Being a Beast Read online

  Part of that martial look, I’ve realised, is his whiskers. They’re Prussian in their belligerence. They’re the whiskers of treaty and border violation; of smoking cannon and multiple amputations. In other words they are long, thick and stiff.

  They are buried deep in the skin of his face. In life, the base of each whisker lay in a densely woven nest of sensory receptors. From each nest, thick nerve cables coursed away towards that febrile brain, which collated the information and translated it into a picture of the world. Was it a visual picture? Was the end product something like ‘Fishy and edible three feet to the north-north-west’, and marked by an image of a fish, generated by a buzz in the visual cortex and flashed around to the paws, the teeth and the appetite? I suspect so. Otters are insufficiently olfactory or auditory for any other type of stamp to be likely, and surely some stamp is inevitable. In normal circumstances we translate to visual: the scent of a fire or a woman becomes an image; a musical cadence conjures the sight of a landscape or of the concert hall where we first heard it. Only in extreme circumstances – and notably during sex – does the translation stop and we experience touch or smell or sound as it is, qua caress, musk or gasp. We’re closest to a hunting otter when we’re in a bed with a lover.

  The knowledge of death first trembled deep inside the cheeks of my Prussian otter. As it lay in the river, all but its nostrils submerged, it would have heard first the chatter about scent and rural adultery and the hunt ball and the inadequacy of the cakes and then, more ominously, a hound speaking from the holt under the alders, and others joining it in a rolling chorus of menace. It may have got a whiff of vol-au-vents and Macassar oil and the sour urine and dead-calf belch of excited dogs. But none of this mattered much: it had all happened before. Not until the pressure waves from the thrashing legs of hounds bounced off the kingfisher tree and shivered through the water to those whiskers did things get serious. Even then it was a time for cunning and not for fear. Only when the cheeks thrilled to the water coming direct and hard from hounds’ legs churning like mill wheels was it time to dart and turn rather than cruise; and only when the cheeks were overwhelmed, and gave way to sight, was it the end.

  Although the nerve cables and the distant processing are important, the local sensation in the cheeks must remain intense. The otter’s head must be like a perpetually engorged glans, pushing desperately into the world, seeking always more sensation.

  There wasn’t much I could do to re-educate my cheeks. Certainly growing whiskers myself didn’t work. My whiskers made my face less sensate, not more. They weren’t buried in a fizzing mass of nerve endings and, being flaccid things, didn’t move much with wind or water or touch, and so didn’t transmit much to their pathetic complement of nerves. I was far better off shaving as close as I could before jumping into a river, and avoiding like the plague those anaesthetic alcohol-based after-shaves which would probably kill all wildlife, like sheep dip.

  Yet I can understand what it’s like to be cheek-o-centric. It’s far more intimate to reach out and touch another’s cheek than to reach down and touch their genitals. A kiss is correspondingly more erotic than sexual intercourse. Everyone knows that prostitutes won’t kiss: there are some things that aren’t ever for sale.

  I tried to push into the world more consciously with my face. I bent my head forward when I came into a room. I tried not to advance towards new people with my hand extended (as I’d been told from birth was how gentlemen behaved) or swaggeringly foot first (as it had been insinuated at public school was the way to make your mark, showing that you’re a man with legs to march across other people’s countries, and feet to kick the butts of the workers).

  I lingered longer in the sexless cheek-to-cheek greetings of the middle class, getting known as a deviant. I nuzzled lawns, chairs, door frames, cake, tablecloths, trees and trains. I lay long in rivers, facing the current, telling myself to notice the shape of the water storms and leas made by the crown of my head and the fussier, angrier ones made by my nose. A horse leech fastened to my lip, and I didn’t notice for an hour.

  It was all rather silly. Cold water quickly makes the face as numb as a pork knuckle, and although I could channel a bit more of my mind into my face, I couldn’t make my face behave like fingertips – even like the fingertips of my own hands, badly mutilated as they are by Arctic frostbite and Scottish rockfall.

