Who Wants to Get Badgered?

(June-August 2012)

9-No One's Arc

As June went on, Jeff held a precarious sway over the Civilized Gnomes. Fortunately, no horrible problems arose for many weeks. The Gnomes began to realize that the old Queen's loss really changed their day-to-day lives very little. Jeff, who had worked closely with her for decades, knew what orders to give for routine Gnomish activities, and no emergencies arose.

Though the Gnomes had bypassed the farming stage of civilization, they had adapted the hunter-gatherer approach. They had begun the rudiments of cultivation—they had planted patches of the berries that were the basis for their many varieties of jam (mourning jam, strongberry jam, boobberry jam, and so on). While they did not fertilize, hoe, or weed these patches, they did keep watch over them and when the berries were ripe, Jeff declared a beginning to the summer's jam session.

That went right as scheduled. In fact, though the number of female Gnome jam canners had dwindled by about twenty per cent, they produced more jams than in the previous year—and in fact when the scent of the boiling berry mixtures spread through the forest, at least fifteen of the self-exiled Gnome women came back in to join the jam production line.

Jeff ordered that no one was to belittle or argue with any of the returning exiles. "Every Gnome makes mistakes," he said. "Our Queen wouldn't want us to be a divided people."

Every day at least one Gnome came to Jeff asking for an order—Gnomes were uneasy doing anything without orders—but the problems were mostly on the trivial side: "Is this a good year for my wife and me to move to a different tree? We might want to start a family in three or four years."

Or "My cousin's gone feral, but he's hurt his leg and can't walk. Does my family help him?"

Jeff knew what the former Queen would have said in such cases, and he based the orders on that knowledge: "This is a good year. We have plenty of food already gathered. It's a good time to move to a different home, since you'll have to spend time making sure it's in good repair and furnishing it." Or "Bring your hurt cousin back into the settlement. When he's healed, if he wants to rejoin us, let him. But if he wants to leave us, don't stand in his way."

Halfway through the summer, Dipper and Mabel found Jeff in the middle of a squirrel bath and asked his aid—they had lost the Mystery Shack to someone named Gideon, and they wanted the Gnomes to help them get it back. In return, they offered Gideon as a prospective Gnome Queen.

Unfortunately, that didn't work out. Gideon had a secret weapon, a whistle that gave Gnomes terrible headaches, and declined to be their Queen. In the end, the Gnomes had scurried back home, advising the human twins to do their own dirty work from there on out. Later, somehow, the Pines kids had won the Shack again, the Gnomes didn't know how. Just another weird week in Gravity Falls.

And every morning Jeff visited the badger. She was used to him. He'd climb down the rope, give her fresh water and food—now she would take it from his hand without threatening to bite or scratch—and he'd just sit and talk to her.

On a memorable day in July, as Jeff sat with his back against the curved wall of the trap, she took the food he offered—meat from a butchered road-kill possum, very fresh—she not only accepted the bundle of food, wrapped in leaves, but did not even pull away. She crouched right at Jeff's knee, eagerly eating what he had given her.

And when only the bones were left, instead of retreating as she always did, the badger laid her chin on his knee and stared at him with pleading eyes.

He experimentally touched her head. She flinched just a bit, but then relaxed. He stroked her neck, and she allowed him to pet her. "You want your freedom, don't you?" he murmured. After a full minute, he sighed. "So do I. You're in this . . . cage. I'm caged by Gnomes who doubt me. I never wanted to be the Queen's advisor. It just . . . happened. And now here I am. Every Gnome asks me to give orders, but who's to give me orders?"

The badger shifted a little, but seemed peaceful.

"Why cant Gnomes be more like human people?" Jeff asked of no one—not the badger, of course, who would have no answer. Maybe he was just asking himself—who had no answer. He thought of Dipper and Mabel, against whom he held something of a lingering grudge. They didn't ask for orders. They acted without asking each other "what should we do?" The Gnomes took Mabel, and Dipper came after her in that human rolling machine.

Mabel didn't take orders from Dipper when she pulled out the wind cannon and blew Jeff away over the forest tops, or when she—as Jeff learned later—blasted the other Gnomes, leaderless and baffled, off into the edge of the forest.

However, Jeff found that time was dulling his resentment.

"Plan B should never have been kidnapping," he told the badger. "It was all I could think of, but it was wrong. We were too sudden. Mabel should have known what being Queen of the Gnomes meant. We should have taken weeks, not tried to do it all in three days. If I'm mad at somebody, it ought to be myself."

That day as Jeff rose to climb out of the pit, the badger whined a little. "Soon," Jeff told her. "I have to be sure that you'll no longer attack us. We'll keep you fed, OK? You won't have to hunt any Gnomes. You can hunt, but only animals and bugs and things, OK? And when times are hard, you can come to us. We'll make you an honorary Gnome."

A week later, Jeff risked raiding the junkyard again. McGucket was away, so the risk was small. The Gnomes had observed humans walking their dogs—leading them on fabric, leather, or metal leashes. Those were hard to come by—people didn't seem to throw them away very often. However, after several days of searching, Jeff did find a leather anklet, studded with fake jewels, that some teen girl had thrown away. He mended the bent buckle and tried it on the badger.

