Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  Smell telescopes and packages history. The pizza was a trivial example. Sniff a lump of Precambrian schist and you might get a couple of billion years of sensation delivered all at once to your neurological door. The sensation, in that case, will be faint: most of the scent molecules will have been reassigned to other bodies and structures, and those that remain are wrapped tightly in a sort of archaic cling film.

  As a fox trots down the Bethnal Green Road, it takes with every breath an instantaneous transect through the past five or fifty or five hundred years. And it lives in those years, rather than on the tarmac and between the bins. Time, squashed tightly by olfaction, is the fox’s real geography.

  The piece of pizza wasn’t substantial enough to be an island itself. It was a signpost – a floating piece of fresh wood that said that an island wasn’t far off. The island from which it came was a tree stump, crumbling and spongy, next to a ruptured bin bag. Like litmus, it had soaked up the run-off from the bag, and like litmus it declared the real nature of the bag and the bag’s ancestors. The declaration was in the smell, and the nature was historical and anthropological and commercial and depraved and careless and anxious and just about all the other adjectives there are. And I got it all at once.

  I think it had been a lime tree, but its own name had been chewed by the rain and the wasps and washed out by curry bleeding from the bag. Because it was porous, it was a safe and capacious bank of the memory of things. Perhaps it was planted a century ago, for no reason that the planners would have been able to explain: there wasn’t language then for motives like ‘feeding the wild heart beating inside the black jacket’. And it died about half a century later, when its varicose roots were hacked up because they made next door’s yard too interesting.

  When it died, it started to accumulate scent. When it was alive it had mostly smelt of itself.

  I moved the bag and slept by the tree for a couple of nights, with my nose in one of its armpits.

  That nose went through three stages. First, it smelt an old tree and moulded the scent into the shape of a cadaver. Then the nose laid out the scent and (it’s a big, sharp nose) began to dissect. It cut out a slice of diesel, perhaps from the mid-1970s, and put that in a bowl for later inspection. Then the nose went back, picked up a length of storm, blown in from Russia at the time of the Suez Crisis, and laid it alongside. With those out of the way, it speeded up: last month’s menstrual blood, a brave crack at cheering up a nursery, an overambitious and unpopular attempt at a Vietnamese culinary classic, some evidently successful attempts at safe sex. And beans. So many beans. All laid out in the bowl.

  The nose roved round the bowl from item to item, proud of its dissection.

  And then, very slowly, it began to know that it is murder to dissect. It reassembled the pieces. It got again what it had got in the first, unexamined sniff: the whole bowl at once; a century in a moment.

  That, I think, is how a fox does it. But it inhabits a much longer period in a moment than I can, and inhabits that period far more fully. Yes, it focuses on the things it’s particularly interested in, as I lock on to one alluring picture in a new gallery. But it sweeps the millennia in an instant, as my eye sweeps the gallery. From the millennia the fox alights on last week’s chops or the last minute’s vole, but the scan is complete.

  Only noses can travel in time quite like this. Our eyes and ears travel too, but we don’t recognise it, because light and sound are fast. We see the light from stars that are centuries old, and the light is mixed on the palette of our retina with light that is tiny fractions of a nanosecond old from the nearby chip shop. We use the mixture to paint a picture of the world that we call reality. In fact, reality’s a cocktail of sometimes radically different times, shaken and profoundly stirred by the Self.

  So those were my islands: a fruit raft, the edge of some concrete, a tree and a stump. Foxes took me there.

  As a matter of mere aesthetics I preferred the fox view to my view from the bus or from my study. It was prettier and much more interesting. As a matter of cartography I came to think that the fox view of the East End was more accurate than mine: it took into account more information. It saw both more minutely and more widely. It saw the hairs on ants’ legs and, in a moment-to-moment orgy of olfactory holism, everything that had been spilt, ejaculated, cooked and grown since the creation of the world. So there.

  The foxes showed me a London that was old and deep enough to live in and be kind about. They negotiated an uneasy peace between me and the East End, and indeed between me and other squalid, wretched, broken human places. It was a great gift.

