Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  Cones rather than rods dominate the central area of its retina, and cones are much better at detecting movement than at recognising shapes. A baby rabbit well within the fox’s field of vision at noon is likely to be safe as long as it stays still. A man with a gun, raising himself slowly, slowly, slowly on his arms, will be likely, even when he’s silhouetted against the skyline, to kill that daytime fox. The silhouette will (not imperceptibly, but unperceived) become part of the background noise in the fox’s brain; it’s filtered out, leaving attention only for new eruptions of sound.

  My daytime eyes are better at shapes than the fox’s, and my brain is also more interested in them. Though the boredom of the days was crushing, there was more entertainment for me than for the fox. I didn’t need a beetle or a fast-swinging shadow, though they were appreciated. I could make do with a pine cone, a frill of lichen or the Corinthian fluting of an iron dustbin.

  My round pupils were made for wonder; for invasion by the world; for allowing takeover by all comers. It’s only my brain, made timid and conservative by the past few millennia, that checks the credentials of everyone at the door, letting in only the familiar and unthreatening.

  A fox presumably puts fewer cognitive obstacles in the way of the world. It’s governed more by the physics of its pupils. At night they’re round, as mine always are: then it needs all the clues the woods and the streets can offer. In the day they’re more sceptical and discriminating: upright slits, like erect sentries, which are much better at keeping light out. They work with the eyelids to titrate exactly the optimal amount of visible world.

  The fox and I heard some of the same things: we both heard punches landing (the fox would have wondered if there’d be a corpse for supper); and people being hysterically cheerful on the radio; and disembodied chopping, grinding, grating, rumbling, whirring and pinging. All of this was interesting to me; almost none of it to the fox. For her, nothing much above her head was worth attention. She’d evolved so as not to fear aerial predation (the most powerful eagle isn’t much threat), and the occasional deadly blast from the bedroom window of a farmhouse isn’t so significant as to nudge evolution towards dread of a thunderous sky god. So she would have noted and immediately discarded (with the sort of mindfulness at which I’ve worked, cross-legged, cramped and unsuccessfully, for years) the soft crackling of poplars (you only hear the cracks after a couple of hours), the myocardial thump of a power shower, the scrappy scratch and trill of starlings in the house’s voice box under the eaves.

  For her, though, the stir of dry leaves by the compost heap, which was for me a nibbling, was like sharp fingernails scraping down a drum held hard against the ear. Her attention would move from the general (or the general below five feet) to the leaves, just as the attention of one of those accomplished meditators clicks back and locks on to the breath.

  ✴ ✴

  I did most of my foxery before I had small cubs. It seemed fun at the time. Now it would be even more fun, and I’d see a lot more. They’d peel the scales off my eyes, and there would be vertical pupils beneath. Human children are more like fox cubs than they’re like anything else. Mine even cache like foxes (there are little piles of Haribos behind books and under carpets), and for the same reasons (small stomachs and an apocalyptic imagination that subliminally tells them, against all the evidence, that there won’t be food tomorrow).

  Their memory for the caches seems to be about as good and as bad as the fox’s:

  ‘Where did you leave those sweeties?’

  Weeks 1 and 2: ‘Behind the Lego bucket.’

  Week 3: ‘Behind the Lego bucket? I think. Or perhaps by the penis gourds?’

  Week 4: ‘What sweeties? Please: what sweeties?’

  When they had to excavate, though, the memory was buried more safely in their heads. We buried cans of beans and tomatoes up on Exmoor, and though they were a lot less interesting than sweeties, the children remembered the locations perfectly three months later – though their ability to remember which can was where was down to fox/sweetie level in a fortnight.

  I don’t want them to change. They have nothing that they don’t need to live properly, and lack nothing. In that too they’re like foxes. I fear their evolution – fear particularly that it will be assimilation into a less intimate world; a world in which sensitivity is impossible.