  But I could, I slowly realised, turn my fingertips into whiskers. Any decent somatotopic map would have told me that that was a sensible thing to do. That, in fact, would emulate the otters’ neural world quite well. I couldn’t teach my fingers to decode, as I imagine an otter’s vibrissae do, the pressure contours of the river. But generally those whiskers aren’t acting alone, like a single antenna on a high ridge: they’re acting in busy, bloody concert with the teeth and the front paws.

  ✴ ✴

  We’ve all seen exciting underwater sequences in which, with symphonic elegance and grandeur, otters chase huge fish in huge tanks just as cheetahs hunt antelope in the Serengeti (and often with the same soundtrack), weaving and turning with such speed that they’re clearly moving through the virtual space between the water molecules rather than through the water itself. The show ends with the triumphant otter in the shallows, struggling to shift the dead fish and taking a bite out of where the fish’s shoulder would be if fish had shoulders.

  Forget it. At least for most English otters most of the time. I’ve only rarely found big fish bones in the spraints of Devon otters. Our hard-pressed otters are often pushed to options 2 and 3 in their spreadsheet. They are bottom feeders: they turn over stones with their front paws and hope for a panicky bull-head to bolt past their whiskers. As the Somerset otter man James Williams observed, it’s like nothing so much as cricket: the little fish come off the bat at an angle, and the slip-fielding otters dive for the catch. There’s not much meat on a bullhead, but there are a lot of them, they’re there throughout the year, and a bit of gentle fielding isn’t anything like as energy consuming as those Tchaikovskian pursuits of big game.

  Otters, then, are highly tactile fumblers. It’s quite effective fumbling. In the fumbling, but not the efficacy, I can follow them. Like everyone, I’ve tried chasing big fish, and like everyone who’s not armed with a spear gun, I’ve failed (though once, wearing fins in a sea pool on Kintyre, I touched the tail of a sea trout and thought I was a god).

  I fumbled particularly in the Badgworthy. It’s easiest in fairly shallow water, where you can lie face first, breathing through a snorkel. Often I used just a snorkel, with no mask, hoping that my face and my fingers would be more alive. And then, more or less blindly, I turned over stones with my nose or my hands. When I used my nose, I made a net round the stone by cradling it with my arms. When I used a hand, I pushed my head right up to the stone to block one plane of escape, and tried to cover the other routes by circling them with my other arm.

  It wasn’t a great success: I managed to grab a couple of blotchy stone loaches and a truculent miller’s thumb. A disoriented stickleback, no doubt taking my open mouth for a cave, swam inside. Its fluttering spines grazed my palate like the probe of a Parkinsonian dentist. I should have crushed it between my fillings and swallowed it. I couldn’t, any more than I could stamp on a mouse. My failure is illogical: I pay good money for other people to winch cows bellowing to their deaths so that we can serve up buttock muscle for Sunday lunch. My illogicality isn’t original, of course, which perhaps makes it worse, and certainly makes it less interesting. It’s about distance; about vicarious guilt being less intense; about the little physiological details of death that speak more intimately to our moral intuitions than any amount of argument; about the fact that physical proximity connotes relationship, even with a very basic animal, and that almost any sort of relationship makes it harder to kill.

  I killed a fish with my teeth once, as a very young child, and by accident. I was by a pond in Yorkshire, with a jam jar full of small darting things, including a minnow.
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br />   ‘Put it in your mouth’, said Chris. ‘I dare you.’

  And I did. Not only that, but I pretended to chew it. Then, in an early and dramatic illustration of the terrible principle that you tend to become what you pretend to be, I chopped it by mistake. Its muddy guts, full of midge larvae and aquatic worms, spilled over my tongue. The flapping electricity of its death quivered into my gums. I spat it into the pond. It was still twitching as a shoal of other minnows rose to eat it.

  ‘Cool’, said Chris, horrified.

  ‘That was good’, said I, far more horrified.

  ✴ ✴

  I didn’t enjoy turning over stones. This was mainly due to my phobia of lampreys. This phobia is yet another reason why I’m not qualified to write this chapter. For otters love them.