  But I’d got to know only islands, not whole landscapes. The city squirmed mistily below the waters between them. For my metaphorically aquatic foxes there is no mistiness.

  ✴ ✴

  Time travel isn’t just poetry. Foxes use it for hunting. If a vole squeaks from any point to one side of a fox’s midline, the sound hits the fox’s eardrums at slightly different times and at slightly different intensities. A bit of basic trigonometry, a lot of experience and a lot of wasted pounces, and the brain will have a rough fix. Although it’s more difficult (as evolution, on behalf of pure-toned prey species, has noted), even a continuous, pure-toned moan can be located: a different part of the wave reaches each ear at a particular time – a crest might smash into the right and a trough into the left. The discrepancies locate the squeaker or the moaner. But only up to a point. If the fox keeps its head still, the sound will be localised not to one dot in space but to a graceful curved plane, starting at the moan and ending over the fox’s head. In its killing leap, the fox can’t chop every point along that plane. It has to do better, and it does, in two ways.

  First, it moves its head or its ears. The plane linking the moan to the fox moves, but the moan doesn’t. By comparing the original plane with the new one, the fox can narrow the possibilities. Several ear swivellings or head swings later, there will be almost enough confidence to justify that costly spring. But there’s another astonishing refinement.

  To appreciate how astonishing this is, go out to the most disgusting park you know and watch dogs defaecating. On a normal day they prefer to defaecate with their bodies aligned along the north-south axis. That’s when the earth’s magnetic field is calm. It’s not always calm: there are storms and squalls as the molten rock we’re all surfing on churns around. But, given a quiet day in Hades, our dogs’ bowels are tethered to the centre of the world.

  We don’t know if foxes do this, but it’s likely. They’re certainly tuned to the earth’s magnetic field. They very significantly prefer to leap in a north-easterly direction on to those small mammals, and are much more likely to kill if they do. There’s a death in 73 per cent of north-easterly jumps, in 60 per cent of south-westerly jumps (at 180 degrees to the preferred direction) and in only 18 per cent of jumps in other directions.

  What they’re doing (and it’s the only known instance – so far – of animals doing this) is using the field to calculate distance rather than position or direction. That’s rather important. Many things confound distance finding in the fox’s normal habitat. The speed of sound varies with air temperature and humidity, skewing those trigonometrical calculations. Sound slaloms between grass stems, bounces off twigs, insinuates into the ground and frolics off in the wind. On well-trodden vole paths there’s rarely a telltale sway of grass, and if there is, a breeze will cover the tracks. Over- or undershooting is wasteful: there may well not be a chance to regroup and refire.

  So the fox jumps at a fixed angle to the magnetic field (ideally 20 degrees off magnetic north). It knows the angle of the sound reaching its ears. Where the magnetic line and the sound line meet, there meat will be. Remember how the Dambusters knew when to drop the bouncing bombs on the Ruhr dams? When the two spotlights met on the surface of the water, they knew that they were the right distance from the wall, and they pressed the release button. That’s what foxes do, but one spotlight is sound and the other is magnetic, and th
e release is an explosive unfolding of hamstrings and about a hundred or so other muscles filled with blood, lymph and hunger.

  What might it be like to take one’s bearings so literally from the earth? I fix sounds like foxes do, moving my head. But to feel north-westerliness in your water? That would give every step a context – a relatedness to everything else. It would make me a true citizen of the world, rather than of the patch I happen to be fouling at the time.

  Once I sat in a pub listening to some old ladies talking about how the world was going downhill. Young people, of course, weren’t what they used to be. But in an interesting respect. It wasn’t that they were idle, unwashed, promiscuous, disrespectful or intoxicated – although they were. It was that they were overly sensitive to magnetic fields.

  ‘They think, you know, that churches and that are all stuck along magnetic lines. Joined to old hills and the like.’

  ‘They don’t!’

  ‘They do. Let me tell you. They say that there are lines of power all over the country and that people in the olden days used to know about them, and built things on them.’

