Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  I got down on my knees beside the foxes and grazed. There seemed nothing barbarous about crushing bodies that were so slight, so dry and so still. A victim needs to have viscera to evoke visceral disgust. The crane flies were pinioned by the surface tension and didn’t move much. Think of a ticklish rice-paper garnish that turns to vanilla slime.

  Half an hour later the foxes were still there, systematically working their patch under the sodium lighting, as I got stiffly up and walked home in a ruined suit.

  It wasn’t the first time I had tried to be a fox. When I was nine my father arrived home, excited: ‘Look what’s in the back of the car. But be very careful.’

  There, in black plastic bin liners, were two recently dead foxes – a dog and a vixen. Their lips were pulled back in a snarl. They looked angry to be dead. The vixen had swollen mammary glands. She had obviously been suckling cubs.

  ‘Don’t touch their teeth’, said my father. ‘They’ve been killed with strychnine.’

  That’s not a nice way to die. A farmer had once delightedly told me what it did to moles, and I could understand the bitterness of that fixed smile. Very soon after taking the poison, probably planted on a dead lamb, they’d have felt tremors and rising nausea. The tremors would have towered up, powered up, and turned into convulsions. In a dark field in Derbyshire they’d have repeatedly arched and extended their backs almost until they snapped, and then, when their diaphragms finally gave up, they’d have turned blue and died in an asphyxial froth of blood and foam. They were terribly lovely. From then on I signed off all my letters with the head of a fox.

  We went out to try to find the cubs. We lay for three nights under a tarpaulin downwind of a hole in a hill. I bought a chicken with my birthday money, disembowelled and dismembered it and spread it tantalisingly around near the entrance to the hole.

  This was a time when I thought I could will anything. I willed the cubs to come out. I asked (not knowing who or what I was asking) to be possessed by those adult foxes so that I could know where the cubs were, or persuade them that it was safe to emerge.

  We shivered and we willed. They never came. It was my first real disillusionment.

  If I’d been in Japan, the fox spirits would have jumped at my invitation. There they don’t need to be asked in at all, let alone asked twice. Plenty of people in Japan are married, often unknowingly, and often satisfactorily, to eyelash-batting, stiletto-wearing fox spirits. It’s not always good, though, and fox exorcism is big business. In everyday life you’ve got to be careful that you’re not being beguiled by a fox. The danger’s greatest over the phone, when you can’t see the person you’re talking to (presumably Skype is making it tougher for spirit foxes), and telephonic conventions have developed to avert it. There are some human sounds that foxes can’t pronounce, such as moshi moshi. They’re part of the standard greeting. If your opposite number doesn’t use it, hang up.

  But these Derbyshire foxes evidently took their metaphysics, like their rabbits, from the land, and the High Peak is part of the West. Here foxes are the definitive other: they won’t cross the species boundary except when, as demonic agents, they tunnel into the soul, making it foul with their stench and mixing their dung with the mess of bloody feathers from other plundered souls.

  Foxes let in disillusionment. They also let in death. The house, my bedroom and the shed to which I and my skins and bottles of formalin had been banished were full of corpses. But I hadn’t really identified the corpses as dead. They were just little peninsulas of wilderness that reached gloriously behind our pebble-dashed walls; aids to living fully, unlike the people all around us in suburbia; nothing to do with extinction. They were silent and still, but that just meant that it was easier to study them than if they’d been slinking or flapping. It didn’t mean that they had stopped being, or that they represented a threat to me or to anyone I cared about.

  That changed when I was eleven. Here is the entry in my nature diary:

  February 2

  Found dead fox (Vulpes vulpes crucigera) down on a large patch of grass in the Mayfield valley. It was in a bad state of decomposition and Rigor Mortis seemed fully developed in the limbs.* Strangely enough, this specimen had been very neatly skinned. The skull and everything else on the carcass was intact. There were many maggots on the carcass which were all dead, probably because of the cold night. We took from the body the skull (including the lower Jaws and teeth) and the bones of the tail. We took these home and boiled them to clean the unwanted matter off. We then bleached them in household bleach (chlorous).