  The phobia is biologically unintelligent. The Badgworthy Water has mostly brook lampreys, which don’t parasitise other fish; and river lampreys, which are much less common there, have better things to do than try to burrow in through the thick hide of a large mammal. Yet I couldn’t shake the picture out of my head: the sucker and those rasping jaws that eat into the side and then in, in, in, through the internal organs, until the host dies. Then the fat lamprey squeezy-squirms out between the ribs and goes off to spawn or to search for another animal.

  Vedius Pollio planned to kill one of his slaves, who’d broken a cup, by throwing him into a pool of lampreys. The slave screamed (I can hear the screams now) and begged to be killed in any other way. The emperor Augustus, who was staying at the villa, was appalled, cancelled the decree and ordered that all of Pollio’s remaining cups be smashed. Quite right.

  That’s the sort of thing that was with me at the bottom of the Badgworthy Water.

  Lampreys are a serious argument against the goodness or omnipotence of God.

  And so it might be argued that anything that kills them with enthusiasm is an agent of light. That thought’s the closest I’ve got to feeling warm about otters.

  ✴ ✴

  By and large, our relationships with fish are emotionally uncomplicated. No child really loves its goldfish. The magnate who shells out big money for koi carp loves the price tag, or the status, or the associated engineering, or the mere idea, or, in his better moments, the lugubrious rolling and stirring – the pace of the fish. But never the fish itself. When a desperate otter breaks in and pulls out the koi pool’s emperor by its gilded face, the children won’t sentimentally stroke or ceremonially inter the fish remains. A man who wouldn’t dream of accelerating his BMW over a rabbit will happily winch mackerel into the air (a journey for them as far, and as significant, as being blasted to Jupiter would be for a human) and beam for the camera as they flappingly suffocate on the deck. The same man might well, without a wince, put hooks into the body of a live fish and let it thrash paroxysmally away in the hope of getting a bigger fish to swallow it. As a species we have a congenital, curious and near complete lack of imagination and empathy when it comes to fish.

  But with crustaceans it’s more complex. Yes, we boil them alive and stick spikes in their heads, but we often issue little murmurs of apology when we do.

  This is very strange: they are at least as different from us (and therefore as blithely killable) as fish. Evolutionary aeons stand between them and our empathy. You’d have thought that the separation would be made more complete by that armoured, chitinous coat.

  I think it’s to do with the eyes. Crustacean eyes don’t wink or have lashes or brows or expressions, but they’re out there: they protrude; they come towards us; they wave to us. Or perhaps it’s those arms, raised and opened to us in aggression that looks like welcome. We can’t help thinking that they’re making overtures to us. We can’t entirely resist the suggestion of relationship. Perhaps we only ever respond to what is like us. Fish eyes are flat. Ours aren’t. We think that flat things can’t have souls. And since fish don’t have arms and so can’t hug, we assume that they don’t want to be hugged.

  Whatever: otters don’t care. They need the calories. We are not like them: we often empathise when it’s really costly, although we’re depressingly good at choking down our empathy.

  There are lots of crayfish in the river that runs by our Oxford house and in the stream in the wood where the children run wild. The children brought one back in a plastic bag and put it on my head and my face as I lay on the kitchen floor.

  I’d thought that big crayfish would make an otter cautious – that those claws would engender a bit of respect. But this big crayfish was a tentative, almost gentle thing. Yes, it stabbed at my closed eyes when I poked at it, took hold of my nose and swung off my nostrils when I moved, and raised and stretched itself in that belligerent patriarchal welcome. But it was all rather pathetic. All the elaborate armouring and posturing wouldn’t even be like a whisper of breeze on the face of that otter, powering out of the dark and flattening the crayfish against the stones with a commanding paw.

  We put it in the freezer to kill it, and the boys fried it with chilli oil.

  ✴ ✴

  Just as I’d put off the night river, I’d put off the sea. Both were like death. I am neither old enough nor young enough to write about the sea. It is both too big to be described and too basic to need description.

  The land was like me: secondary, derivative, the product of comprehensible forces. The sea was not like me. Yet I wondered if I’d get closest to otters there, because the sea is strange even to most otters. It was hard to follow otters when they were being themselves in the East Lyn, but that was mostly because their true selves were so elusive. If we met in a place where we were both alien, we might understand each other better, as embattled refugees from different war zones have an uneasy fellowship. But whether or not that was right, the sea couldn’t be put off indefinitely.

