Being a Beast Read online

  For all my wilderness fetishism, I found that I wanted the land to bear my mark. Badgers obsessively mark all sorts of objects in their territories with the secretions from their musk glands, and defaecate diligently on the borders. I have a less healthy relationship with my own dung, but found that I put my hand repeatedly on the same parts of the same rocks, just to see a reassuring polish. This was my musking. I had to know that I had been there. This wasn’t a thirst for possession, but a need to confirm that I belonged to the place – that we had shared some continuity. The ‘I’ part was strong. If you take a badger cub and put it in a pen, it’ll frantically, incontinently musk. Then it calms down, as if reassured by the smell of itself and the knowledge that it and the pen share some history. It was like that for me.

  Karen Blixen, when she was about to leave Kenya, asked: ‘Will the flowers on the plains of Africa reflect a colour that I have worn?’ The answer, for her, was no, and there was some sort of self-ablatory salvation in the answer. Andrew Harvey was explicit: ‘It is the things that ignore us that save us in the end.’ Blixen’s conclusion was wrong. The Ngong Hills were immutably different because she had breathed and worn a red dress among them. And even if she was right, I have to believe that Harvey was wrong. If he got it right, there is no possibility of relationship with anything, and thus no possibility of any sort of salvation. You can’t live or die like that. It’s that sort of salvation that I was seeking as my hand stretched out to the rock by the beech bole.

  ✴ ✴

  The winter broods over the summer, finding its way into the sunniest August badger. There’s a new urgency in the snuffling and rooting. Cereals and fruits are added to the worms and slugs; they’re good at fat building.

  We too know that winters are coming. For many of us it is the ruling fact: the whole year is surrendered to the cold. The thoughts and itineraries of the summer are the lackeys of the dark.

  I fight hard against this demonic capitulation, but it is hard to enjoy an August day qua August day. The stronger the fight, the greater the acknowledgement of the eventual defeat. I race round, like the badgers, manically soaking up the heat. The greater the mania, the greater the depression that follows. It shouldn’t be like this: I should be able to live in January as a smug, torpid parasite on the body of July. That’s what the badgers do. They don’t hibernate, but there’s not much in the diary from November to March apart from sleep, the occasional sortie for worms, stretching and a change of air, and gestation.

  There’s a week in early May, after the Green Man has been piped and carolled back, when the world seems all right; when resurrection rules and it’s possible to believe that resurrection is the rule. But this faith fades fast. By mid-June, when we were first in the sett, the liquid sun of the blackcap’s call starts to sound like a taunt (‘It’ll soon be gone, soon be gone, it will’) and its name ominous.

  ✴ ✴

  I chewed, licked, gagged, sniffed and waddled my way towards the badger’s world. Sometimes I felt that I came near, only to find that the conceit of that feeling meant that I was further away than ever. We heard the real badgers every night as they crashed through the bracken, and occasionally got a Belisha flash of head stripes in the dusk or a darkening of a shadow as a badger lumbered into it. We’d often try to approach them and got good at hearing them pause, then putting their fears to rest by loudly scratching ourselves. We put our front paws on trees and stretched as soon as we came out of our hole. We defaecated on mounds chosen for their view of the hill. We acquired a thick patina of scent that even Burt, his nose full of lanolin and diesel, could know and resent. When Tom was ahead of me in warm, damp weather, I could pick up his vapour trail for twenty minutes.

  Burt’s jibes and meals became less frequent. We were left on our own to be encrusted by the valley. We saw strange lights in a long-abandoned house. Our hackles rose when we heard farm dogs. Distant figures in nylon were as far away as the moon and a good deal less relevant. We cared about the weight of the clouds, the colour of the leaves and the hunger of the midges. We put a badger’s skull on a stick outside the sett for no reason I can identify clearly. We washed very occasionally, and even then patchily. Our mouths tasted of mud and smoke. A wren speared a caterpillar on Tom’s leg as he lay snoring in a clump of dead bluebells. My watch seemed offensive: I took it off, put it in a plastic bag and ceremonially buried it. We stood to attention. I played the Last Post on my tin whistle.

