Being a Beast Read online

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  ‘It’s ridiculous to think that you can know this wood like a badger’, said Burt a week or so later. ‘You can’t even know it like me, and a badger knows it like me, but far, far better. We’ve only been here five hundred years or so, but even so, you’ll never catch me up. A man whose DNA has been sloshing round the wood for half a millennium knows more about a badger’s world than someone who sniffs and slithers around for a few weeks.’

  I was annoyed. I was determined to take one part of the wood – the badger’s part – from Burt. It shouldn’t be hard, I thought. He’s just a man. I’m halfway to being a badger.

  The first step in any campaign is to know where you are. You need a map. And you need to know what’s possible and what’s not. That second step was easy. Burt’s nose has been devastated by years of roll-ups, and his brain by generations of agricultural reductionism. We’d been in hard olfactory training with lumps of cheese, our noses were a badger’s height from the mulch, and we were humble: O so humble. We could quickly overtake his ancestral, generic understanding of the land with our specific olfactory wisdom.

  So, over several squirming, scraping, scratching weeks, we made our own map of the wood. It was a scent map, and its contours were very different from the physical ones. When you walk through a town, you see piles of bricks with holes in, topped with slanting tile and penetrated by pipes. You do a bit of processing and call these things ‘houses’. You do a bit more processing and call them, on account of the shape of the holes or the angle of the tiles, houses of a particular type. From a pile, via an eye, to some sort of Platonic abstraction in a millisecond. After a while our noses began to brew abstractions too, but using the metaphors encoded deep in our brains by the processing of visual information.

  The bracken formed big, emphatic, monolithic blocks – the olfactory equivalent of a grand but grey and uniform housing development. It was too strongly and monotonously aromatic to be satisfying. Better noses than ours would make something of the sparse vegetation around the bracken roots, and even we began, slowly, to be able to see slight differences in the window fittings, the roof angles and the decorations around the doors.

  The oaks – even the small ones – were all determinedly different from each other. They followed the unpatterned pattern of a house I once knew on a plain in east Africa: built with a systematic ramshackleness of grass, mirrors, surfboards and copies of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, all cemented with elephant dung and garnished with human bones, nappies and fragments of Catullus on cork boards.

  You’d have thought that trees close to each other would smell alike – or at least more alike than trees far apart. But it wasn’t, or wasn’t necessarily, so. We could mark our blindfolded crawls from the sett fairly well using just the nearby oaks: ‘Out of the tunnel, turn right. Fifteen yards; raw tobacco, mostly Turkish; straight on. After half a minute, wall of limes and sick in front. Resolves into oranges rubbed on leather to your left and mushroom risotto with too much parmesan to your right. Head gently downhill. Flaking saddles, with neat’s-foot oil somewhere on the shelf. Bear on down for cobwebs and garlic paste.’

  Individual ashes were similarly distinct, but less emphatically: Arts and Crafts houses somewhere in the Sussex Downs. We couldn’t distinguish between individual beeches (mansion blocks off the Brompton Road), elders (yellow brick, plastic windows, red tarmac drive for the company car) or alders (terraces in Bradford). (‘For God’s sake’, said Burt. ‘I used to like metaphors until I met you.’)

  The more monolithic the blocks, the more fiercely and successfully they fought with other blocks for domination of the valley. The oaks didn’t stand a chance: they didn’t exist as a block at all. In high summer the bracken generally had the upper hand. When we returned in the autumn the beeches ruled the wood, and were themselves edged out by the elders by the time of the first frost.

  But to these crude rules there were many exceptions. We were in a seething bottle. Scent sometimes rocketed up from a particular tree and came down in a strange pattern, reaching distant ground before it hit the tree’s own shadow. The edges of the wood, and particularly the hedges, seemed olfactorily sterile – or at least hopelessly confusing to scent-hunting predators. They were relatively safe corridors, along which tender, timorous, succulent things crept, invisible to black noses above sharp teeth.

