Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  ✴ ✴

  The days were easy: I plunged in and drifted down, face first, pausing to nudge and grope.

  But for a lot of the day, like the otters, I lay up near the water. At first, before I discovered the river night, I lay up so that I could hear and smell and see what was in the otter’s day. Later, when I began to know the night, I lay up because I was tired from the previous night in the river and wanted all my senses to work properly when the sun dissolved in the water and the real show started.

  Otters have many favourite lying-up spots. They have to, with such large territories. They’re not particularly fussy. Their needs are mine. They want somewhere dry, safe and, ideally, quiet. They don’t need a vaulted ancestral palace under an ancient ash. A drainpipe will do, or a shaded couch of stranded drift grass out of the reach of lolloping dogs. I’ve slept in a pipe too, dumped outside Rochester by a contractor, full of rabbit bones, nappies and syringes. A bull terrier waddled in, looking for trouble. I snarled and nearly bit his head off. I hope he’s in therapy forever. But usually I curled up within a stone’s throw of the river, listening with the one waking ear; resenting the gossiping hikers; looking for the night.

  In my mind the river has two seasons: light and darkness; life and death. Spring and autumn are desperate Manichaean battle grounds. The summer breathes and throbs. The winter does not: The heart of the world stops. The world doesn’t even wheeze.

  In the light I splashed and smiled and bobbed bum-bruisingly down the rapids. The river had wildly varying moods, but they were always moods that went with its age.

  Wherever you are, though, when there is sun, the bottom of the river is a mosaic of smashed faces, all cackling at each other in a cubist hell. In the young, chatty upper reaches, the weed tops those faces with the hair of madwomen in wind. I combed their hair with cold fingers. Loaches hung there like lice.

  In the middle age of the river, the faces flatten for a while, the hair recedes, and the voice, though never lugubrious, sometimes pauses so that the river can draw breath. Then, before the final few furlongs to the sea, it is menopausal, disgraceful crisis: Ruskin on acid; all hanging greenery; soft focus from the spray – it’s too much; it’s desperate to make the most of those last few miles of Devon. And then, when you can hear the cough and grumble of surf, it gets measured and reflective. It paces itself.

  Wherever you are, most of the daytime life, most of the time, is at the edges, under cover. The visible riverbed is a desert. There are occasional, bold caravans across the interior, from rock to rock. Minnow shoals shiver; Miller’s Thumbs stab and grind. Brown trout, big enough to be complacent, wave with the weed, as a camel sways and cuds in hot sand. Beneath the rock eaves are thousands of eyes the colour of the gravel, patient for the dark.

  Only occasionally does the day desert bloom. I was in the middle of a bloom once: a mayfly hatch on a June day after a beery lunch at the Staghunters’ Inn.

  From a distance the mayflies were like the breath of the river. In fact, they had been breathed by the river. The surface of the pool was a shivering skin of flesh. I didn’t bother to undress. There were too many walkers, and anyway, I’d been sleeping in my clothes for a couple of weeks and they needed a wash. I took off my boots, hung my jacket on a branch and tobogganed head first down a mud slide into the water. I came up with my head in the cloud of flies. This was no amorphous cloud of being: it was a highly organised traffic system. The mayflies yo-yoed just above the ripples – ripples as big for them as the mightier Hawaiian breakers are for the butchest of big-wave surfers. There were rigid corridors above the river, and down each of them raced, like disciplined rush hour motorway traffic keeping to the right lane, five thousand flies a second. I lay for an hour with my head in the central reservation. When I moved my head into one of the carriageways, flies from one direction filled my mouth and eyes: flies from the other piled up gently into the back of my head. An hour after exhaling them, the river inhaled the mayflies back. I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep at the wantonness.

  Brown trout, which usually hung in the shadows when I joined them in the water, loved the killing more than they hated the floundering of my corduroyed legs and check-shirted arms, and jabbed past me on the way to the surface like sharp-elbowed matrons en route to the buffet at a wake after an over-long funeral. The mayflies made a roof of steak for the trout’s world. Imagine that your ceiling suddenly turned into a hamburger. It would turn your head, and it turned the fishes’ heads: they stabbed through the hamburger roof into the air.