  And, for that summer, we had to be content with that: had to be satisfied with knowing that in some ways, perhaps for a few minutes, we had lived in the same place as some badgers.

  That’s all we thought we’d done.

  ✴ ✴

  I dug up the watch. We went back to Abergavenny station, thinking that we’d failed – that the Puck of otherness had dodged away, as usual, away into the murmuring greenwood.

  The town blared, belched, leered and cackled. There was more variegation on one leaf outside our sett than there was in the whole place. It fed itself by oriental airfreight, and everyone was the same colour. They talked about the adulteries of footballers and tone-deaf singers. The scent blocks were huge and crass; they lurched and swung and bellowed. I felt sick from shock and boredom and the heaving floors of deafening smell. Someone asked me the way to the cash point. It seemed as if he was shouting at the top of his voice, nose to mine. I jumped through the roof and nearly knocked him down. And yet, as an example of a human settlement, this is one of the very best. I’ve always been happy there.

  I was desperate to get back to the valley. On the train I put in earplugs and looked out at the fields sliding past – the distances hideously shortened by the engine. Then I took out the earplugs and put on the calls of the woodland birds. I was missing something that I very urgently needed – something I had recently had.

  So here is the first proposition: to thrive as a human being I needed to be more of a badger.

  ✴ ✴

  Back home I forgot a lot very quickly. But, though my nose returned to its usual inertia and I became used again to the tinnitus that we call normal living, it wasn’t all lost. I had the dreamy tetchiness of the exile. I knew that it was possible, as a matter of sensory routine rather than yogic contortion, to pay attention to the world in many planes at once rather than just our usual one or two, and something of what there is to be perceived when you do.

  Tom and I went back to the sett in midwinter. There were cobwebs over the mouth, which was rather hurtful. I’d hoped that it would have been adopted, at least by foxes. The badger skull was still on the stick, but its position had shifted, so that instead of staring at the ground it looked up the hill, through the cracking old man’s fingers of the oaks, past the silent rookery, to the house that Burt had built that summer, where Meg was mulling cider, reading the Mabinogion and calmly ignoring the epidemic of diarrhoea and vomiting that had felled all the children.

  Our paths were still there, just about. They’d be gone by the spring, but they would still be the best way through the wood if you were crawling. When you lay on the ground, an aching cold, the colour of mourning, cascaded in, starting with the ribs, filling the chest and streaming down to the legs. The ground seemed hungry for us: it sucked and nibbled.

  Outside the brown thickets of dripping bracken, the wood was bigger to the eyes, and sight much more relevant than it had been in the summer. There were sometimes clear horizons and often distinct trees. Winter gives badgers distance. But it takes away that succulent marriage with the earth which is brokered by noses and summer heat. The thin winter sun worked hard, but for us vainly, to smash the ground into grains we could smell. There was leaf mould and inchoate decay, and that was all. The winter wood was flat; much more like ours than the summer wood had been.

  Ears came into their own. The longer sight lines meant that our ears could focus on sounds from distant objects, and since there wasn’t so much going on, they could give a much fuller report on each sound now than they could in the hummin
g summer.

  The real badgers of the wood were quiet but about. There was fresh dung in their lavatories, grey and white hairs on the barbed wire, and pad marks in the mud on their highways. We heard them puffing along in the night like old shunters in a marshalling yard, out of condition. They should have felt close: their snorting was unbaffled by the thick green of June; the clear air had only to carry the call of a tentative tawny owl rather than the thrum and thrust and shrill of the summer. But they seemed further away than ever: we shared less; it seemed they had less to share, or that they were less willing than in generous June.

  The sett closed coldly round us. This time its walls were jaws. The worms liked the heat that leached and was leeched out of us. They came, like hairy tongues from the jaws, and slimed over us.

  ‘I don’t like this’, whimpered Tom, shivering in a sleeping bag that was far too thin.