  There were tides in the wood, as powerful and predictable as on any beach. As the sun rose, air, and thus scent, was sucked up the side of the valley. The elders moved, like Birnam Wood, through the stands of beech and bracken and by midday could be found on the lip. They stayed there until nightfall and then slowly retreated back to the river. They were fully back home by three in the morning.

  So we made some progress with that scent map. But after a few weeks on my belly in the wood, I despaired. I had an unchangeably visual world. I painted it in shapes and colours, and then added in smell and hearing as extras. Sometimes smell could be powerfully evocative: a smell would pick me up and dump me back in the past with a speed and force that the wraiths of visual memory could never manage. Smell, buried deep in the most ancient part of the brainstem, could petulantly remind me of the sovereignty it had when my ancestors were fish and lizards. Sometimes a voice came first out of my memory. But smell and hearing were always and only the assistants of vision, the great conjuror who brings our worlds out of the hat. No parlour games with cheese and joss sticks could change that. The problem wasn’t mainly to do with the sensitivity of my nose; it was about the architecture of my universe. Badgers lived in a universe that wasn’t even parallel to mine; it was aligned at an angle to mine that no geometry I knew could coherently describe. So I’ll settle for incoherent description.

  Consider two examples, both from Ernest Neal’s classic book, The Badger.

  In the first example, a man placed his palm on a badger path for one minute at 11 am. At 10 pm a boar came along the path. He stopped where the palm had been applied, sniffed and made a detour. A sow who came along at the same time simply wouldn’t pass: she took her cubs back to the sett.

  And here is my reworking, using the language I learned in the wood:

  Along the path there was a wall, built of scent particles sticking to the veins of dead leaves and the squashed casts of long-dead worms. To the boar, that wall had definite dimensions: he could skirt round the edge and go into the world beyond. For the sow, made conservative and fearful by maternal responsibility, the wall was indefinitely high and long and the world beyond it unthinkable.

  In the second of Neal’s examples, a badger path went across a grassy field. The field was ploughed up and sown with corn. Badgers took precisely the same route across it.

  My reworking: This second path lay between two high but transparent and permeable walls. They each had two dimensions: a physical and a mental. The scent particles that made up the physical part of the walls were tumbled and deep underground, yet they generated a psychic field that rose high into the air above the corn and cut a swathe through the badger’s brain. The path wove around obstacles that had long since ceased to exist save in the nose-brain memory.

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  An eight-year-old has a plastic nose and can recover quickly the old knowledge of how to use it. After the first week, as we were watching ladybirds mash aphids, Tom had said, ‘I can smell mice’, and he’d set off along a new path, swimming breaststroke through the grass, his nose grazing the ground. He was very nearly right. He’d smelt and uncovered a network of bank vole runs, marked by droppings, fine chopped stems and urine. But what was more interesting was how he hunted. He sniffed very fast – several snuffles a second. This, I later learned, is precisely what scent-reliant mammals do. It’s called ‘odour sampling’, and it increases the percentage of air that’s diverted to the nasal epithelium. Normal efficient breathing sends air direct to the lungs. I tried it; it works dramatically. I now make a different and very unrefined noise at wine tastings.

  There’s little
point in being able to climb neuronally down the evolutionary tree (terrible and terribly constricting vertical language, that) if you’re too fastidious to leave the top branches. Tom had mercifully few of my inhibitions. He licked slugs (‘The big black ones are a bit bitter, and the bigger they are, the bitterer they are: I prefer the browner ones; they’re sort of nutty’), crunched up a grasshopper (‘Like prawns that taste of nothing’), had his tongue bitten by a centipede and his nose invaded by ants, and sucked up earthworms like spaghetti (‘The big ones are hairy, and I don’t like that so much’).

