Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  These capacities and tendencies have obvious emotional (there, I’ve used the word) corollaries.

  Dogs suffer separation anxiety when parted from an owner to whom they are bonded. When the owner returns, they race out to greet them, jumping up and dancing; for all the world like a toddler reunited with its mother. Up on the Howden Moors in the Derbyshire Peak District, where I used to roam as a child, a sheepdog called Tip stayed with the body of his dead master for a desolate, dangerous fifteen weeks.

  I can’t believe that foxes have used their available RAM in so radically different a way from dogs that these traits have no echoes at all in fox heads. We know that foxes have good memories: they recall, for weeks at a time, not only the location of cached food but also the particular food that is cached there – ‘There’s a bank vole to the left of the twisted oak; a field vole under the nettles,’ they say to themselves. We know that they have a significant vocabulary of their own, produced using a sophisticated suite of methods (at least twenty-eight groups of sounds, based on forty basic forms of sound production), and that the call of individual X is recognised as that of individual X rather than that of a generic fox: a monogamous captive male reacted to recordings only of his own mate.

  These faculties in the fox translate just as inevitably into relationality as the corresponding faculties do in dogs. It’s just that the relation, as of course will be the norm with animals (the dog-man case is a highly unusual one), is with other foxes. Who, having heard Macdonald’s story of the mutilated vixen, could doubt it?

  Here’s another of his. A tame dog fox got a thorn in his paw. Septicaemia set in. The dominant vixen of his group gave him food when he was ill. That’s very unusual: adult foxes are usually aggressively possessive about food.

  No doubt this is reciprocal altruism. The vixen, at some level, expected a kickback in the event of her being ill. But that label doesn’t begin to mean that there isn’t a real emotional component. No doubt my love for my children and the sacrifices I make for them have at least a partial Darwinian explanation: I want them to bear my genes triumphantly on into posterity. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be genuinely distressed by their non-reproductive-potential-affecting injury, or that my devastation at their deaths wouldn’t go far, far beyond the distress caused by the mere trashing of my genetic aspirations.

  I prefer the easy, obvious reading of Macdonald’s stories and of the lessons from the dogs. Foxes are relational, empathic creatures. And you can shout ‘Beatrix Potter’ as loudly as you like: I don’t care.

  This relationality and empathy of fox X is, so far as we know, directed primarily towards other foxes with whom X shares an interest. That’s what Neo-Darwin says, and no doubt he’s right. But once you’ve got a capacity for relationality and empathy, it’s terribly difficult to keep it tidily in its box. It keeps spilling out over other evolutionarily irrelevant individuals and species. People give money to donkeys and to starving children from whom they’ll never get any benefit. They even give it secretly, denying themselves the chance of being applauded and favoured as a mensch. A Nazi with children of his own will find it harder to bayonet the children of others than one in whom relationality has never kindled.

  This is what I told myself, on my knees next to the crane flies and the foxes. Those foxes have the ability to connect to me, and I to them. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t want to. There have been times (whole seconds at a time) when I’ve looked at foxes and they’ve looked at me (in a Yorkshire wood; on a Cornish cliff; in an orange grove near Haifa; on a beach in the Peloponnese), and I’ve thought: Yes! There’s a rudimentary language in which we can describe ourselves to the other, and the other to ourselves. We needn’t be as mutually inaccessible as Earth and the Baby Boom Galaxy.

  Even when those long seconds have passed, I’ve still been able to say to the fox: Listen – we’ve both got bodies, and they get wet as the clouds burst on their way up from the grey sea, and we’re both here! I am here! You are here!

  I and thou!

  Then it’s usually time to go to the pub.

  ✴ ✴

  When I lived in the East End I’d often give the arrabbiata a miss and shuffle instead at night round the bins, rifling through the bags. A fox’s nose has no problem telling, through a thick layer of black plastic, whether there’s anything worth its while, but even thin plastic defeated mine. I had to open the bags up.

  It was only the instinctive phobia of the saliva of my own species that made eating scraps unpleasant. I cheated. I sprinkled mixed spices on everything. That, absurdly, seemed to sterilise it, or at least personalise it and defuse the threat of the dribbling other.

  At first I tried caching like foxes do. I gave it up in disgust when I returned to a cache of rice in a foil box and found three brown rats with their snouts in it like piglets round a trough. A proper fox would have had them for starters.

  The takings were good but dull. If the East End is like the rest of the Western world, it throws away about a third of all the food it buys. There was no shortage of pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips and sausages. But not much else. In this most variegated of all English societies, everyone eats the same as everyone else, and the same all the time. Foxes, even here, do much better than the humans. They have pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips, sausages, field voles, bank voles, house mice, road casualties of all kinds, wild fruit in season and the air-freighted unwild, unseasonal fruit of South America and Africa, cockchafer grubs, noctuid moth caterpillars, beetles, rat-tailed maggots from the sewage outlets, earthworms, rabbits (wild and insecurely caged ones), slow, complacent birds, rubber bands, broken glass, KFC wrappers, grass to snare intestinal parasitic worms and induce therapeutic vomiting, and just about everything else. But, unfortunately, they’re not significant cat killers.

