Being a Beast Read online

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  A few days after dumping us, Burt roared back with chorizo and news. The news was about some figures on some national balance sheet and about an imminent storm. I couldn’t have cared less about the figures, which was progress. But I did care about the storm.

  ‘And remember’, said Burt as he climbed back into the Land Rover and made off, ‘you’ve got to be naked: butt naked.’

  In Chapter 1 I sang the praises of nakedness and of Fraser Darling’s bare feet. I don’t take back a word, but Burt was wrong. Badgers have a thick outer coat of coarse hair lying over a softer inner layer. Both trap air very efficiently. The badger walks around in a halo of warm air. To strip off would take me a long way from the badger’s sensory world. I was much closer to it in my old moleskins and tweed coat. In which, as soon as Burt had gone, I went to sleep, deep at the far end of the sett.

  We’d not been in the wood long, but already it was ours. It was that sense of proprietorship, rather than any concern about physical dangers, that made us emerge cautiously from the sett at dusk, sniffing the air exactly as badgers do. Outraged proprietorship feels like danger.

  Our beds were now in the ground. We came out of the ground every day, and we wanted to stay close to it all the time. I’d thought that it would seem an absurd pretension to go on hands and knees through the wood. Now it would have seemed an insufferable arrogance to do otherwise. And not just that: we had begun to know how much we’d be missing. To go hind-legged would have been like watching the wood on TV when we’d been offered the best seats in the stalls.

  Our heads swayed from side to side as we came out of the sett – exactly the questing swing of a badger, but forced by our clumsy anatomy. Those long legs and arms felt as disabling as amputations. We were going through bracken, reeds and rough grass. I’d dropped six feet and several million years into the badger’s world. My versions of the senses that were most useful down here – scent and hearing – were dismal compared to a badger’s. I was handling the badger’s world with thick mittens. But even so, this world was objectively more interesting than my own. A lot more happens at six inches and below than at six feet and above.

  It was obvious why natural selection had made the choices it had. Eyes were pretty pointless down here. I couldn’t see more than a few inches ahead. The space inside the cranium is prime real estate. It would have been foolish to hand more of it over to visual processing. My eyes, even in the fast-fading light, were better than a badger’s. When I raised my head I could see bats flickering in and out of the lacework of the oaks, and a barn owl ghosting over the walls in the field across the river, and wood pigeons settling fussily in for the night. These had no place in the badger’s night. Badgers trade these airy pleasures for darker, stickier, mucousy, damper, rougher pleasures. Dropping my head was like going from Schubert in the conservatoire to a candle-lit bordello where you wade through beer to the bed. If I had to pick one word for the badger’s experience, it would be intimate. Grass and bracken stems brush your face. When you’re forcing a new path, every step is like a birth. Water shudders off grass into your eyes. Things slide away. Slide; hop; rush. You don’t just absorb the world; you make it. You make the fear that rustles away on every side.

  When a badger goes out, its object is to bump into food. This system of incontinent collision with the wood makes it more a creature of the wood than any other inhabitant. We bustled and grunted and elbowed and pushed and pressed our noses into the ground. And even we smelt something: the citrusy piss of the voles in their runs within the grass; the distantly marine tang of a slug trail, like a winter rock pool; the crushed laurel of a frog; the dustiness of a toad; the sharp musk of a weasel; the blunter musk of an otter; and the fox, whose smell is red to the least synaesthetic man alive. But most of all we had what we clumsily called the earth: leaves and dung and corpses and houses and rain and eggs and horrors.

  We got these things usually as single words; occasionally as short sentences. If we had noses like badgers’ they would have been intricate stories, weaving in and out of each other, punctuated by possibility and frustration.

  When Tom and I snuffled through the wood on our first few nights, I began to feel trapped by my visualness. As I got occasional nose glimpses of the wood and became able to guess at some of what I was missing, this became the full-blown panic, regret and bereavement of the prisoner. I made ludicrous, mystical plans for escape. They failed. The sensory claustrophobia has never abated. When, now, I pray for redemption, a redeemed nose is high up on the list of petitions.

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  Making something of the badger’s auditory world wasn’t quite so hopeless. Badgers have much better sensitivity to high frequencies than we do. They probably hear sounds up to around 60,000 hertz, whereas even the most acute human children won’t go much beyond around 25,000 hertz, and many humans of sixty-plus will stop at about 8,000 hertz. Badgers will pick up many of the squeaks of a bank vole, inaudible to us. But a squeak isn’t unimaginable. I live in a house full of them. And squeaks aren’t all that badgers hear. We share most, but not all, of the badger’s bandwidth. The badger notes the pheasants exploding from the edge of the field, the thump of the generator up at the house, the mewing of the wood warblers, the panic of a sheep caught in the wire and the grumble of distant thunder. At least, their ears register these things, and there is electrical activity in the auditory parts of their brain cortices shortly afterwards. What does the individual badger ‘hear’ as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologise as a difficulty in enquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends. And I choose similarly to believe that a badger hears those pheasants instead of merely noting them. In the case of my children and friends, my choice is supported to some degree by EEGs and auditory stem potentials and functional MRI scans (although there are no such data, so far as I know, for badgers). But the support is very limited, and I can’t blame anyone for not joining me in my act of faith.