  Somewhere among the wild garlic, hunched and watching, was a big dog otter, its feet twitching with frustration. Fish as drunk on death as those trout were themselves killable, but here was a fat human thrashing the pool dry. I felt his resentment, sour in the sun. I’ve never felt anything else from an otter.

  When I dragged myself back up the mud slide and shook myself off on the bank, I found that someone had nicked my jacket. I wish them luck: I’m amazed and flattered that they could stomach the smell. Unsurprisingly, they couldn’t face the boots. I slouched drippingly back up the hill for supper. As I was tucking into the moussaka, the mayfly bodies that the trout were too gorged to take were being churned into protein cream by surf on the Lynmouth rocks.

  Usually, though, the light days in the water were unbiological, unteeming times. I cruised at altitude; surveying, collecting coordinates; the days marked by the click of my scanning shutter eyes rather than the snap of jaws, and the assembling of images into a crude mosaic rather than the dismembering of animal bodies.

  We picnicked, played cricket on the riverbank with stones as balls and deer femurs as bats, slept in the shallows, consecrated and defended our own sprainting sites, compared (and tasted) the types of maggots that eat fish and those that eat birds and mammals, ate lots of raw fish liver, had (for a week) a rule that we couldn’t drink cider unless and until we’d seen or heard five species of summer migrants, and found a chalice-shaped hole in the riverbed which contained the uncorrupted bodies of a wheatear and a stonechat.

  ✴ ✴

  So that was the season of light. Stooping always over it, like a schoolmaster trying to catch me out in an act of enjoyment, was the season of darkness.

  I can no longer pretend that the winter is fine. I have tried to tell myself that the country is not dead but resting and regrouping, stroking the inchoate life inside it, and that that’s what is happening to me too. But it won’t do anymore. Although it’s biological nonsense, the land is dead to me. I can’t feel any solidarity with it. It’s dead, and I’m not: I wouldn’t panic as I do if I were. I resent the land for being dead. I’ve kept faith with it, and this is the way it treats me. It goes and dies just when it’s needed. It will come back, but that’s resurrection, not resuscitation. I don’t need salvation eventually: I need it now. There’s no slow heartbeat to hear when I lie with my ear to the ground in a January wood. The mist curling up from the combe isn’t the slow breath of cold trees; it’s the stenchless stench of a long-dead corpse.

  There’s a sort of winter life, I know. Waders and waterfowl come to the shore; there are redwings and fieldfares on the common. But these are like maggots feeding on the carcass of the year; their movement is horrible. I sit by the fire with cider and a book, getting fat and cold and bitter. I endure, and mark off the days on the cell wall.

  This is not a good attitude for someone writing a book about the natural world. I’m supposed to feign a cheerful fascination with all the faces of the land; to talk merrily about the joys of storm and frost and woolly socks. I can’t do it. This is an incomplete writer, and an incomplete book. The otters stay when the sun goes, but I’m hardly there with them.

  I’ve tried to stay; I really have. But I’ve just been going through the motions. Sometimes the motions have been fairly strenuous. I’ve floated and stumbled in December down from Badgworthy to Watersmeet – stumbling because the proprioceptors in my limbs stopped telling me where those limbs were in space. I’ve
rummaged in January in the flooded roots of the waterside trees, expecting big, sluggish fish to be dozing there but getting nothing but fingers like blue carrots. And, knowing that the cold and that urgent calorific imperative send otters wandering ever more widely, I’ve tramped and tramped the riverbanks and the watersheds, trying to feel in touch with the otters – or in touch with anything outside myself. I’ve failed. It’s like sitting in the Bodleian Library besieged by email, my brain bruised to spasm and uselessness by the attrition of all the daily littlenesses. The cold of the moor does that to me too. The littlenesses have to stop before my brain can come out of spasm and grasp things again. The sun has to come back before there’s any chance of empathy, or even half-decent observation, on the riverbank. But when it does! When it does, there’s the euphoric whoo-whoop of the depressive surging back on to a manic wave top. Then I’m not just a pedestrian sniffer of spraint and a trudging, grudging collector of adjectives: I’m a bloomin’, blooming shaman, impossible to live with; pretentious beyond endurance.