  It wasn’t just his nose that was plastic. All of him inched smoothly towards badgerhood. His Achilles tendons stretched and his wrists and neck tightened so that he could frolic four-footed through the fern arcades. He swore he could hear a woodpecker’s tongue being thrust through holes in tree bark. ‘I can, you know. Imagine a nail file whispering.’ (I’m imagining, Tom, and how the hell can we make you go to school to unlearn it?) When the night congealed around the base of the trees, he’d go over and stir the clots of dark with his finger, saying that they swirled and stuck to his hand. His body in the sett or on one of our midday couches seemed to flow round the stones. The wood never stuck into him, as it did into me.

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  Most mammals spend a lot of time sleeping. Badgers certainly do, and so did we – much more than usual. We became more tired the more multimodal we became. We should have expected it. We were paying attention to so much more. It’s exhausting trying to make sense of lots of voices clamouring for a hearing. Normally when we’re in the countryside, our sight works overtime. Every step on a walk is a completely new and cognitively challenging view. We have never seen before the arrangement of stones upon which our left foot is about to descend, nor that completely different one upon which our right one is about to descend; and so on. To say nothing of the orientation of those leaves on that branch of that tree in that gust, which have never been that way before in the entire history of the universe and never will be that way again.

  Our ‘normal’ views are in fact deeply abnormal and crushingly dull: Those chairs, in that corner of that room. That picture over the mantelpiece – perhaps an ossified version of one tiny fraction of one outdoor second, which nonetheless (it’s better than the chairs) eases the retinas designed to catch the millions of utterly different fractions that in fact followed it. The only moment-by-moment visual differences in the lives of most of us are the changing characters on a computer screen, and we don’t see those as visual at all: we see straight through them to the abstractions they represent. No wonder our poor starved brains will drink down any change they can get – even if it’s the flashing of Simon Cowell’s dentistry. Take any of us for the mildest of country walks, and we’re immediately in thrilling – but exhausting – sensory overload. We’re bombarded with change. Everything demands a response. We have to pay unaccustomed attention. And this, I presume, is why people say that they sleep better after a bit of fresh air.

  Now imagine what a wood is like if you’re paying attention to what enters not just through your eyes but also through your ears, your nose and your skin. And imagine that through each of these portals barges a different world, which maps only mystically on to the others. It’s tiring even to think about it. It’s exhausting to experience. It takes a lot of processing. So badgers and yogis sleep, and so did we.

  Badgers aren’t blind: they just don’t open their sensory batting with their eyes. Their eyes seem to build a version of the wood composed mostly of shapes. They are silhouettegenerators, and their visual memory seems to be concerned mostly with comparing the presently visible silhouette with previous versions. In other words, they’re on the lookout mostly for change in the gross structure of the wood. Put the Empire State Building on the ridge, and they’d be spooked on Wednesday night and, so long as it didn’t change or belch out threatening smells, cautious on Thursday and blasé on Friday.

  We can do better than badgers in the day, of course, and even in the gathering dusk we can pick out visual nuances for rather longer than they can. Yet for most of the time that matters to badgers, we’re visually on a level playing field: we’re silhouetters. To make use of this skill, we need their capacity for the recollection and comparison of successive images. Most of us have this in embryo already. If a very minor change has been made to a familiar room, we’ll say: ‘Something’s different.’ That itself, without more, is useful if you’re living in a potentially hostile wood. Even if the change can’t be identified, the fact of the change will be enough to keep you underground, away from teeth and claws. But actually badgers seem able, often, to be more specific. They’ll note a change, then they’ll identify its location by reference to their library of previous images, and then they’ll swing their noses and ears on to the target to collect further information.

  This demands an intense localness – a knowledge of the exact relationship of the individual badger’s body in both space and time to the wood. It was this localness, above all, that I wondered if I could acquire. I hoped most desperately that I could.

  Alan Garner simply and wonderfully wrote: ‘On a hill in Cheshire the Garners are’. From that fact flowed all his books, all his worlds, all his power. The resonance of that hill is the timbre of Fundindelve, its evenings the fading light of Elidor. I envy Garner enormously his ability to write this sentence. There has never been anywhere that the Fosters are.