  ‘Neither do I’, said I. ‘Let’s go.’ So we gathered up our stuff and went across the river, up a track that was straighter in the moonlight than in the noonlight, and back to the farm.

  No badgers came out to salute us. They were warm. Their sett was much deeper in the wood than ours; far deeper than we could safely go.

  3

  WATER

  Otter

  Every morning five otters watch us having breakfast. They are dead, Victorian otters, bleached white by the taxidermist in the manner of the day, looking haughtily out like cavalry colonels, their feet on vanquished fish. The Victorians wanted white otters, and so they got them. We all tend to get the otters we want. They are tools, in a way that few other species are. Henry Williamson (Tarka the Otter) figuratively mashed up his otters and used the paste to paint north Devon and to smear as balm on the wounds, real and imaginary, left by the trenches. Gavin Maxwell (Ring of Bright Water) wanted, and therefore got, rollicking, boisterous otter friends who wouldn’t ask him too much about himself and could be cuddled on lonely Hebridean nights. I have only this advantage over those true masters of otter writing: I don’t like otters very much.

  Being an otter is like being on speed. In suburban life the nearest I can legally get to it is to stay up for a couple of nights, drinking a double espresso every couple of hours before having a cold bath followed by a huge breakfast of still-twitching sushi and then a nap, and then keep repeating until I die – which I would do most authentically by running in front of a car or from septicaemia from an abdominal wound.

  Writing about otters is, more than for any other animal, an accountancy exercise. They are metabolic businesses running with very tight margins. They spend more than three-quarters of their lives asleep. That’s more than eighteen hours a day. The remaining six hours are spent in frenetic killing.

  They have a resting metabolism about 40 per cent higher than animals of comparable size. That rises massively when they’re swimming, particularly in cold water. A swimming otter’s metabolic motor is running at around four and a half times the speed of a dog’s. It doesn’t quite work like this, but imagine your dog’s heartbeat jumping to five times its exercising rate. The chest wouldn’t really thump: it would flutter as if a huge hummingbird were caged inside it. An engine like that needs an unfeasible amount of fuel – around 20 per cent of the otter’s body weight each day.

  I’m around 15 stone – 95 kilograms. If we go just by the weight of food, to keep up with the otter’s intake, each day I’d have to eat about eighty-eight Big Macs (all three tiers, with both patties, cheese, iceberg lettuce, pickles, onions and that strange pink sauce). Or 3,800 standard bags of crisps, 229 regular cans of baked beans or around 792 typical lamb chops or fishcakes.

  Eighty-eight Big Macs in six waking hours is around fifteen per hour, or one every four minutes. It’s no wonder that otters never look as if they have time for reflection.

  Otters are made sinuous only by physics. There are many poems celebrating their lubricity, but these are celebrations of the water, not the animal. Otters are spiky things. We want something to flow with its environment, for some reason about which we can wax all metaphysical. But real otters won’t do it. We talk about flow and laminae; we should talk about bristle and snap and scrabble. They are invaders, not citizens. They shove those winsome little noses between the laminae like surgically gloved fingers pushing inside an orifice. They are wedges, splitting up the river. They turn fish away from the flow and crush them. They hardly belong in the water. They’ve not been there long enough to be the foundational-mythical water animals we want them to be. It’s only been about seven million years or so.

  They are land animals who dabble, impressively but precariously, in the water. They’re much more stoat than seal. Evolution has only just begun to tinker with these primordial stoats, flattening their skulls, shifting their eyes and nostrils to slightly more advantageous positions and giving them thicker coats, tails like hairy outboard motors and some half-hearted webbing between their toes. And with those modest bequests, evolution threw otters into the deep, cold end and told them to get on with it, tyrannised by horrific thermodynamic arithmetic.

