Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  The stag’s grazing at the foot of the slope. He relies on the women for protection. About 300 yards from the stag there’s an area of rough grass. It’s a mixed blessing: it might cover the final crawl, but it might also baffle a bullet. Between you and the grass there’s precious little cover for another 300 yards.

  You get flat on your face, with your genitals scraping the ground. Many a stag has been saved by a proud, disobedient arse. The idea is to go at the speed of continental drift, since if the deer are themselves floating at the same speed, their movement-detecting software won’t be activated.

  A raven, looking for carrion, sees you and stoops low for a better look. He sees your hand inching forward and veers away. The hind sees the change in the flight angle. It’s a ripple in the calm of the world, and she doesn’t like it. Her head goes up and goes stiff, and she brings up the heads of the other hinds like a puppeteer. Vicarious alarm isn’t as intense as first-hand fear. In this friendly wind the other heads go down after a couple of minutes, but the old bitch isn’t satisfied. She’s looking straight at us. Please, please, somebody: tell her that the ground breathes too. You look down, thinking that she can see us blinking, and then look back. She raises her head further, and her nostrils swell. Perhaps some of your scent has rebounded off the cliff and leaked down the slope. After an age her nostrils subside, and her head comes down. She’s grazing again, but she’s shifted her position so that she’s pointing at you.

  You give her another five minutes and then pull yourself forward, about an inch a century. There’s a nice calculation to make: the danger of moving faster and being seen has to be weighed against the danger of the wind changing. It only has to swing 10 degrees or rattle down the burn, and she’ll have you, and you’ll never get near that stag. A billiard ball coming off a green cushion is unpredictable enough: the game now is about tumbling smell in a gusting tide of rocky bagatelle. And no, that sentence doesn’t make sense, and I don’t care: this is life and death, and if you don’t mix metaphors you’re not doing it properly. There are so many imponderables that you’ll kill the stag only if God wants you to, and don’t you dare think that would be a mark of favour.

  Her head’s up; her head’s down; up, down. Whatever you do or don’t do is irrelevant. If the stag’s doomed, it’s doomed. It’s too late for prayers, for him and for you, and they don’t work anyway in land like this. No: your actions aren’t completely irrelevant: you can do something that hurts. That’s the sort of currency that’ll buy stuff out here. So you force your cheek against a rock until you can feel there’s no skin left, and that does bring a kind of clarity, and, better, it keeps the bitch’s head down. A hundred yards to the lump of grass where it’s all going to happen. It will be good to be there, but you hope that she’ll get your wind. Far better not to have a shot than to miss, and for sure you’ll miss: your fingers are dead; and you’re not good enough. By which you don’t mean ‘good’ in the sense of being a good shot, but ‘good’ in the moral sense. Look at that thing: the size of its neck. It’s always the neck. And then look at your white legs, exposed where the hill has pulled down your socks. You’re pathetic, and to be pathetic means that you’re undeserving. Thin white legs don’t deserve to bring down that neck. They’re thin and they’re white because they’ve not done anything heroic, and they haven’t done anything heroic because they’re thin and white, and the ethic out here, old boy, is Homeric or bloody nothing.

  You’re at the grass. This hasn’t been unpleasant enough for a kill. There have been moments of enjoyment, and they’ll make the bullet swerve. Up on your elbow. The rifle bolt’s deafening. Everything between here and Inverness will have jumped at that. There’s a glistening bullet crouched on the blocks. Better leave the safety catch on; there’s a sprig of heather that could snatch the trigger. Up to the shoulder. The stag shifts. He’s too end on now. You might just clip his leg or chew up his guts. Gun down. It’d be hell if he lay down, and he just might. But the wind and stars have shifted, and the bitch is now your friend. She’s jumpy, and it’s infectious. She’s about to go. Her haunch sinks so that she can blast up and out. Even this suave, blasé stag takes notice. He twists round.

  Because your skin and blood are on the stone back there, and that’s apparently enough, and because there’s mercifully no time, it’s easy. To the shoulder; catch off; cross hairs up the front leg; as soon as you see chest, squeeze and keep squeezing. You squeeze the bullet all the way through the air into the left ventricle: it won’t go unless you keep squeezing. Imagine yourself squatting in the stag’s heart. Reel the bullet in. Or beckon it in, slowly and emphatically.