  But I can’t do the winter. You should ask for 25 per cent off the price of this book.

  This tells me something worth knowing. A depressed shaman, hunter or naturalist can’t work at all. A grey soul, apparently, can’t penetrate that thin veil between the species. I don’t understand the metaphysics. But it seems that you have to be sufficiently ‘I’ to be another, and depression erodes the ‘I’ below the critical point. Perhaps, for a human, being an animal is just an extreme mode of empathy – no different in kind from what you need to be a decent lover or father or colleague. When you’re depressed you might simply be nursing that injured ‘I’ too obsessively to have the energy or attention necessary for empathy. Our nursing strategies are radically misconceived. They all tend to be based on the disastrous misconception that if you give your Self away there will be less of you. In fact, of course (as we know when the sun shines), the very opposite is true.

  Or perhaps you prefer the epic language of the shaman. Travel between worlds is a strenuous business, not for those with any disability. Remember the Levitical prohibition on disabled priests? And the shamanic world is a gift culture: the gift required is the only one you can give – yourself. The spirit otters guarding the gate won’t beckon you in with welcoming paws to a sumptuous eel feast if they see you limping or bearing, wrapped in lily leaves and red ribbon, a mere effigy of yourself. They demand the real thing.

  ✴ ✴

  I’d served my apprenticeship and made my maps during the day. But the night was the real business. I’d put it off and off. It’s one thing to romp through moonlit bracken being a badger: that’s like being an excited Cub Scout on his first camp. It’s quite another to lie on the bottom of a pool at midnight with ancient things cruising around. That’s like being dead. I needed to be pushed into the river, or lured by the prospect of sensual excitement. The river was kind. I was lured.

  I left the Staghunters’ Inn after a night of pool and a few pints of beer and plunged straight into dark diluted only by starlight.

  The Staghunters’ is a gentle, murmuring place. It clicks, clinks and giggles. By the time I pulled on my (new) jacket, said goodbye and stepped out on to the rippling ribbon of river sound that runs along the road, my ears had changed: They’d started off small and applied conventionally to the side of my head. Fifty yards down the road they were the size of cabbages, and had started to swivel. Another fifty yards, and they’d dropped into my ankles, and I heard voles better than I heard owls. Yet another fifty, and they’d multiplied and sprouted from my front and sides like bracket fungi. It was fifteen more minutes, while I was climbing through the wood to the ridge, before my retinas accommodated and gave me badger eyes. If I jumped naked into the river, I suddenly thought, I’d have the eyes in two, and the river would throw in a whole stack of new ears too.

  So the next night I walked over the bridge and along the path (dodging, by memory, the piles of dog shit), stripped by an ash tree, stood on a rock like an overnourished sacrifice to a jealous Aegean god and jumped in among the cock salmon. When my head broke back up through the film of foam and mayflies, I had a thick, leprous skin of seamless ears like the compound eyes of a bluebottle, each of them sucking in sound. This, to begin with, was far too much sensation for sense. My brain knew what to do with sound beamed into the sides of my head. It couldn’t cope with sound from my little toe and my shoulder. It got dizzy with overload and with the unaccustomed angles and complained queasily, just as your stomach and your semicircular canals complain when you’re being centrifuged with candyfloss at a fairground. But then my brain pulled up its neuronal socks, realised that it was up to the job of co-ordinating the broadcasts from each of its distant, outlandish outstations and swelled proprietorially, announcing that its body was big and young and capable of doing new, strange stuff. ‘Have you never heard with your knee?’ it said. ‘Ha! Call yourself a human?’

  Sound travels more than four times faster in water than in air. When you’re down in the water, relying mainly on sound and feeling rather than sight, distances are exhilaratingly shrunk. A crayfish clattering across gravel fifty yards away sounds as if it’s at the end of your arm. The water filling your ears is a mega-phone. If your only sense is phonic, things swell. Those clacking claws are monstrous. They’d usually occur only in lurid Jurassic dreams. The night-time pool is epic; a legendary playground.