  I fear that too for the red foxes of the inner city, although there is encouragingly little sign of it. If it were going to happen, there might well be signs of it already. Genetics and evolution, coupled together, make a fast and powerful machine. But the foxes are still at risk. When, for a mere forty generations, traits of friendliness to humans were artificially selected in silver foxes, those cold, snarling pots of poison barked, wagged their tails, whimpered cravenly when humans walked towards them and licked human hands.

  May God or Darwin protect my children from comparable breeding.

  ✴ ✴

  I hate cats. Really hate them. This isn’t the dispassionate distaste that everyone who likes birds, small mammals and relationality should have. It’s elemental, wholly disproportionate to the damage they do and getting worse by the year.

  Nobody really likes cats as cats. They’re intrinsically unlikeable: vain, cold and cruel. To like a cat, you’ve got to turn it into something that it plainly isn’t. You have to dress it up as a lover, a postmistress or an old school chum. Cats are at their best in the hands of a really bad taxidermist.

  I don’t wish them ill: I just unwish them. I’m religiously committed to the removal of their reproductive apparatus. It’s very disappointing that only 0.4 per cent of Oxford urban fox scats contain cat fur – and probably most of that is from road-killed cats.

  The smell of cat urine enrages me. I don’t know which came first – hatred of cats or hatred of their urine – and now I can’t disentangle the two. But when a tomcat sprayed the ground-sheet which was the roof of my fox den, terrible things happened to my head.

  I put a chicken leg on the sheet and wriggled underneath. It wasn’t long before I felt the cat climb up my back. The chicken was on my shoulder. I wanted to smash that insolent composure. I waited until I knew the cat would have his teeth in the leg, and then erupted skywards with a Vesuvian roar. There was a gratifying screech, and the cat shot up and off with neuroses that would be immune to all the veterinary CBT money could buy.

  I chased him across the yard, to the end of what we laughingly called the garden. He jumped over some planks. So did I. He cleared a flowerpot. So did I. He leapt on to a fence and ran along it. So did I. He did so with balletic elegance. I did not.

  I fell between a wall and a shed, slumped, panting and swearing. I was there for a minute. I looked up into vertical pupils in a sharp red head, six feet away. The chicken leg drooped out of one corner of her mouth, for all the world like a cheroot. She held my gaze: it was certainly her holding mine, not me holding hers. Then, when she chose, she let me go and strolled to the corner of the yard and out through a door that wasn’t there.

  ✴ ✴

  Foxes gave London back to me for a while. They would have given me more if I’d asked. But it seemed unfair to press them. They had other things to do in the few smoothly bristling seasons that the statistics allowed them. I had nothing to give them. They didn’t need me, my domestic waste, my sympathy or my fantasies of wild companionship. That needlessness, and the memory of smiling eyes above a chicken cheroot, gave me the only confidence I have that it’s all going to be all right.

  Endnote

  * I was plainly wrong about the rigor mortis. The dead maggots indicated that rigor mortis must have passed off long before.

  5

  EARTH 2

  Red Deer

  Red deer are designed to be hunted by wolves.

  It is easy enough to be a wolf. This is how I did it.

  First, I was born into a society that baaed: ‘Acquisition good; renunciation bad.’ Then I went to a school brazen enough to have compulsory lessons in laisse
z-faire economics called ‘Community Wealth’ and where, on Tuesday afternoons, we looked through the sights of Second World War Lee-Enfield rifles at charging Communists and got splendid badges for nailing them between the eyes.

  Then I went to a university which was ancient, the stones and the occasional drunk don told us, because in every generation excellence came to the top by a natural law of antigravity and mingled eugenically with more excellence to create still more excellence. And so it would continue until the world was filled with the glory of Adam Smith, as the waters covered the sea. After six years of mediocrity I was invited for dry sherry in an oak-panelled room overlooking the Cam. A Fellow of the Royal Society in a black gown asked us to sit down.

  ‘You’re about to leave Cambridge, gentlemen. Now, it may very well be true that the meek will inherit the earth, but my advice to you is this: until they show some signs of making a serious bid for that position, trample all over them.’

  Thus equipped, we strode out into the world. Or, in my case, slunk out, wolf now by constitution, but not by conviction.