  A sketch map followed.

  The prose is revealingly constipated. There’s plainly something missing. What’s missing is the soul-rattling shock I felt. This fox was dead in a way that the strychnine foxes had not been, and for a fox to be dead was really pretty serious. Apart from swifts, foxes were the most obviously alive things I knew. I’d watched them alongside lean, wired, taut dogs. Even when the dogs were racing hard, the foxes sauntered. The very best dogs slouch; foxes glide. If even foxes could be killed this emphatically, nothing was safe: not my parents, not my sister, and not me. The grave opened.

  And then, as I was still standing there in that cold field, came another thought: This very, very dead fox is more alive than a correspondingly dead dog. So an ontological snobbery was born: a belief in a hierarchy of being. Some being was so mighty that it would survive even cardiac arrest. It made me an insufferable little shit for years. I’ve never recovered, and nor have several of the people who’ve had to put up with me.

  But here’s the relevance for this book: I felt that if I wanted to be like a fox I could do it by, first of all, being very alive (which was a comfort), or by being splendidly dead (which is a rather stranger comfort).

  ✴ ✴

  Foxes trickled up with the Pleistocene ice and then trickled down railway lines and canal fringes into the inner cities. They are Tories. Urban fox numbers correlate perfectly with blue rosettes. They like the gardens that come with affluence. Some commute – in both directions. Many (though not my East End foxes) have nice, leafy country houses and come to town, like the men in suits, for the rich, easy off-scourings of the city. Others choose to live and raise cubs under a lawyer’s shed by the Tube station, and to relax and get a breath of fresh air in the country.

  The East End of London doesn’t vote Tory, despite the corporate laptops and the avocado foam, and the foxes here are hard pressed. There are shed-owning lawyers whose kids like to feed foxes, but they’re in small ghettos with polished floor-boards, walled in by towering concrete cabinets where the desperate are filed.

  The humans here have small brains. Smaller, that is, than those of the wild men from whom they descend. They’ve shrunk about 10 per cent over the past 10,000 years. Since dogs faithfully follow their masters, their brains have shrunk too. Dog brains are about 25 per cent smaller than those of wolves – their immediate ancestor. Domestication makes everything shrivel.

  We don’t know what effect inner-city living will have on foxes, but urban foxes have lost no length or weight. It’s not surprising. Even in the fat suburbs, where they could live off bird tables, hedgehog food and the interested benevolence of the middle class, they choose to hunt. Like us, they are built to be multivalent. It’s how they and we triumphed over heat, ice, drought and monoculturalists. Strenuous though it is for them – demanding a lot more ingenuity and energy than it takes simply to pick up pizza and lap up sweet-and-sour sauce – they’ve opted to listen, pounce, prospect and innovate. We haven’t. In a few generations we’ve turned into sclerosed super-specialists, each in a niche so tight that our limbs can’t stretch and our brains can’t turn. I bet foxes’ choices will keep their brains throbbingly big and keen and their legs like steel wire when we can’t hoist ourselves from the sofa.

  ✴ ✴

  It’s easy enough to march to the urban fox’s beat. They are those most onomatopoeic of creatures: crepuscular. They live, by preference and as befits brilliant p
hysiological generalists, along the mucky tideline where the night washes into the day. Here in the East End, though, there are no proper nights: just dirty days, and nights of scorching twilight. For these foxes the dusk is not the dimming of the light but the thinning of the traffic. Sound and tremble take over from photons. When the taxis have dropped off most of the bankers, out come the foxes. They forage over a big area here (probably getting on for half a square mile) and show the generic fox’s caching behaviour. They forage or hunt, then cache (usually burying, in an often rather messy, approximate way), and then continue to forage and hunt and cache before returning to cached food. It’s hard to bury under tarmac: my foxes shove food clumsily under pallets and cardboard boxes used to deliver wide-screen TVs. Then, the territory trawled, they select what they need (going for the most toothsome first) and head home.