  We have had two strategies to deal with this. The first (my own) is to try to pretend that we are at home everywhere. This has failed predictably and dramatically. It has resulted in pretension, superficiality and neurosis. The second (that of most of the rest of my family) is to insist that it doesn’t matter that we’re not at home wherever we happen to be. This has generated a sort of hereditary lantern-jawed stoicism: we’re islands in a wicked sea. But we’ve never really had any shared characteristics other than the name, and the strategy has not made us thrive. In practice it mainly meant that we watched too much television.

  Badgers belong to a place and hence (terribly important, that hence) own it, like few or no other animals do. Their hillside dynasties outlive our own most hoarily heraldic, begartered families. Their bodies are built from the recycled earth of a few acres. They burrow deep and know whatever roams our underworld. They have the connection with a body of land that one can get with any body only by penetration. Their hold on this local life is viciously strong: they’re terribly hard to kill or displace. Their skulls are thick. Spades bounce off their sagittal crest. Once they’ve locked their teeth in the throat of an invading terrier, you have to break the jaw to prise them off.

  Badgers, for me, are the embodiment of the genius loci.

  We don’t know of many badger gods from old Europe, but one, Moritasgus (‘Great Badger’) is commemorated in some Gaulish inscriptions from the Côte d’Or. He seems to have been syncretised with Apollo and thus regarded mainly as a healing deity. The theology of this association is uncertain but not hard to guess. When a badger disappears into the earth, it is on a shamanic journey. It can, if the ritual is right, carry on its broad shoulders the petitions of the people. It will take them to the Great One, of which it is an acolyte, and if the Great One is pleased to do so, it will send the badger back to the upper world with the transforming blessing.

  But, as usual, there are many layers. The root of ‘tasgus’ in ‘Moritasgus’ probably came from the Old Irish tadg – one of several words for a poet. (Tadg may be preserved in our own modern word ‘badger’.) Such was the knowledge of the power of words in that world that the functions of poet and shaman, and the meaning of the words for them, tended to merge. Yet the fact that the badger was seen specifically as a word bearer, a logos-smith, an incantator, is significant. Here’s my fancy: the badger carried between the world above and the world below the words that interpreted each side to the other. It enabled each side to make sense of its context and hence of itself. It shuttled like a sewing machine, stitching the world
together, making it whole, giving it an integrity it would otherwise have lacked. And it still does.

  If this is possible for a badger, perhaps it is possible for us. Perhaps even for me. Perhaps if we all shuttle enough across frontiers the world won’t fall apart.

  A few weeks in a wood doesn’t make you local. Localness means that you weave round your mouldering ancestors. Yet our human lives are so long, and our capacity for skin shedding so great, that we can become our own ancestors. The ground in which the ancestors moulder has to be real, not figurative. But we can settle in a place and by living sufficiently completely to each moment, die completely to each moment too, so that the place becomes littered with our own corpses, and we can fix our landscapes by reference to their graves. I’m trying to live, and thus to die, on a piece of moorland in Devon and, partly thanks to the badgers’ lessons, making some progress.

  Of course we never began to know the wood as Burt did. Over a few centuries you can’t help sharing some of your collective unconscious with the dwarf oaks next door. We merge with our neighbours. Every shared breath is an act of copulation in which our DNA gets mingled. (‘You, my friend, are one seriously disturbed freak’, said Burt.) Yet even in our short time there, we started to seep into the wood, and it into us. We noticed that our first slitherings had found, with uncanny canniness, the easiest ways across the landscape from and to our sett. Our prone bodies felt the land, moulded it and were increasingly moulded by it. We got callouses where it was good to get them; our legs learned to stretch to slide easily over a fallen beech. We followed these paths religiously and increasingly automatically. Badgers are the same: they have firmly established paths, from which they are very, very reluctant to deviate. They are marked with the scent of badgers who died during the Civil War, and it would take a landslide or a bulldozer to change them.