  ‘They never!’

  ‘They do. Wonder if I’m on one now. Me bum’s tingling.’

  And so it went on: bums and then breasts tingled; shapeless pants were mockingly electrified; the feng shui of mantelpiece junk from Benidorm was evaluated. It cackled into the night as I bought narcotic beer I hadn’t thought I’d need, and tried to knuckle down to Greenmantle.

  Their despised grandchildren were right; ask any fox, bushman, squatting dog or just about anyone before the dark dawn of modernity. Magnetism, along with burial and planting, anchors humans to the planet. We are alphabetic fridge magnets: our only hope of spelling something coherent is to hang on. To be unmagnetic in the Upper Palaeolithic was to be blind and footless. You wouldn’t know, properly, or intimately, where you were. And hence why and who you were.

  Or so I wrote, self-righteously and adolescently, in my beer-stained notebook. I was no more magnetic than the women. My ancestors, just as much as theirs, had hacked off their own feet and put out their own eyes sometime in the past thousand years. But at least I didn’t think it made them or me better.

  Perhaps I’m overstating things. When a fox uses the angle of 20 degrees off magnetic north for efficient killing, it’s not doing it any more transcendentally than a ping-pong player turning her wrist for maximum topspin. But not less transcendentally either. Which makes me conclude, on balance, that I’m not overstating. For the connection between a world-class ping-pong player and the table is surely a wondrous thing. For me, the table is a piece of wood. For the player it’s a stage on which extraordinary things can happen; a frame on which embroidery of unique beauty can be woven. That’s only possible because of the connection between the player and the table.

  So the whole world, for unmagnetic me, is as far below what it might be as a few planks of wood are below a table used for an international table tennis tournament. Foxes play ping-pong all day and all night.

  ✴ ✴

  The churchyards and canal banks of this part of the East End were too tidy. There were voles there, but I needed longer grass to hunt them. I needed to swim breaststroke through the grass until I found their paths, which are chlorophyll cloisters. Then I could stand and hover over them like a hunting kestrel.

  Foxes can leap up to three metres (ten feet) horizontally, from a standing start, in order to pinion a vole. (That’s like me jumping about eight metres, or twenty-six feet.) They jump high too – perhaps to get a better view of the hunting field, just as a human deer stalker climbs to a high point to scope the ground – though the fox has a specific target on its auditory and magnetic screens and just needs some fine tuning for the final approach.

  There was no need to jump high when I was vole hunting. My eyes were naturally far above the zenith of the most athletic fox’s leap. My ears were useless. Mice (and probably voles) can squeak at a wide variety of frequencies, from those audible to my ears to well into what we call the ultrasonic range. Foxes do much better than me at the high frequencies. They perform best at around 3,500 cycles per second, which is where I do well too (human ears are most sensitive at around 1,000 to 3,500 hertz, but are amazing audiological all-rounders: they can locate sounds accurately in more than 90 per cent of cases between 900 and 14,000 hertz, and even at 34,000 hertz – well beyond the range of even the youngest of us – they get it right around two-thirds of the time).

  The fox’s technique is thus: reconnoitre (know where the vole cloisters are); listen for a squeak; move head and/or ears to get a cross bearing; supplement if necessary by listening for a lower-frequency and thus more accessible noise, like the rustling of a dry leaf; fix magnetic distance; jump; make a minute visual correction; kill.

  My technique was: reconnoitre; stand astride the cloister; watch for a grass blade moving or listen for a rustle; drop suddenly and hopefully, landing with my face in a pile of vole dung; miss; brush myself off; try pointlessly to explain myself to the group of concerned citizens clustered anxiously nearby; make off before police arrive.

  I’ve spent hours doing this. It became an obsession. I never got near, and I never got better. About five times out of several hundred leaps I saw my prey – sidling arrogantly, mockingly away. One of them actually turned round. You wouldn’t have thought that, anatomically, a vole could sneer. But it can. I know.

