Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

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  We put the fish pie in a plastic box and put it in the river to keep cool. The box wasn’t terribly badgerish, but then again, badgers, although they’re enthusiastic scavengers, seem to prefer their carrion fresh – even though carcases that are further gone have the added garnish of maggots, which you’d have thought badgers would think of as children think of chocolate drops sprinkled on pudding. I doubt it’s the risk of infection that inhibits them. Badgers lose their immunological naivety very quickly and don’t spend their lives throwing up into the ferns. All thoughtful human parents should mix pureed earthworms with the milk: it’d abolish asthma and eczema and exorcise later fears of a bad curry. But badgers, like many animals and some people, can vomit, where necessary, without much distress: they hardly break stride. I’d like to be like that.

  Having stowed the pie, we stumbled up the bank and hollowed out a nest in the bracken. The stems soared above us like the fluted columns of a devastated cathedral. Green light slid algally over Tom’s face and neck, decomposing him. Less poetically, a sheep tick scuttled under his shirt. Ticks are always in a hurry. I pulled up the shirt and watched, interested to see what site it would choose. They tend to go for my groin or my armpit, which seems logical, but our children tend to get them somewhere obvious on their torsos, which doesn’t seem to be. Though perhaps the poorer innervation there means that they’re less likely to be detected, and there’s no abrasion from a moving joint or a swinging scrotum. Sure enough, this one, though it could have had the discreet dampness of an armpit, began to get settled over a rib. I crushed it between my nails.

  Having Tom next to me made me pretty immune to ticks. They go for him every time. It’s presumably a scent thing: they head for him rather than me long before they can know that his skin is thinner and that they won’t have to fight through a noxious jungle of oily hair.

  Many badgers carry ticks – typically hedgehog, dog and sheep ticks – although the incidence isn’t as high as one might think. The leathery skin must be a challenge, and ticks tend to concentrate around the thin skin of the anus and perineum rather than, as in dogs, on the head, the neck and the thin skin of the underbelly and the inner thighs.

  Lying up outside the sett during the day isn’t unbadgerish, although it’s far from the rule. Badgers sometimes, just like we did, crawl into dense vegetation and lie there until dusk comes and it’s time for the next round of shuffle-hunting. We don’t know why that is. Perhaps there’s tension at home and they can’t bear the thought of a day close to wretched, cantankerous, odious X. And sometimes, no doubt, they’ve been caught short a long way from home as dawn breaks and don’t want to run the gauntlet of the early morning dog walkers. Cubs in particular play outside during the day. It’s their version of teenage rebellion, like adolescent humans staying out inconsiderately late at night. I don’t imagine, though, that those days in the open are very relaxing ones. Although dangers hover round the sett, they are dangers faced in community, using old and practised strategies. Aloneness, novelty and sunlight are the badger’s unholy trinity. Badgers are social to the core, and conservative, and creatures of shadow. Sunlight freezes them. It seems to switch off their senses. You can often walk right up to a daytime badger. It’ll seem stunned. They are two-mode animals: on and off. They live in the no-man’s-land between day and night, and that’s such a demanding place that there’s no room for half-heartedness.

  Tom needed to sleep, and so he did, curled fetally on old bracken, his paws, earth-brown from digging, clasped under his chin. I too needed to sleep, and so I didn’t. Instead, like one of those sun-stunned day badgers, I watched nothing in particular; I was a lump of idling software in a box made of meat.

  We often did this when we were in the wood. We had to change our rhythm to that of the badgers, which meant sleeping in the day, but, at least at first, I found the sett a threatening place. Was this an old fear of burial? If so, it was a strange fear. Live burial has never been a common method of execution, and my human ancestors lived in and took refuge in caves for millennia. Burial’s associated with death, and most of us are afraid not of death but of dying. The idea of physical dissolution is more interesting than terrifying. Although we’re conservative animals, for whom the novel thought of being eaten and assimilated demands a bit of psychological adjustment, it’s not the stuff of lasting, soul-shaping horror. It was more likely to be a fear of losing that long view that our long legs give us – the view that makes us creatures of the big horizon and hence of infinite options. To be is to see is to stride is to be able to choose. Even the panic of claustrophobia, which I’ve known when squeezing through a tight rock tunnel somewhere under Derbyshire, is really an unhappiness that one’s options are limited.