  Anyone who has paid good money to lie in a flotation tank (why would anyone do that, when there are rivers?) knows what happens when you turn down the dimmer switch on one set of senses. All the others are switched more fully on. (To switch them actually fully on is a yogic enterprise.)

  I used a torch that first night in the river. I never used it again. Torches are an abomination. They don’t illuminate: they obscure. They drain the night of its colour and freeze fluid animals. The rods in our retinas, which work at low light intensities, create black-and-white pictures; but whether by some immense subtlety of the retina itself or by some cunning central processing, the greys of night are as varied as the rainbow spectrum of noon. It’s not just that we translate a particular combination of greys into the combination of colours that we know it represents. The neuro-alchemy is more mysterious than that. Our night brains aren’t just pretending, pathetically but convincingly, that it’s day. There’s a wholesale translation of our brain into the brain of a night thing – one of the most complete and joyful shape-shiftings we can know. Like all graces, it is a fragile thing, and our instinct is to smash it up. This is easily done. A flick of the switch, and you’re back in a world that doesn’t exist at all, in either the day or the night: you’re a creature of lithium-cadmium. We have a depraved craving for not-places, for not-food, for not-people. And so we buy torches.

  Humans, made bionic by a cold bath, can see, hear and (before the cold knocks out their peripheral sensation) feel the most wonderful night things in the river. The river day is frigid. The weed waves prettily enough, but like sterile surgical drapes, with no erotic promise. It might as well be wallpaper or an overcurated exhibit in a clinically lighted, centrally heated museum. But at night it grabs your legs and strokes them up to the crotch. Sunlight rinses colour from the weed: lubricious blacks, reds and browns slink back when the sun’s gone. In the dark wood the night clots; in the river the night is in solution.

  That first river night spoilt the river days for me. But even the night couldn’t redeem the winter.

  ✴ ✴

  In my first summer on the East Lyn river I’d found a place where the water races through a tight spout into a deep pool. It travels so fast that it’s pushed right to the bottom of the pool, carrying with it the air it has collected in the stony avenue that runs down from the moor – air full of greenness and birdsong. It hits the rock at the foot of the pool and spirals back, right to the top, weaving round the downward bubbles in an incomprehensible double helix. That first day, I put my face in it and made myself a mask of air with streamers down my head like si
lver dread-locks. When my face was in it, I had a million compound eyes, like an enormous fly. They smashed up the light and shot it into my retinas with a violence that made ordinary vision old and tired. I moulded the bubbles like a potter moulds clay on the wheel – pushing the helix in to make a waist and pulling it out in strands. In the light seasons I went religiously to the spout once a week. It became a Sabbath.

  Otters too take time out from the mania. They play with the water – pointlessly, if the only possible point is the acquisition of calories and the maximising of reproductive potential. But only when the spring comes and the input-output equations look healthier. Same for me.

  When the spring gave me back to myself (how amazing to be able to use the words ‘spring’ and ‘myself’ – for the first time since October), I came up out of the earth, an elated escapee from the dark camp behind me, and slipped back epiphanically into the water.

  ‘You’ll feel the change in your face’, growled a Scottish farmer I knew. He was talking about the weather, or puberty, or sheep-dip poisoning, or orgasm. But it’s not a bad general observation about the world. I felt the change in my face. It didn’t grin, but it had possibilities again.

  Otters experience the world mainly through the change in their faces. Their faces are chisels thrusting between the layers of river water. They’re the first bit of the animal to cross the sudden seam between the shallow-warmed water above Rockford and the old, cold, green water sludging up from the dark basins. All that is obvious. But the intensity of the sensation is not.

  Above my desk is the mask of a big otter killed by hounds somewhere in Dorset in the 1930s. He looks defiantly martial, as he no doubt was when his final attempt to escape the stockade of thundering poles failed and he turned at last to try to rip the testicles off the booming lead hound.