  As I mooched round the bins I listened and I watched. I found in the houses and the flats what I found in the bags: uniformity. Everyone had a more or less identical cultural diet. One drizzling September night I stood on the pavement, eating an abandoned pie and looking through windows. I could tell from the flickering that seventy-three households were watching TV. Of those, sixty-four (sixty-four!), the coordinated flickering told me, were watching the same thing.

  No fox ever looks at the same thing as another fox. Even when a family is curled up together, each fox either has its eyes shut, dreaming about chicken houses or a vole glut or an onion bhaji, or is looking out from a slightly different angle from every other fox, its understanding of what it’s seeing modulated by the slightly different precedence each gives to smell and hearing, with those in turn being conditioned by cement dust in the nose from snuffling round a building site, the angle of the ears, or parental instructions from cubhood.

  We too have blocked noses and positions in space, but we’re such unsensory, unmindful creatures that they make no difference to us: we don’t notice them. We have acutely sensitive hands but handle the world with thick gloves and then, bored, blame it for lacking shape.

  ✴ ✴

  I’d just about given up on London, but the foxes’ faith in it and the intensity of their commitment to it touched me and made me think again. I suspected that if I could get as close to it as they were I’d see it properly, and therefore learn to love it. To hate anything is exhausting. I hoped that the foxes could help me to rest.

  When I lived here I was almost anaesthetic. Like the accursed in the psalm, I had eyes but could not see, a nose but could not smell, hands but could not feel, and ears but could not hear. I was constantly being told that this was where it was all happening; where the real business of life was done. Sometimes I could dimly sense that something was happening, but it seemed distant, blurred and muffled, as if I were looking down from a great height through cloudy seawater.

  Then, still blind, deaf and anosmic, I started to follow the foxes. Eventually they took my collar between their teeth and swam with me to four islands. On th
ose islands my senses functioned. I could feel and describe things there. The rest of the Atlantean world of the East End remained submerged. If I’d stayed longer and persevered with the foxes, they might have shown me more islands, or perhaps even dived down with me, or raised the rest of Atlantis so that I could buy and taste beer in it, or run over its hills and feel it under my feet.

  I never got anywhere other than the islands, and never really understood what made the East End tick. Perhaps the genius loci lies deep in the troughs between my islands, forever out of my reach. Yet in describing my islands to myself I mapped an archipelago, and an archipelago has a taste of its own: it can be a nation of which one can be fond.

  I wanted most of all to feel fond. I was so tired of resenting. If I’d thought that fondness for a place was different from understanding the foxes that inhabit the place, I’d have wanted the fondness more than the understanding. But the conviction that they weren’t different had grown with every sniff and crawl and bin-bag raid.

  It wasn’t that I experienced something on the islands that was better than anaesthesia elsewhere but not as good as normal experience. Not at all. I became convinced that the foxes saw, smelt and heard the real thing, and that on the islands to which they took me I was experiencing the real thing too. The foxes gave me their eyes, ears, noses and feet. But only on the islands.

  The foxes were the real East Enders. They inhabited the place in a way that, without their help, I could not, and in a way that reflected what the place itself was. I lived there in a way that reflected me, or my view of the place. I walked round with a mirror in front of me, describing myself into a notebook and calling it nature writing.

  If you look into a fox’s eyes, you get no reflection of yourself. They have vertical pupils, which deny gratification to the human narcissist. Now jump to the other side of the fox’s eye and look out through it at a pool of vomited curry, or a hedgehog, or a stream of four-by-fours on the school run. You’ll similarly get no reflection of yourself. You’ll see the things themselves, or a better approximation to the things than you’d get with your own drearily self-referential eyes. Eyes are meant to be sensory receptors. In the fox’s head they are. We make them cognitive, and ruin them. This is not because a fox has less consciousness and hence there is less to intrude between its retina and its mental model of that hedgehog, but because its consciousness is less contaminated with toxic self and presumption.

  None of the fox islands was visible from more than two feet above the ground. One could be seen only with the nose.

  These are the islands:

  Island 1

  There are lots of shops that sell everything, deep into the night. They smell of ghee, soap, cardamom, coriander and lighter fuel. The owners never ever die or get excited. In an alleyway beside one of these there was a pile of crates, stamped with customs ink from Barbados, Bangladesh and some little piles of Pacific rock. It was soft, sweet, damp and alcoholic under the crates. I floated on a raft of fermenting fruit. The wasps were too pissed to sting me when I rolled on them.

  I lay on my belly, because foxes normally do. There was a wall a couple of feet ahead of me. Damp had edged up the first foot. The rest of the wall, which climbed up to the billowing net-curtain sails of a taxi firm’s masthead, was dry as toast, and as interesting. But next to the ground there was writhing wonderment: silver slug tracery; trundling woodlice, swimming through air as baby trilobites rowed through the Cambrian soup; centipedes armoured in bronze plates, snaking like a file of legionnaires with shields over their heads towards a tower of hairy Goths; lichens flowering the way that scabs would flower if William Morris directed skin healing; moss like armpit hair.