  The walls of our sett writhed around me, as active as a uterus but not so comforting. The earth twisted and fumbled and scrabbled and sprouted and spurted. A worm fell into my mouth. A badger would have welcomed it as a pasha on his couch welcomes a grape dropped by a slave, even though the worm is probably made of the badger’s dead grandmother, entombed in the sett wall. I gagged quietly and went back to sleep with my face buried in the bracken bedding.

  Those first few days and nights underground taught me a lot. They taught me that, despite my shaggy, anarchic pretensions, I was dismally suburban: I preferred a whitewashed wall to the endless change and fascination of a real earth wall, and regimented ranks of floral wallpaper patterns to the Real Thing. In fact, and this was the main worry, I preferred almost any confection to the Real Thing. I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness. They demanded much less. They were more obedient and less complex. And they didn’t broadcast my inadequacies so deafeningly.

  These were all symptoms of a nasty condition from which I’d thought I was immune: colonialism. ‘You shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’, we’re assured. Taken on its own, as it has been, this is a catastrophic formulation. You can go straight from Genesis 1 to the Monsanto boardroom, pausing for sightseeing picnics at the annihilation of the world’s herd game, at some select dust bowls full of cucumbers grown in nitrate powder, at the Torrey Canyon, at factory farms, at the edge of a retreating glacier and at many other uplifting destinations. And you could take in, while on the road, the sport hunting of native peoples everywhere, since they’re not made in the image of God, are they?

  I’d sanctimoniously seen myself as a bandana-clad fighter against this sort of perverted Biblicism. And yet here I was, lying resentfully in my burrow, thinking exactly the thoughts that I theoretically despised. I’d thought that I was better than the wild: more advanced; an improvement on it; evolution’s zenith.

  I learned some other things too. One was that all humans, at some level, know the absurdity of the human pretension; know that there’s a better way than colonialism. Here’s the proof: Take a sleek, besuited banker, ideally fresh from Stuttgart or Zurich. Put him in a wood. Drop into his polished palm, with an explanation, a nice, dry otter spraint or a handful of fox droppings. He’ll examine them and sniff them respectfully. Now do the same with a domestic dog turd. He’ll throw down the turd and throw up his expensive lunch. This shows that he’s not irredeemably far from acknowledging the generic nobility of savagery, or hopelessly out of touch with his indwelling noble savage. The dog shit draws out his inchoate distaste for the domestic.

  I learned too that real, lasting change is possible – to our appetites, our fears and our views. And that change has to happen in that order. First I learned to like that burrow. Habit is tremendously powerful. It can do almost anything. Merely going regularly into the sett and having a place at the end pressed to the shape of my body was enough to change my appetite for underground living. From that low platform I could jump to more complex forms of appreciation: liking the shape of the window on the sunlit world that was the tunnel’s end; liki
ng the exuberant spectrum of smells that met my nose as I crawled from a dusty bracken bed through a stretch of hay, up through a cervix of earth and leaf mould and out, panting from the effort of the crawl, into elder and oak and, very often (since Tom’s a pyromaniac), wood smoke. And then, since it is hard to fear what one likes, all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was OK to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting towards, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all eco-colonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger.

  Quite a lot of being a badger consisted simply in allowing the wood to do to us what it did to a badger; being there when it rained; keeping badgers’ hours; being cramped underground (there’s no possibility of thinking that the world is at your sovereign feet when in fact it’s over your head, squashing your legs and dropping into your eyes); letting the bluebells brush your face instead of your boots. But there were some high physiological fences keeping us out of the badger’s world. The main one was scent.