  The arithmetic makes them wanderers. In a warm, fecund lowland river an otter might be able to run on the fuel it finds in six miles or so of water. In leaner Scotland it might need to cover thirty. The numbers also make them vicious: lose a fish to an invader, and the balance sheet starts to look scary. Too scary, most of the time, for playful niceties. More than half of the dead otters autopsied have been in recent fights. The injuries are typically very unpleasant: otters fighting in water go for the underbelly and the genitalia. Bellies are unzipped and guts unravelled; testicles are ripped off; penises are snapped. And that’s not the worst of it. We don’t see the worst injuries: they must kill the otters quickly, leaving them stiff in a bankside bush for the rats, or at the bottom of a pool for the scavenging fish. We see otters only when they survive long enough to be hit by a van.

  What can I do to get close to these jangling, snarling, roaming, twitching bundles of ADHD, other than acknowledge that, like them, I’m a pretty shabby evolutionary compromise with a short attention span, poised on the edge of an ontologic precipice? Well, I can start by getting to where they are and, when I’m there, resetting the physical boundaries of my world so that they coincide with the otters’. This, to begin with, is a matter of pins in maps.

  At the centre of our map is a little grey cottage on the edge of a moor in Devon. If you climb through the bracken to the top of the hill, you look over the Bristol Channel to the lights of Wales. Herring gulls tug ticks from the anuses of red deer. We pull our water from the stream that runs past the cottage. The stream slices through badger woods, picking up speed and oak leaves and coating the stones with peat as if they’ve been dipped in a chocolate fondue. Mysteriously, it slows down just before it meets the East Lyn river, as if it is having second thoughts about leaving the hill: it weeps resentfully under the road and is bowled off to Lynmouth for lobster and chips.

  But with us it is a cheery little river. It pauses and pools. There are chiffchaffs, toad nurseries and algal fans like Cranford doilies. Our hill is a strong, rosy-cheeked bit of moorland, which throws its weight around. The caddis-fly larvae use boulders, not grains, in their coats. But beware of thinking it’s all simple and bucolically beery. There’s a stand of tortured trees sprawling and sucking like mangroves. The children won’t go in without leaving limpet shells as propitiatory gifts for whatever sleeps on the hammocks of moss.

  At the very top of the valley, three minutes from our tea table, just as the river leaks off the moor, there was, as an act of grace, an otter spraint.

  Otters use sprainting (depositing dung) as a way of saying ‘This is my patch’ or ‘This pool has just been fished: don’t waste time here.’ It may not be their only remote method of territorial signalling (urine might be important, and there’s a gratifyingly vigorous debate about the significance of anal jelly, a rich, marmalade-like substance that probably eases the passage of sharp fish bones through vulnerable gut). But
it is certainly the most visible. Indeed, it is usually the only sign that there are otters around, but spraint study has badly distorted our understanding of their biology. It has been truly said that we study spraint, not otters.

  Spraint’s a merry specialty. Its professors shamble happily along riverbanks with their clipboards, charting, extrapolating and eating cheese and pickle sandwiches. But it’s rather vain. Shit just won’t bear the scientific edifices we purport to build on it. You can’t reconstruct my life from my stools. Dung is good for some things, though.

  You’d expect the otter’s bowel habit to reflect its extraordinary metabolic rate. And indeed it does. Hans Kruuk devotedly monitored sprainting behaviour in Shetland. In winter, when sprainting is much commoner than in the summer, he recorded about three spraints per hour. And that was just spraints – depositions on the riverbank – rather than episodes of defaecation. He must have missed some spraints and even more evacuations – some of which must have happened in the water. Assuming six hours of waking time and thus sprainting time per day, that’s eighteen spraints a day. That’s a lot of signalling. Those are busily conversational bowels. Assuming one and a half bowel movements per child per day, an otter can mark in a day what it would take each of my children twelve days to do.

  I gave the children a little lecture on sprainting and then sent them off up the valley. ‘Spraint’, I said. ‘But don’t fall in, and be back for supper.’

  It was a failure, of course. Human children can’t produce bowel movements to order, and to give them laxatives with the rice crispies just for the purpose of this book would be at least unkind and possibly illegal. So I changed the instruction. ‘Whenever you need to go, go up the river and choose a place. It must say: this part of the river is mine.’