  We’re probably safe in saying, though, that the badgers weren’t very interested in the generator. They habituate very quickly to sounds, especially distant ones, that they know aren’t threatening. The thump inevitably caused the eardrum to vibrate: that’s immutable physics. But the brain ignored it; that’s excitingly mutable biology. The brain chose not to use that block in building its world. The plaintive wood warblers had a place but not, normally, at the level of ‘conscious’ hearing. Theirs was the mew of a normal wood. A change in their tone might indicate something relevant, and hence it was change, rather than the wood warbler per se, to which the badger paid attention. I, not knowing the significance of the changed tone and lacking context generally, paid attention to more than the badger did. In this sense my wood was bigger and more complex than the badger’s. A badger focuses fairly hard on its career of survival, and focus is rarely a friend of aesthetics. A badger’s aesthetics, I would guess, are mainly relational and fairly crudely sensual. They like rolling around with the kids and scratching their bellies in the sun.

  That’s not to say that they can’t branch out. If I can expand my suite of sensory accomplishments and appreciations, why shouldn’t a badger? Music is the obvious thought. Pan piped more than he spoke. If Bach encodes (and surely he does) some of the most basic formulae of this dazzling world, wouldn’t you expect him to do exciting things in a Welsh wood? If he makes my DNA quiver, shouldn’t he set the DNA of a badger – so, so similar to mine – a-trembling?

  I’ve tried this, half-heartedly and inconclusively. My speakers have always been rained on or the batteries too flat for a proper
broadcast. But most classical-music-loving dog owners are on my side. That cliché Jack Russell listening to His Master’s Voice would learn to love the B-minor Mass just as much as the voice, even if the mass didn’t come with a pat and a handful of dog biscuits. In the film The Weeping Camel, the mother camel, which had refused to allow its calf to suckle, is entranced by an old Mongolian song and becomes immediately happy and compliant. The calf suckles and lives. The mother permits suckling and so lives as a mother. The music represents the way that things should be, and the world, including the camel, hums along. The music acts like a defibrillator, gently shocking the world back into rhythm. Great music, great literature and great anything are great because they are built of the most basic elements; because they are fundamental. They can therefore speak to kings, commoners, badgers and wood warblers. Hence this next and most extravagant act of faith: play the B-minor Mass to a badger, and the badger would hear the B-minor Mass.

  Badgers don’t just have broader bandwidth than us; their sensitivity to sounds within the audible bandwidth is also greater. They’re more acute. It’s thought that they may be able to hear, as many birds do, the rasp of the earthworms’ bristles as they scratch through the earth.

  Just think what the obscene tsunami of a nearby motor vehicle does to an animal that can do that. It’s easy to get a faint idea. Sit outdoors one night in an isolated place. Leave the iPod at home for once. Then walk quietly to a road. The first car will seem like a regiment of tanks. You’ll feel violated and feel that the land is violated. You’ll note in yourself, perhaps with surprise, that since both you and the land are violated, there must be a previously unrecognised solidarity between you and the land. Or even, since nights outside tend to make you romantic, perhaps you’ll think that you and the land share an identity. You’ll hate and resent the driver. But most of all you’ll pity him, cocooned in his air conditioning, listening to canned banality on the radio. You’ll know, and have, what he’s lost. And you’ll know something of the outrage of the badger feeling the bellow of the engine in its ears, the trembling of the road in its feet and the whole bloody bombardment in all of it, deep down and throughout – rape, offence, invasion, totalitarianism. Badgers feel low-frequency sounds in their feet. A distant footfall in a darkening wood shudders into their pads. They freeze, which isn’t a great strategy in front of a bus, until reassured (easily done in the wood by scratching: they love the sounds of normality). In the road there’s no reassurance for any of us.

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  A big black bale, full of the worst that Nova Scotia could find, bundled towards us. It shuddered over Snowdon, spilling some salty Atlantic shavings, and then spun on, up and up until the sharp green air over the wood slashed through its electric sheet. Down it rolled, angry and old, bundling up rain, dust, feathers and swathes of insects like a big baler and sealing them all in an electric sheet instead of a piece of plastic. Tom and I, nose to ground, felt its approach in the back of our necks. The sun fell through a tense and sickly sky.

  There was a businesslike urgency in the wood – a hurry to feed off the usual before the unusual arrived. It was a good crammer for the olfactorily remedial student. As the light went, we found ourselves in intimate tunnels of touch and scent. The world outside the tunnel was made of sound, but as we crawled and sniffed, it seemed increasingly distant and irrelevant, and when the rain came, the shocking reports on the leaves all round our heads were a fusillade which dismissed all of that bigger context. There was no way of hearing the scrambling of the wood pigeons in the next-door field. There were just our heads and, around them, a halo, with a radius of about six inches, of hiss, crack, mumble and scent. The fusillade split open the ground. Scent came spinning out so fast that it reached even our noses. It was as if the ground were bursting to tell the story of that summer. A badger’s nose can detect the tales of each of the actors in the drama of the wood; we got a muddled medley, new and thrilling to us. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as a play without players; that if you cut away the particular you’re left not with the generic but with nothing; that the generic is a monstrous abstraction from which I’d come to the wood to escape. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that what was rising into my nose was the summer, or that that conclusion was better than no conclusion at all.