  My landscape is a visual one. I have big eyes and a correspondingly big visual processing area in my brain. The version of the world that my brain constructs has a high proportion of visual elements. These are supplemented importantly by the results of my cognitive processing – so that when I say I see a hill, it’s a very different hill from that which anyone else would describe. I ‘see’ the hill through a set of ‘higher’ cortical filters: myths, presumptions, recollections, cross references, allusions. There are ways of stripping out those filters. Many of the ways come from the East, and I’ve used some of them over the years. It’s possible, though hard, to learn to see a flower. But when you do, it’s still seeing.

  A badger’s landscape is primarily a scent landscape. The main bricks that its brain uses to build its world are made in its nose. The physical boundaries of its life are set by scent. Its territories are marked by defaecation, and the faeces of each badger carry a unique scent. We’re all, all the time, bacterial substrates, and bacteria do slightly, or dramatically (everyone’s been in a hot compartment with an unwashed, undeodorised teenager), different things with each of us. It’s the same with badgers. Each has its own olfactory hallmark – a cocktail of the musky caudal gland secretion and the work of bacteria.

  But it’s not only perimeters that matter. Noses don’t just map perimeters: they sneeze form, colour and personality into the badger’s life. For a badger, with its relatively poor eyesight, wood sorrel is mainly the scent of wood sorrel; a soaring horn-beam has, on a hot day, the helical shape of the scent vortex that pulls dust up into the canopy, and is, on a cool day, a low hump of tart lichen with an indistinct chimney. A dead hedgehog is the shape of hedgehog, then the shape of green scent, then the shape of tripe, then the shape of sweet, then the shape of pork scratchings, then the shape of beetle.

  The literary way into this should be the autobiographical reflections of synaesthetes – those who smell colours or taste numbers, or whose letters each have a colour of their own. But that literature (and I don’t exclude Nabokov, who wrote exhaustingly about synaesthesia) is strangely unpoetic and unreflective. It’s as if the gift of perceiving the world in several dimensions disables the ability to describe it. Or perhaps their world is beyond words, which doesn’t bode well for this book, or for any other attempt to grope at extreme otherness. The most audacious and hence the least unsuccessful artistic effort was by Olivier Messiaen, who devised a new musical mode to demonstrate what it’s like to live in two overlapping sensory zones.

  Compared to a badger, humans are almost entirely olfactorily blind. We perceive scent landscapes in terms not even of outlines but of vague assemblies of blocks with wholly indistinct margins. Imagine walking down a city street and seeing, instead of faces and figures, a swaying tartan rug. That’s what our scent perception is like.

  But I didn’t quite despair. I remembered that humans are very plastic creatures and that blind people can learn to echo-locate. Not well enough to make a chapter on bats credible, but well enough to avoid banging into walls. That’s what the ‘tap, tap, tap’ of the white stick does: it bounces off obstacles and back to the brain, which crudely assembles the information into a picture of the world ahead. And I remembered Jack Schwartz, who said that he could see auras round each of us and whose ability to detect light frequencies extended from 335 to 1,700 nanometres, which is 1,000 nanometres beyond the spectrum normally regarded as visible by humans. But I remembered in particular John Adams, the physiologist who tested Schwartz. Astonished at the results, he re-examined his own vision without the conventional presumptions about what humans could do, and found that much of the theoretically invisible infrared spectrum was in fact visible to him.

  I tried strenuously to turn myself into a more olfactory creature. I joined a blind-tasting wine society and aahed and imaginatively adjectivised with the rest. I burned a different brand of incense in each room of the house, trying to supplement my visual picture of each room with an olfactory one, and trying to learn how the air currents in the house crept and surged. I held blind smellings of my children’s clothes. I put a different type of cheese in each corner of a room, moved all the furniture so that there were no other clues, blindfolded and disoriented myself and then tried to find out where I was by reference only to the cheese. When engaged in middle-class cheek kissing, I tried to get a good sniff. I snipped off different types of leaves each day and put them on the pillow at night. But most of all I lay outside with my nose on and at various levels above the ground, learning how scent changes through the day and through the seasons and over the immense distance between the ground and the normal elevation of my nose.