  The traffic dawn and the sun dawn more or less coincide. Trucks shudder down the Old Ford Road; Porsches purr off to Canary Wharf; buses rumble west to disgorge people into open-plan, air-conditioned comfort, with cooled-water dispensers. The foxes lick last night’s aloo gobi off their lips and curl up under the shed.

  ✴ ✴

  The more respectably dressed you are, the harder it is to be a fox. No one has ever accused me of being respectably dressed, but even so I soon realised that I should be even more shabbily shambolic than usual. Someone in unstained trousers and an unripped jumper looks criminal if he’s raking through a herniated bin bag, but if you’re dirty, tired and slumped, no one minds. You’re translucent. People look through you. The grubbier you are, the more translucent you are. If you’re on all fours, sniffing at a sack, you’re invisible. Except to the authorities. And even there, sleeping is more offensive than doing.

  I was shaken awake under the rhododendrons.

  ‘Afternoon, sir.’

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Can I help, at all, sir?’

  ‘No thanks. All’s fine.’

  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing, sir?’

  ‘Just having a little sleep, officer.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t sleep here, sir. You sure you’re OK, sir?’

  ‘Fine, thank you. And what’s the problem with sleeping here?’

  ‘It’s forbidden, as I’m sure you know. Trespassing. The owners can’t have people just sleeping.’

  (Just sleeping?)

  ‘I can’t see that I’m interfering materially with the enjoyment of its title of a property management company registered in Panama.’

  ‘Are you trying to be clever, sir?’

  I could think of no palatable answer to this. The policeman didn’t press me for one. He moved to another topic.

  ‘Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?’

  ‘You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and’ – I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential haemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill – ‘I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.’

  This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out. For him, calves, ankles and concealment in an evergreen shrub meant perversion so deep that it should be measured in years inside. But I could see him struggling to identify the right pigeonhole for my depravity, and imagining the paperwork. Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to ‘bugger off home, sir’ – the italics were powerful on his lips – ‘and get a life.’

  ‘That’, I said, ‘is exactly what I’m trying to do.’

  He looked paternalistically at me as I brushed the leaves off my jersey and walked home.

  After that I cravenly slept under a groundsheet in my backyard.

  ✴ ✴

  Foxes sometimes sleep on the central reservation of motorways. Three thousand vehicles an hour shriek past in oily vortices of dust, rubber, deodorant, vomit, electric muttering and what we’ve absurdly come to call power. I’ve slept on the verge of an A road myself, beneath a canopy of cow parsley and dock, wanting to be violated by noise and palpitation, and still being shocked by the unbrute brutality of the thrusting pistons. Even the most wanton wrenchings of the natural world – wild dogs in a tug of war with a baby gazelle, for instance – are tender and proper beside the violence of a bus or a train.

  A fox can hear a squeaking vole 100 metres (109 yards) away and rooks winging across plough half a kilometre (a third of a mile) off. To lie ten metres (eleven yards) from a speeding van must be apocalyptic: like living inside a tornado. Even the sneezing, snoring, grumbling, humming, moaning, turning, deep night of the inner city is a cacophonous fairground.

  It’s the fox’s plasticity that so daunts me. I can get an intellectual, or at least a poetical, grip on acute sensitivity in another animal. But acute sensitivity and intense toleration: that’s hard. And it’s not as if it is mere reluctant toleration for the sake of survival, as with the badgers who, because suitable habitats are hard to find, might put up with a rather suboptimal railway embankment. Foxes seem to enjoy being outrageous. They flaunt their thriving in conditions that are objectively wretched. They don’t want my loud, tree-hugging sermons on their behalf, and I feel not only miffed but mystified. They are the true citizens of the world. I’m not, and I rather resent them for bettering me. I also don’t understand how they do it, either physiologically or emotionally.

  You’d expect a truly cosmopolitan creature to make some costly compromises: to give up some hearing in return for better eyes, or some smell for some sight. Surely generalists can’t be great specialists? But they are. I’m in awe.

  ✴ ✴

  I hated the East End. ‘This place is an offence’, I wrote bitterly in a notebook.

