a couple of inches long and he didn't want to think about the fangs in that pointy little muzzle.

"Shoo! Get out of here! Shoo!" Its ears went back at the first shout but the second and third yell didn't scare it away. It stopped a foot away from his face and showed its fangs. It was watching him with the alert gaze of a predator looking at potential prey, seeing if the threat would inspire him to wriggle free from the dirt. When he didn't, it stepped even closer, and josh's eyes went wide as a fanged maw creaked wide in front of him.

He was expecting, even dreading the pain as it bit him. Instead it pushed its gaping jaws forward and the sharp-toothed lower jaw slipped beneath his chin even as canine fangs scraped along his scalp. His head was about all that projected from the dirt and bit by bit the badger worked its jaws over his face. The fleshy inner walls of its cheeks slid forward on each side until the light was cut off and he was staring into the slick tunnel of its gullet. Like a snake swallowing a rat far too large for its maw it pushed forward until his entire head was wrapped in its jaws, and then it swallowed. His final attempt at a call for help was smothered as his face slipped into the badger's gullet.

Josh tried to jerk his head free as the throat's muscles gripped like a soft fist and tugged him deeper, but there was nowhere to go but down its throat as the badger stepped forward. The little beast couldn't be more than half his weight but he could feel the massive bulge his face made in its shaggy neckfur as the slide stopped. Its nose came up against the cool packed dirt and there was simply no way the impossibly flexible beast could take in any more of him.

For the moment. All he could see was the slimy gullet, stretched around his face to the point that dim pink light made its way through. All he could hear was the creak of elastic muscle and fur, all he could smell was wet meat and the saliva that pressed into his eyes and slicked down his skin. But he could feel the thing's movements as it reached its long claws forward and began to dig.

A badger is a digging machine and it soon unearthed his shoulders, just far enough for it to push its narrow muzzle down his neck and begin the herculean task of working its jaws over the broadest part of hisdug the away body. Already his face was wrapped tightly in the thing's expanded ribcage and the smell of bile from the all too close stomach stung his nose, and yet it was still pushing forward. Every few seconds it would pause, wheezing in through a full throat, and then it would swallow again. Small as it was its throat muscles were powerful and the next gulp popped his face past a tightness in its throat and into a slightly looser place that must be its belly.

Caustic bile stung Josh's face and the stink of it filled his nostrils as the thing's gut immediately began to work on what, to it, was just another chunk of meat to be digested. His head was half the size of its whole body but the badger's gut churned and gurgled, pressing its juices into his ears and mouth. It was impossible, inconceivable. The badger was swallowing him whole!

Josh had never struggled as hard as he struggled now, but the dirt packed in all around him was like a coffin. His desperate wriggling freed a tiny space around him only for the dirt to collapse and fill it and even as he struggled the badger was working its jaws over his shoulders. Its strong forepaws reached forward, digging away at the dirt and exposing his upper arms onto for the hungry little beast to push its jaws over them as well.

If he'd had an arm free he could have saved himself. There were rocks in the soil and he could have grabbed one and smashed in the narrow skull that was making its was down his spine as the badger swallowed him. While he gasped and squirmed in the stinking gut the badger dug the packed dirt away inch by inch, never letting more than a sliver of him show. As fast as the claws dug away the earth the narrow jaws and slick throat slipped over him. He was slowly putting on a badger-fur coat that was going to digest him.

By the time his arms were finally clear of the earth past the elbows they were pinned to his sides by the advancing throat. He still couldn't move his legs but the increasingly swollen little badger showed no signs of stopping. It was determined to finish its meal and Josh could only wince and squirm as digestive juices began to consume his face.

It had waited until it saw he was helpless before starting its meal. If he'd been a threat it would have left or maybe finished burying him and eaten his carcass later. He realized, now, that he had fallen into a trap built to catch the badger's prey. It had dug the pit and then pushed the walls in on him from its tunnels, watching him the shadows until it was sure he couldn't save himself. Only then had it come close, ready to gape for its meal. And bit by bit it dug him out and ate him; strong little forepaws reached out and wrapped their claws across his ass, helping pull it in as the badger swallowed.

His shoulders followed his face into the thing's stomach and his torso wasn't far behind. A badger no bigger than a medium sized dog was swallowing him alive and though its fur, fat and muscle was stretched so thin there was no more than an inch of it between him and the cool air of the pit there would be no escape. It was digging his legs out of the dirt and swallowing them down and in the grossly distended pocket of its belly he found nothing to grip, nothing to push against. The walls were slick with digestive slime and his hands just bulged the rubbery flesh out as he struggled, only to have it press back against him when he tired. By the time his arms were finally free to fight he was already worn out from lack of air, burnt by acid and half crushed by the weight of earth it had dug him out of.