  A crack in a box from Lesotho half-framed a bathroom window, and the woman in the bathroom was lovely and the man was not. Why would she stay? But that was not a fox thought. If I lowered my head there was a cauliflower, green with mould and bonny as a horse chestnut in May.

  There were worms in the raft; fat, pickled worms with thick saddles like the thick wedding rings of the emphatically faithful. A fox would have sucked them through its teeth like spaghetti: each is worth 2½ calories – 1/240 of the 600-calorie-per-day requirement of an adult fox. Although most foxes eat some earthworms, it seems that some are worm specialists, to judge by the soil and worm chaetae in their dung. It’s a safe, lazy way to earn a living: like being a probate lawyer.

  Island 2

  In the park there’s a place where concrete meets tarmac. The concrete has broken where the winter has hardened water into wedges. There’s a lush tree of cracks. Flash floods, invisible to us but tumultuous wild water to greenfly, have filled the cracks with soil, full of ascarid eggs from unbagged dog shit near the playground. Wind, shoveled by the wing mirrors of cement lorries and white vans, has seeded the soil with grass and bravely straggling ragwort whose ancestors probably killed a horse or two in Kent.

  If you walk on this boundary with bare feet, you’ll know that the concrete is as hard and sharply pitted as a cheese grater. It doesn’t welcome anything. The sun leaves it as fast as it can go. The tarmac, though, is warm and spongy, even in the cold. When it’s hot it sends up tar tendrils to grab your feet. They leave tattoos, like black thread veins, on your soles.

  Foxes have absurdly sensitive feet. These city foxes, used to pounding the roads for eight hours a night, have pads that feel like velvet which has had milk poured over it and then been put in the oven overnight to get a fragile crust. Their feet, like their faces, extend beyond the fur line: there are small, stiff hairs on the carpus which are buried in a buzzing hive of nerves. When the biologist Huw Lloyd lightly touched these hairs on a young fox sleeping in front of his fire, the fox, without waking, snatched back its foot. Those hairs are stroked lustfully by the grass in any country wilder than a well-managed sports field. Imagine your nostrils being shafted enjoyably with face-high thistles as you walk. That’s a fox’s progress through a spring wood.

  It seems a bit much. They really don’t need to be so good. Clumping, club-footed ungulates, their nerve endings locked up in horn boxes, dance perfectly satisfactorily over rough ground and along mountain ledges. You’d expect natural selection to be more parsimonious in dispensing its favours to foxes.

  Island 3

  We think of small trees as going straight up from the ground and then getting wider like mushrooms or narrower like carrots. They don’t. Even the slenderest tree has a big, wide underground life. The parts up in the light are just kitchens for making food.

  If you lie on the ground you’ll eventually know this. I watched one tree for about three hours before noticing. It had sloping shoulders, hinting at a pale body beneath the paving.

  The tree had prised up the stiff skin of the yard and then, tired, slumped on to the fence, pulled down by the weight of its head as a drunk’s head is pulled on to a table by the weight of a head full of beer. Ants, beetles and earwigs, each in their own rigidly observed carriageways, poured over the shoulders – streams of iridescent water with legs. They were going to eat dead stuff, or live stuff: it’s always one or the other. The boundary between the two isn’t very clear.

  I couldn’t gallop between trees on my hands and knees in the East End. There aren’t enough trees. But I’ve done it as best I can in plenty of other places. The real fox’s-eye view of trees is when you’re sledging fast downhill through woodland. Foxes have, like most predators, frontally positioned eyes. They’d have had more or less the same view of the beetles as I had, but I’d have been able to identify the tree species at a running speed sooner than the foxes. For them the trees would have been dark columns that would have come at them with that lurching, not-quite-anticipatable violence that you know best when you’re driving one of those fake motorbikes in an amusement arcade. Computer simulation of driving or riding doesn’t feel like driving or riding, but it’s useful for making you feel like a fox.

  I tried to run like a fox at the tree in the yard. I skinned my knees, and the woman in
the house next door pulled back her curtain and asked nervously if I was all right.

  Island 4

  I turned over an old slice of pizza with my nose. It was lying in a backyard. I don’t know how it had escaped the rats and the birds and the foxes. It had lasted long enough to have soaked up the weather of a couple of weeks. There had been no rain for a week, but it was damp. There was a luxurious green fur over the pepperoni. There were human tooth marks on one side, and the fur was thinner there: presumably the streptococci of which human kisses are a concentrated solution compete viciously with the mould. The underside was a metro system, its tunnels already packed, like a rush hour station, with jostling weevils. Black beetles (which I always think are too downright mechanical to need food – which is a demand of flesh) were there directing the crowds.

  But it was the smell that got me. There were physical smell strata in the slice: at the top there was still metallic tomato and the fat of unhappy pigs, shaken up with spores (which don’t smell at all of death, though they should). At the bottom there was pasty, yeasty creepingness. The tomato and the metro were separated by about an inch (it was a deep-pan pizza) and a fortnight. But – and this was the point – I got them both in a single sniffing millisecond.