  You need a revolution to change a constitution, and for a long time I was too busy for that.

  I tooled myself up to carry on the baton of wolfishness. That meant professional scalps, papers, girls and guns. And, pre-eminently, it meant the sleeper train from Euston to Inverness or Fort William in September.

  I loved it. I love it still. There’s a gratifying apartheid in the restaurant car. It’s not safe to leave your rifle in your sleeping compartment, so it’s got to be with you as, eating your microwaved haggis, you look pityingly at the unarmed tourists eating salad. There’s a tense priapic fellowship between the stalkers: we despise the others even more than we dislike and distrust one another. We raise our eyebrows as an aspirational peasant who doesn’t know the rules asks for Glenfiddich (because he’s seen it in an in-flight mag) instead of an island malt. We silently and companionably mock their practical waterproof coats, their light, breathable trousers, their easily-tied boots and, particularly, their earnestness. They’ve all got their maps out. They’re tapping grid references into their GPSs and calculating the distances between bothies. But we: we have no need of navigation. We go where we bloody well want and kill the deer that we bloody well want to kill. We don’t mention to ourselves that we don’t take maps because we’ll be shepherded on the hill by a professional stalker who despises us far more than even we are capable of despising these kind, hardy, self-reliant walkers who probably do triathlons in the time it takes us to drink a pint of overpriced beer at the White Horse on Parsons Green. No: we’re the wolves; they’re the deer. We eat them. Good on ’em for playing the part and eating spinach.

  By the time the train has lurched into the north Midlands the tourists have trotted down the corridor to early beds. Very wise: you never know when they’ll have to run to escape one of us.

  Before they turned in, things were simple: there were wolves and there were prey. Now, though, we have a closer look at the other wolves; leaders, soon-to-be-leaders and followers. That’s a brand-new gun case; bet he’s not seen much action. He won’t get a good look at a stag’s heart through those owlish glasses when the fog’s coming down. And look at those arms: they’ll never hold a rifle steady when he’s waited three hours in the cold for a stag to get up. The girl’s pretty enough, but there’s too much of the bottle about that hair for her to get a return invite to the table in our lodge. And I bet she can’t sing, play, recite or otherwise do her bit in the drawing room after dinner.

  Self-deception isn’t always possible. In my mind at least, there’s usually someone in the corner, laconic and ironic, drinking water and tea, a very battered rifle propped up beside him, dressed in faded clothes, desert boots insolently on the seat, reading Sophocles in the original and perfectly happy to kill and eat me.

  By Fort William the distinctions between the wolves have been ground down by the turning wheels. Only the natural aristocracy of the smiling Sophoclean remains, as immutable as the mutability of the highland weather. We’re disgorged, crumpled, stiff and fearful, into old Land Rovers.

  Because there are wolves and wolves, there are lodges and lodges. Some (think Germans, Americans and complex, agented rental agreements) have tartan carpets and wallpaper, immaculate gravel, a flat-screen TV and jus. And others have cheese safes, a barrel of beer in the kitchen, a wood-fired drying room and gravy. I’ve only ever killed from this second kind, may Diana be thanked.

  The breakfasts are leisurely and fittingly carnivorous. Then there may be a ride in a boat down the loch to a remote beach for an amphibious start to the campaign (which was of course how we talked about it), or a jolting journey round the hill to kinder wind, or a spy from the herbaceous borders and a crawl within sight of the kitchen windows.

  In my wolf years I killed many deer with my exploding teeth. I don’t know how many. I never kept a diary. Sometimes I thought that to chronicle the days would preserve them, and so allow me to keep living in them, and hence stop me living effectively in them as they were happening. And sometimes I thought that a mere account of my doings would so radically miss the point of what was going on that it wasn’t worth it.