Two feet from his pack, his phone and a folding knife Josh whimpered as the badger gripped his feet between strong little paws and stuffed them into its jaws. With a last massive effort it forced its jaws shut and swallowed, settling down as the double bulge of his sneakers moved through its neckfur. It sank heavily into the loose soil dug out from around its meal, so swollen its limbs and pointed muzzle appeared as mere afterthoughts attached to the great bulge of swallowed man. Its fur was dense enough to cover even this mass without the skin showing but the badger grunted uncomfortably as its prey squirmed within it. It was the third man it had swallowed and like the others it was grotesquely distended around a meal that would take as long to digest as it had needed to dig out the pit that caught it. A week of hard work had fed it well.

In the slimy hell of its gut Josh struggled, but the slick walls offered no more purchase now than they had before. Stars floated across his vision as he struggled to suck in a last gasp of air in a belly rapidly filling with acid. His trip cross-country had ended horribly and not at the hands of a better known, well publicized threat. He had thought of serial-killer truck drivers or sadists inviting him to stay overnight only for him never to leave. Instead he would die in the stomach of a badger, of all things, and no one would ever know. He'd be just another hitcher gone missing.

Maybe someone would find his pack, his phone, or some item on his person that survived the digestive process. But probably not. The pit was bound to collapse eventually, burying equally whatever parts of him the badger coughed up or shit out. There would just be a shallow depression like a little sinkhole, not much to mark the grave of a lost college student.

The fleshy walls squeezed in, the badger let out a belch, and Josh sank into gurgling dark and the slowly accelerating tingle as the little beast's stomach began to work on its meal.

The badger was completely vulnerable now, paws unable to reach the ground past the bulge until it either regurgitated its vast meal - not an option it would look on with favor - or had the time it needed to digest it. Like the other two times it had devoured men, though, it was in its own burrow and had all the time it needed.

Months before a man had crawled feet first into the badger's burrow and gotten stuck like a cork in a bottle. Irritated by the intrusion and not about to let a potential meal get away the badger had crawlmade its way up the tunnel and swallowed the man an inch at a time. At the end two other humans had appeared at the burrow mouth but for whatever reason had not attempted to assist the still-living man the badger had just gulped down. It had snarled and chittered, as reluctant to give up its meal as it would be now, but ultimately they had left it to digest its meal in peace.

Now the badger was just a badger, albeit one so stubbornly unwilling to share its burrow that it had swallowed an entire man who intruded onto its territory, and though much fatter after its huge meal it had gone on with its life of digging ground squirrels out of their dens and cooperating (rather sourly) with coyotes in hunting said squirrels and rabbits. It would much rather eat the coyote itself but they were far too clever to stray within reach. It gave no further thought to the man who existed now only as a large amount of fat on its flanks and as quite a lot of badger shit in a now-abandoned burrow. It certainly did not cast an eye on passing humans with the thought that they, too could be made into belly bulges so large its little clawed feet would dangle clear of the ground.

But then one night two men, one smelling like one of those it had seen at its burrow mouth after its last big meal, had appeared at its den and thrown a third man head-first into the entrance. The badger regarded this development with annoyance more than anything else until it saw that this third man was bound so tightly he could do little more than wriggle like a worm as it approached. Well, that was different then! With the two observers only a few yards away it arranged for their victim to proceed headfirst down its throat, ropes, clothing and all, and for a second time it was too gorged to move for days.

Indigestible regurgitated cloth from its human meals made the badger a fine bed in one of its many dens, and the smell of man near it so much of the time made the badger began to think. In its energetic digging it had spread a network of tunnels for hundreds of yards in all directions, and it could not help but note the passage of heavy-footed humans only a few feet overhead. By peering from its burrows and listening for footsteps through the earth, not to mention emerging at night to sniff at tracks, it soon worked out that the few humans who passed through its bit of sagebrush all tended to follow the same trail.

It could not overpower a human. It could swallow a helpless one, yes...might it manage to make one helpless? It pondered this in its badgery way until one day, half asleep in the shadows of one of its many burrows, it saw a man step into a squirrel hole, sink to the knee and drop his phone. It realized two things: With enough work more than a foot might disappear down a hole, and that humans seemed unduly fascinated by their small, shiny toys. It had one of those in its possession, coughed up along with the clothing from its first human meal, and with days of hard work it had set its trap.

The work had paid off. With a long, long burp the badger vented the last of the air it had swallowed with its meal, and settled down atop its belly-bed to let its stomach do its work. It would need days to digest a meal this size, and when it was done, when it was hungry again, it would take the shiny toy it had carried down into its tunnels after this meal fell into the trap, dig a new one, and set out the bait.