  It was built on water meadows as a refugee camp and is now a workhouse from which, because of poverty or wealth, few can afford to escape. Few would say these days that it’s home, and even fewer would say so gladly. Few people really live here at all. They beam their thoughts in from outer space, fly their food in from Thailand and their fripperies from China, and their furniture sails in a steel box from Sweden. I suppose that’s not really so far. We are, after all, made of star dust.

  Though foxes are made of star dust too, and eat Thai chicken curry, they’re genuinely local. They know the taste of every square inch of concrete; they’ve looked from a range of about three inches at every spreading stain of lichen up to eighteen inches from the ground; they know that there’s a mouse nest under the porch at number 17A and bumblebees by the cedar wood decking at number 29B. They’ve watched the tedious adulteries of Mrs S, Mr K being carted off to die, and the psychosis of the M twins blossoming from petty backyard cruelties into much worse. They know the flight paths of jumbo jets and greylag geese. Under the shed they nestle among the oysters that gave the local Victorians typhoid. They walk around the area for nearly five miles a night, and they do it with everything switched on.

  But they’re not around for long. Being an urban fox is an intense, dangerous business. Sixty per cent of London’s foxes die each year. Eighty-eight per cent of Oxford foxes die before their second birthday. They know bereavement. There’s only a 16 per cent chance that both animals of a fox pair that have raised cubs in their first reproductive year will survive for a second breeding season. They don’t just know the fact of bereavement; they feel it – apparently as I do, and they make similar sounds.

  David Macdonald, who has conducted, from his base in Oxford, much of the most significant work on fox behaviour, kept pet foxes. (He commented that his landlady found his flat curiously hard to rent when he left it. Not everyone shares my, or his, taste for the smell of fox urine.) One of his vixens was caught in the flailing blades of a grass cutter. A leg dangled by a thread of tissue. Macdonald’s distraught wife picked her up. The vixen’s mate tried to pull the vixen away as she was carried to the car, and looked after the car as it drove down the path.

  The next day the vixen’s s
ister picked up a mouthful of food at a cache and ran off with it, whimpering as foxes do when they’re giving food to cubs. She hadn’t called like that for over a year. She took the food to the grass hollow where, the night before, her sister had bled. She buried it beneath the bloodstained blades of grass.

  This has the pathos of my own story, and it was this that made me more anthropomorphic about foxes than about any of my other animals. I felt more confident about reading them right than about the others.

  ✴ ✴

  Foxes and dogs are very, very different. They’re in different genera. They parted company about 12 million years ago – a divergence reflected in the number of chromosomes: domestic dogs (evolved wolves) have seventy-eight pairs; red foxes thirty-four to thirty-eight pairs. You needn’t put your poodle on the pill if there’s a libidinous dog fox oiling around. And yet there’s something to be learned about foxes from looking at dogs.

  Dogs are specialists in getting along with humans: they have been selected rigorously for it over the past 50,000 years or so. Foxes are not: evolution has nudged them in other, less placid, directions. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that foxes have at least the raw mental processing power of dogs. If that’s right, by seeing what dogs can do we can get some idea about the resources available to foxes.

  Dogs are supreme copiers and bonders. They mimic human actions as well as a sixteen-month-old child, observe closely what humans are looking at or pointing to, read many human social cues and want to work with us.

  Some dogs have capacious memories. One should be careful about drawing conclusions about normality from the spectacular tricks of savants, but the ends of a bell curve do indicate something about where the middle lies. So let’s consider a Border collie called Rico who appeared on German TV in 2001. He knew the names of two hundred toys, fetched them by name, and learned and remembered words as fast as a human toddler. When a new toy was placed among his old ones, he recognised it by a process which must have been something like: ‘I know the others, but I’ve never seen this: so this must be the new one.’ When he’d not seen the new toy for a month, he picked it out correctly in half his trials. The new name had become part of his lexicon: he seemed to slot new words into some Chomskyite template. Another dog, Betsy, tested in a Hungarian laboratory, had a vocabulary of more than three hundred words.