  I floated and scrambled to the sea from Watersmeet, where the river writhes with fat trout. At night I could have stalked them with the torch I’ve so piously denounced. In the day I couldn’t help snapping at them like a puppy. An otter wouldn’t have bothered. If it had got this far downstream it would have hurried on, knowing that there were shoals of scaly succulence just beyond the smack and suck of the surf.

  There are huge tides here in the Bristol Channel, but the land is so steep that you don’t feel them. They keep to the sea. There’s land here and there’s sea here, but little no-man’s-land. For a few hours each day there’s a soapy, brackish ambiguity for a couple of hundred yards at Lynmouth, but the invaded land doesn’t stop being land, just as the water stoats that we call otters don’t stop being stoats.

  Yet there’s a scouring and a scraping and a screeching of stones and birds that roll through the water. In the dead of night, which is the life of night, the otters swim past the pasty shops into a forest of kelp and gutweed, just as I floated down like an inner tube one bright March morning. The fish there are a new kind of moon silver. The crabs cracked (it would have sounded like crackling wireless in an old submarine) by an otter at the harbour mouth are descended from crabs that ate children who drifted out on their airbeds, fishermen who stayed too long for one more box of fish, and dead otters washed down from the moor. And I can join with them; we can all eat each other.

  The sea is different. It’s not just land water and rock crumble. The land and the sea have different rulers, and so different rules. The moon tugs all the time at everything in the sea. The land is insulated from the moon. At most, the moon cuts on a clear night a few feet into river and lake water. There’s a moon tide inside the bodies of earth women, but that’s because they’re all mermaids. (‘Yeah, right’, said Burt.) You see land fish wallowing in moonlight, but that’s because it’s a luxurious novelty. It’s like bubble bath for them. In the sea there’s no escape from the moon. You can’t have a moonless swim any more than a saltless swim.

  Land otters, when they come to the sea, are at sea – as tentative and as baffled as I am. They lollop along the long, bleak beach at Dunster at the edge of the surf, like little ch
ildren; for all the world as if they’re frightened of getting their feet wet, but with a holidaymaker’s delight in the fear.

  ✴ ✴

  ‘This is fun’, said an otter-child who’d been swept down the East Lyn and then out to sea with me. ‘At least for a while.’ I wasn’t so sure, because by then I was more of an otter than him.

  4

  FIRE

  Fox

  The Tube is a syringe, pushing a solution of bodies and electric air into the city’s limbs.

  When you ooze out of Bethnal Green station, there’s a grimy brick building by the road with a tired sign: ‘Come unto me and I will give you rest.’

  There’s a café round the corner. It used to be run by gentle, stammering, self-effacing Buddhists, and I used to regroup there over cheese and onion rolls after romantic routs. Now it’s full of shrill, carefully unshaven metrosexuals eating pine nuts. There’s a metallic noise which is either music or bad plumbing. Everyone’s thin, and no one’s enjoying being thin.

  Outside that café, squeezed at both ends into calligraphic flourishes, was my first London fox scat, coruscating with purple beetles.

  When I first came here it was a less brash, more confident place. People lived here because they did rather than because they should. There was no corrosive apartheid between the drinkers of ristretto and the eaters of pie and mash.

  Back then I’d read a book and eat penne arrabbiata most nights down Globe Road, drain a carafe of rough Chianti and take a loop of the park before heading home. One warm October night, steering between drug dealers and copulating couples, I saw two foxes on the grass by the bandstand. They swung their heads smoothly over the ground like placid Hoovers, each swing marking a silver furrow in the dew. I crept closer. They took no notice. I crept very close: they raised their heads, saw that I wasn’t a dog or a car, and went back to their swinging. They were harvesting crane flies. The ground was thick with them. The crane flies were laying eggs. That takes time, and anyway, the damp stuck their wings to the grass like stamps in an album. The foxes just had to peel them off with their tongues and suck them up.