  Just what was going on I wasn’t clear about. I’m still not. But there was, even then, something shameful about it. It wasn’t the unfairness – knocking over a beast seen through a telescopic sight at 300 yards when I would never have been able to spear it. It wasn’t the fact of the killing, as that fact is represented in the estate’s ledger: a certain number of deer have to be killed. It had something to do with relationship, and hence with proximity and with those telescopic 300 yards. I was doing a terrible, intimate, undoable thing; I was moulding an ecosystem. I was ending something and beginning something else. And I wasn’t even there to take hands-on responsibility for it: a finger on a trigger is not a hand. I wasn’t there to see what it meant when a bullet zigzagged through the thorax, ricocheting off ribs and ripping blood vessels. I wasn’t there to apologise; to explain; to shoulder the burden of regret that is also the burden of exultation. A stag is fearfully and wonderfully made. I had carelessly and easily unmade it. To uncreate is (I suppose my logic went) an ungodly thing to do. I began to know why the kosher laws preserve, in their horror of blood, the old, unhistorical insistence that we were all vegetarians once and had the relationship then with non-human animals that we need for our own thriving. Standing on the hill by a shattered stag, I was as theologically queasy as a Hasid who’s had a mouthful of black pudding. I felt dirty, and I didn’t want smutty literary photos of me lying around in a drawer to snigger at later.

  Because there was no diary, there is now just the memory of a generic stalk; a chimera woven from many strands, from many hills. But the strands that make up the red deer’s story are only from red deer: there are no roe deer, or zebra, or wildebeest, or blesbok, or hartebeest strands in there. It’s not true the other way round. There are some coarse brown highland hairs from Conaglen deer colouring the zebra. Red deer are special. They are more themselves than the other ungulates I’ve killed. They’re more jealous of the specialness of their deaths.

  This (excluding the crucial details of lusts, lunches and of course misses) is how the red deer stalk goes.

  You go to a target in front of some sandbags. A thin man in tweed looks sceptically at you unless and until you can put three bullets within two inches of one another at 200 yards. If you can’t, it’s time to get back on the train. There’s no point in continuing to exist, and life, if it continues at all, will never be the same again. You are not a predator.

  If you can, the thin man nods at you and puts the rifle back in its slip, and you walk together to the hill. Your relief about the target will make you want to talk companionably. That wouldn’t be appreciated. You might be a predator, but you’re right at the bottom of the pack pyramid.

  That thin stalker, anyway, has things to do. He’s scanning the hill as you walk. You do too, but it’s not the same. You try to look a
cute and far-sighted, sometimes stopping and leaning forward sagely to look at a fold by a corrie, but no one’s taken in.

  You both stop. The stalker takes out his binoculars. You take out yours. You both sweep the hill. The stalker says: ‘Two nice stags, but a parcel of hinds in front. We’ll never get through to them.’ You pretend that you can see them, and nod. He picks up some grass and throws it away to see what the wind is doing. He sweeps the hill again and sucks his teeth. He sits down on a tussock, pulls out a brass telescope, puts it to his eye and steadies it on his knee. ‘There’s a shootable stag at the foot of the scree’, he says. ‘We might get there.’

  There is now, although it’s not spelt out, a sophisticated plan. You climb into a gully that goes up to the ridge. The wind is blowing from the deer to you, and you are out of sight, so this part can be fast, and should be. Weather can drop fast; deer can be spooked by anything and nothing.

  You have to get out of the gully before it meets the ridge. An old sentinel hind has the shape of the skyline running constantly in her head just as you might have a tune running in yours. You’d notice a small change in the melody or even a mildly distorted chord. So will she. So you climb out of the trench and into no-man’s-land. There’s no need yet to crawl. ‘But keep down’, says the stalker, and you walk slowly, bent double. The stalker stops, and you, a pace behind, desperate to please, cannon into him. He reaches round and grabs your jacket, keeping you behind him. The hind has looked up and at him. She’s not happy. She keeps looking at him for a tense minute. Then she puts her head down and continues feeding. The stalker doesn’t move, and quite right: a few seconds later the hind whips her head up again and looks straight at you. It’s an old trick. The first gaze didn’t satisfy her. She hopes that if there’s anything suspicious it will have thought that she was reassured, will have started to move again, and will be caught by the second look. This happens a few times between now and the scree slope. You have to see the swing of the neck and stop moving before the eyes lock on.