  Water unlocks scent. After a rainstorm in limestone country you get nosefuls of long-dead shrimp. And it’s water that makes the rest of the world breathe too – a botanical truism, yes, but also a sensory fact. By the early morning the summer ground is relatively cold, and the water that condenses on it makes the ground truly smell of itself. Dry ground is just waiting to be realised. As the day heats up, the ground rises, sometimes very fast, until you’ve got the huntsman’s celebrated ‘breast-high scent’ – the scent that gets hounds charging, often too drunk with the scent to speak. This pure scent doesn’t rise much further than a hound’s shoulder or a badger’s head. By the time the sun has lifted the land that high, it’s also made the air eddy and tumble and slide around, so that everything higher than a couple of feet above the ground isn’t so local. By seven o’clock in June, a badger, caught out after a hard night’s worming, will have the treetops and the pondweed from across the valley.

  It’s different in winter. Then there’s not that exhilarating gradient down which the earth can slip up into the air. Scent takes refuge in the soil, like everything else that can burrow. And even there, scent is sluggish. When we hacked our way back to the sett through the mid-December tinsel, the chill choked the scent. Or perhaps it just anaesthetised our noses. Neurones don’t work so well at low temperatures. The manufacturers of lager that tastes of nothing insist, very wisely, that it should be drunk ice cold: it’s the only way they’ll not be found out.

  When the temperature fell in the evening, the ground, which had been soaking up calories all day, retained its heat for longer than the air, and indeed the cold air above the ground seemed to act as a blanket, pressing scent tightly to the earth. That’s very good for badgers, who are mainly interested in things on and slightly below the ground. And it’s one of the main reasons why badgers come out when the sun goes down.

  My attempt to enter the scent world was partially successful. But th
ere were obvious and frustrating limits. I could, and did, learn to pay more attention to scent, and I knew glimmeringly, for full, fat fragments of a moment, what a landscape painted in scent might look like. But these glimmerings were imaginative extrapolations from what I actually sensed. The limiting factor was the magnitude of the inputs. I couldn’t multiply the number or the sensitivity of my sense receptors to anything approximating those of a badger. All I could do was to say: ‘Well, if inputs totalling x do that, what would inputs totalling 1000x do?’

  Relating all this is hard. It would be pointless to reel off the adjectives and metaphors I used to describe to myself the scent of shepherd’s purse on the pillow or dog’s mercury in the wood. That might say something about me, but nothing about badgers or woods.

  Do badgers use adjectives? I expect that they describe the world to themselves, and so they must. Their world isn’t just a huge, damp noun; a big blob of ‘is-ness’. Adjectives are a corollary of fine shades of perception.

  Metaphors are a different matter. They demand a lot of central processing power. Badgers have a fair amount, but they’ve got other, and probably better, things to do with theirs than the industry of metaphor – the forging of connections between disparate things in the world, and the use of those connections. Metaphors are useful for big-leap strategy, and hence for coping with traumatic novelty. But normally badgers are creatures of routine: sleep, wake, stretch, defaecate in one of the sett’s prescribed lavatories or on the boundaries of the territory, eat earthworms, sleep, repeat. It wouldn’t add anything to this process to say, en route, that a tree was a mother.

  All of which is to say that the ways in which, inevitably, I perceive and describe a badger’s scent world involve things that have no representative at all in the badger’s own world. They are purely human artifice. This is the main source of inauthenticity.

  But perhaps it’s not really so bad. For, like most organisms, a badger isn’t particularly interested in dog’s mercury per se. The smell of dog’s mercury is immediately and dramatically translated into something very different – to something like: ‘When I got to this point last night, about twenty steps further on and a bit to the right was an old log, and underneath that there were some fat earthworms. I had some, but there may well be more.’ I can’t know what the immediate burst of dog’s mercury scent does in a badger’s brain, but does it really matter? I can arrive at a pretty decent approximation to what it means. I can’t do much to educate my senses (although I can do something to educate what my brain does with its inputs), but I can get better at translating external stimuli into the basic propositions of badgerese.