It fit. At first he let her wear it only for his visits. Then he left it on overnight. She had accepted it and didn't claw at it.

Some things that the Gnomes found when scavenging were the disks of metal and the slips of paper the humans called money. Jeff had a tentative grasp on it. He knew the papers and metal represented value. Four of the larger coins were worth one of the slips of paper that had a 1 on it. And five of those slips equaled a slip with 5 on it.

For the first time in known history, a Gnome went shopping. They knew about bartering—they exchanged things like mushrooms with feral Gnomes in exchange for things like nuts and berries.* Jeff made the connection—buying things with money was like having a bag of mushrooms to exchange for what you wanted.

What he wanted was a real leash and a real collar.

Shmebulock agreed to go along. They had scouted various stores, and the old-fashioned general store in town—the Mercantile—had a section of pet supplies. And the Gnomes found a way in.

For obvious reasons, Jeff proposed to shop after closing time.

So one night they slipped through an unlocked basement window—unlocked because it was far too small for a human thief to pass through—and found themselves in a basement that smelled dank and was crowded with cardboard boxes of laundry soap, electrical components for the do-it-yourself types, glass jars and lids for home canners, stuff like that.

The two Gnomes climbed the stair. The door into the store was not locked, but they had a hard time opening it. Finally Shmebulock climbed on Jeff's shoulders and managed to turn the knob.

The store didn't have a surveillance camera, but it did have a dim security light. They found a rack of pet supplies. "This is perfect," Jeff said, selecting a collar that looked as if it were made of diamonds. "This will fit."

Then they found a nice, sturdy leash. In the dim light, Jeff read the figures: "The collar is five nine nine. The leash is four nine nine. Give me the moneys."

They went up front. By observing the gift shop in the Shack, they knew that a human gave the money to someone at a money-eating machine. The human then could take the goods, while the Wendy person put the money in the machine.

They clambered up onto the counter. Beside the cash register, Jeff used a pencil they had received from the Lilliputtians and a small sticky note to write, "I did not steel a colar and leash for dogs. They are five nine nine and four nine nine. Here is a money for five and one for ten. Thank you."

So, leaving a ten and a five-dollar bill for a roughly eleven-dollar purchase, Jeff and Shmebulock left the store. The next morning, the store owner figured that some kid had left the note and the two price tags. He smiled. He didn't mind. That was Gravity Falls for you.

In late August, Jeff put the new collar on the badger and hooked the leash to it. He climbed up the rope and had the other four Gnomes who had come with him—all of them fortified with fresh strongberry jam—haul up a blanket in which the Queen crouched. With one Gnome at each corner, it took only a few seconds. Jeff took the leash.

The badger sniffed the air and looked around.

Jeff said, "You four leave now. Go away and then Blink. I have some words to say to her."

The other Gnomes obeyed.

When they had gone, Jeff bent down and took the collar off the badger. He rubbed her head. "I think you're tame," he said.

She nuzzled his hand.

Jeff knelt. "You're not evil, are you? You're just you. A badger." He sighed. "Listen. Something bad has come into the Valley. We Gnomes don't know what it is. It's from outside. It means to—to change everything. To ruin everything. We don't even know if we can survive it. We don't really even know what it is. Do you understand anything?"

The badger gazed into his face.

"So—here's the deal. You can go back to your sett** and try to survive. Or if you want, you can come with me. The Gnomes will try their best to help you. We're afraid, too—but we're afraid together." He stood and pointed. "There's your sett, over there against the bluffs. Go there if you want. You're free. It's your decision. If you want to come with the Gnomes, follow me."

He turned and walked toward the ridge, feeling the fear every Gnome had when turning his or her back to the Gack of Doom. His thoughts whirled. The Gnomes had met and befriended two Dippers—copy-Dippers, somehow—and now they increasingly thought their chance of living through whatever evil was coming meant they and the humans would have to work together.

It would be nice to have the badger's help, but—she's a wild animal, Jeff thought. She may not hunt us now, but she'll never accept us.

At the edge of the brush, he stopped—

And the badger looked up from where she stood beside his feet, with calm, trusting eyes. She had followed him. She stretched her neck upward.

Jeff smiled. "You want your collar?" He leaned down, and she stood patiently while he fastened the collar. "Do I need the leash?"

Evidently not. She followed him obediently.

"You can't Blink," he told her. "Come on. It's a long walk."

And, as they passed the unicorn clearing, they heard fierce sounds of combat—neighs and hoofbeats, human battle-cries—one of them sounded like Wendy, another like Mabel, the most terrifying one like Grenda—and Jeff thought, Trouble is coming. Bad trouble.

The badger nuzzled his leg.

"You're right," Jeff said. "Whatever's coming, we'll face it—together."

*Mushrooms were a treasured resource. No Gnome knew why, but though the fungi were avidly sought, there was a prohibition against a Gnome's picking one. They had to look for patches where a large animal, a deer, maybe, had stepped among mushrooms and had broken some free from the ground. The fallen ones they eagerly harvested. In later years, Dipper and Mabel learned of this and won a lot of goodwill from the Gnomes by furnishing them with piles of mushrooms.

**Sett—an old word for a badger's lair or den.