  The life of small mammals is written in Morse: dots and dashes. They dash between the dots. They pause, trembling, between the dashes – so more of a semicolon than a dot – to conduct a detailed assessment of the situation.

  I’ve just come back from watching shrews on the riverbank. They rush for a couple of seconds; wait for three; rush for two; wait for three; and so on. And in the waits they are wondering how to make it across the next foot of leaf litter, and perhaps (it’s not such a big step) whether they’ll make it.

  Most predators become their prey, or at least adopt their prey’s rhythm. But foxes don’t do that. There’s no staccato in a fox. They manage to be themselves more than any other animal I know. They make no concession to the prey or the place. A fox from the churning gut of a city lives about as long as one from a beech wood or a mountain. It’ll insist on needlessly hunting and won’t die of coronary artery disease. It’ll carry on being foxy, whereas thoroughly urbanised humans are in danger of not being optimally human.

  The urban fox’s foxiness is all the more spectacular because they spend so much of their time badly injured – by vehicles, of course. It’s a consequence of their confident foxiness: why should they run from such strange predators? The road is their home: why should they move? Rumble and light don’t impress them into fear or flight.

  A heroic experiment demonstrated just how much pain is stirred into the mix of bristling alarm and poised command that is the brief but dazzling life of a city fox. The hero scraped up more than 300 dead foxes from the streets of London and laid them out for the flies. Several months later, and probably many friends lighter, he could see that 27.5 per cent of them had healed fractures – most of them, no doubt, from hurtling lumps of steel propelled by decomposed plants from carboniferous forests.

  We can’t know how foxes cope mentally with the disruption of their bodies, but I’ve seen lots of dogs look, puzzled, at the splintered ends of bone coming out of their legs. They soon start licking the ends, as they’d lick a new puppy. They deal with the mystery of one bloody thing erupting out of their bodies as they deal with other bloody eruptions. They welcome it into the air.

  I’ve looked at the splintered ends of my bones. I didn’t welcome them. Tubes sprayed blood into my eyes until, unbidden, the tubes pinched themselves off. We’re always and only kept alive by unbidden things. Put a heart cell on to a glass slide, and it’ll keep contracting in time to the baton of a dead conductor who never even knew he was conducting.

  Foxes aren’t just run down by vehicles: they’re run down by time too. Thirty-five per cen
t of London foxes have spondylosis deformans – a deforming fusion of their joints – most commonly in their spines. Sixty-five per cent of foxes in their third year of life have arthritis in their spines; all of the few who survive to the grand old age of six do. When they walk along fence tops like teenage Olympic Romanians on the beam, or blast from a hedge on to a wood pigeon, or seep like mercury up to a rabbit, they’re doing it with a back so bad that, were they office workers, it would have them signed permanently off work. They must look forward to lying under the shed during the day, and must see the approaching of the night with the same resigned dread with which a man more committed to his office than to his crippling sciatica hears the morning alarm.

  ✴ ✴

  Beneath the roof of my den, for day after long, long day, I dozed, hot, shivering, fitful: never right. The view I commanded was the view that a fox under the shed would have had. I had no sky. At this low altitude, horizontal perspectives are steep: a drain-pipe funnelled the world fast into a vanishing point. Vertical perspectives, though, are sickening. Once your eyes are raised from the ground there is only wall. We live in a well: light drips in from the top through an invisible mesh of cloud and fumes.

  We don’t know much about the colour perception of foxes, but it’s likely that they are red-green colour-blind. Here, though, it doesn’t make much difference. These humans, thinking that flowers are vulgarly overdone, have opted for grey – or at least that’s what the prevailing westerlies and the drip-fed sun disdainfully make of their pastels after a season.

  When a fox, after playing with its vole for a while, as my children roll their peas round the plate, snips off its head, the blood is just a darker shade of grey on the grey grass.

  I wallowed incontinently under that groundsheet, chapped and stinking; watching and listening.

  My watching wasn’t so unlike the fox’s. At short ranges in the day its visual acuity is more or less as good as mine, but its eyes need rather more tickling than mine to become interested.