  The rat-a-tat of the rain had summoned the earthworms as a military parade drummer draws the crowds. The earth opened up and out they oozed, dripping from the hill like mucus candles from a snotty-nosed child.

  These rain-time worm bonanzas must create an agonising dilemma in the badger’s mind. The wood becomes a groaning smorgasbord, but you have to get wet to feast. Badgers are cosy creatures. Their default setting is curled up with the others, dry and asleep in a bed of old bracken, deep inside a well-drained hillside. That setting can be overridden, but it takes a lot of doing. The worms were safe that night. We followed the badgers into our piece of hill.

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  I lay at the mouth of the sett. It had a curtain of water, like those curtains of bead strands that fill the doors leading to the toilets in small Chinese restaurants. It was almost completely dark – at least to my collection of rods – except when lightning bled through the fault lines in the sky. Yet each water droplet seemed to act like a retina, sucking light efficiently from the wood and reflecting it on to my own grateful retinas, buried in my head, buried in the hill.

  Our sett was cradled in the interlocking fingers of tree roots: beech on either side, oak from above. The whole wood bent to the wind. There was no overground or underground: it was all just ground. We rocked in our cradle, the roots around us straining and creaking like the timbers of a rolling ship. A wood mouse, displaced from a flooded or crumbling tunnel, scrambled in and hunched, shivering, in the crook of Tom’s knee.

  Without that wood mouse I wouldn’t have slept. But it reassured me. We were in the best place – a sanctuary accredited by the wild – and so I snatched bits of queasy maritime sleep, which, laid end to end, were enough. Tom slept, which is what I expect badgers do in storms.

  The storm didn’t devastate: it culled. Some branches that had brazenly reached too high were wrenched hubristically down. Some trees that had imprudently spent their sun sugar on leaves rather than roots were weighed in the wind’s balance and found wanting. The river snarled brown, and a dead crow circled the pool, as if looking for carrion on the gravel. But Nova Scotia’s worst wasn’t so bad.

  Our sett wasn’t damaged at all, but, out of gratitude to it and with a new proprietorial pride in having survived the worst of the summer, we set to that morning to make it even better. We excavated a new chamber, complete with shelves, reinforced the roof and built an imposing earth arch at the entrance. Then, as Tom was happily making his own purely recreational earth-works, I slipped into unbroken sleep.

  I’d thought that this pattern (sleeping in the day, being out and about at night) would be hard to establish. I knew, of course, that I could slowly reset my own clock. That was a simple enough matter of cortisol levels. But I’d thought that the change would be psychologically strenuous – that I’d resent the loss of the sun so much that simply to exist as a nocturnal animal would be an act of exhausting protest against all my instincts.

  It wasn’t so. The cortisol took about four days to fall fully into line, but after a mere two I was willing it to obedience. There was nothing very profound about this: it was the simple lust of the curious tourist. That first night of nosiness, frustrating though it was, had shown me (no, that’s a visual word; had ‘indicated’? Too generic. We need an olfactory version of ‘shown’, and there isn’t one) – had demonstrated (weak, but the best I can do) that within that wood there was a vertiginously strange and urgently desirable universe, untrodden and untreadable by man in his normal sensorineural boots. I wanted it badly.

  This wasn’t part of the poignant true-love quest for otherness, which wants to know in the desperate hope of being known. It was an Elizabethan desire to discover a new world. When I
slid out of the sett each night, I was setting sail from Plymouth Hoe and heading west into the sunset in the hope of fame, spices and, importantly, somewhere new to live.

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  Burt trundled back, not looking as solicitous as he should have been after leaving his supposed friend and a cub in a wood in an historic storm. This time it was lasagne.

  Food worried me. Worried me because it didn’t worry me: I couldn’t duplicate the precariousness of the badger’s life. We did our best: we ate earthworms, both raw and cooked, and any other flotsam tossed up by the valley that we could keep down. We scraped a squirrel off the road and had it with wood sorrel and wild garlic. But there were Meg’s regular gifts, which we had neither the discipline nor the churlishness to refuse, and lying guiltily at the bottom of the backpack were sardines, tuna and beans.

  Some later reading helped. Badgers really aren’t, usually, neurotically urgent hunters. Starvation is an important cause of death, but mostly among cubs. The choice of earthworms as the staple is a good one. Earthworms are resilient – even to drought. In most English woodlands most of the time, a significant proportion of the earth’s weight is worms. When the topsoil turns to dust, the worms dive and the badgers dig. Dry nights are longer and busier, but although drought affects breeding success (which no doubt makes for an unquiet psyche), it is rarely deadly for individuals. We could have eaten that lasagne less guiltily.