  There’s a thump and a stagger. It doesn’t look like much, but the ventricle is mince, and, bored with the heart, the bullet has gone off wandering. The stag coughs. It seems an inadequate response. This, after all, is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to the stag. It warrants more than a prosaic, workaday cough.

  The stag’s off. That too is unworthy: there really is no point in running. It just has to be faced, and what better place to face it than right here, with a storm building over the sea and the raven angling back in for a beakful of bowel, and the five o’clock news just starting on the Land Rover radio? His horns, sticking out of the heather, are more trees than swords. There’s a fly on his eye by the time you get there. ‘Nicely done’, says the stalker, and if there’s any decency in you you’ll have no idea what he’s talking about.

  We don’t go in for he-man snuff photos (me and a dead animal that’s better than me except that it’s dead and I’m strangely not). A knife that you never noticed before slides in, and the belly uncoils like fat, hot snakes. They’re still squirming as you head down for your bath, forgetting how it really was and translating the day into something that’ll do for dinner chat.

  By the time the gong goes, the stag is dead and never really lived, and you, my friend, are an effective predator, splendidly lonely at the end of the food chain; perched in bright sunlight on the teetering summit of an ecological pyramid, and the Sophoclean’s there too, smiling and slow-clapping.

  ✴ ✴

  There is another way to be a wolf. On Exmoor there is an ancient herd of around 3,000 red deer, and there are stag-hounds to chase them.

  I’d catch the train to Taunton on a Friday, spend an uneasy night wondering how I’d cope with a broken neck, get up in the early hours to meet a mountainous horse in a rain-swept lay-by and head off across the moor after a horn, too busy to be afraid.

  Every other day, on average, the hounds would bring a stag to bay in a river, where it was shot. And every inch of the average twelve-mile run retaught me things I’d forgotten about how to be a human child. On the back of a horse I was as high above my usual height as I’d been below my current height as a six-year-old. The gorse and heather were tumescent and psychedelic with my surging serotonin. Everything was made new with every lurching stride in this rollicking Wordsworthian blood-fest. The trembling horn from the valley bottom, always pubically, triangularly wooded: ‘Whoooooooooo. It’s died. It’s died. It’s died.’ ‘So that we can live’, came the echo from wet rock. It was all very complicated, this death and sex and childhood. I tried not to think about it too much.

  Sometime between then and now I began to have some idea of how time works; how long it takes for humans to change, for habits to become ingrained; of the ratio between the intensity of experience and its apparent duration. On a train rattling back to Oxford I started to sketch out, on the back of a paper about the moral status of the embryo, some fanciful metaphysical calculus. Although a few red deer may reach the age of twenty, fifteen years is a good old age. Say that fifteen deer years are equivalent to eighty human years. One deer year, then, is 5.33 human years. Say too, and conservatively, that a deer does five times as much living in its converted year per unit time as a human: that’s five times as much attention to the world around it, and factoring in the relatively smaller amount of sleep that deer have. That means that… It was
nonsense. I screwed up the paper and threw it away. I was left with the bare, unquantified conviction that red deer put me to shame and that to be alive for longer I should learn from them, get up earlier and wander wood and heath by night – an amorphous but quite practical conclusion.

  Since I’d concluded that red deer lived more intensely than I did, I should probably have been uneasier about my own predatorhood. I should have concluded that killing them was more morally serious than I did. I didn’t, because no one, and least of all me, is morally consistent, and because I was having too much fun.

  ✴ ✴

  I wasn’t converted in a Damascus Road moment as I watched a deer I’d shot spray blood from her nostrils on to the snow and try to reach her friends in the wood; or as I saw a hunted hind, with calf at heel, lift it up with her nose and dump it in a stand of bracken so the hounds wouldn’t find it; or as I was asked to admire a photo of a beaming oaf from a bank kneeling beside a Highland royal that he’d wounded twice and that a contemptuous stalker had to finish off; or as I read about the men of Porlock standing by in their boats on hunting days to chase, lasso and slit the throats of deer that swam out to sea; or as I drank old Burgundy at dinner in the lodge, trying and failing to feel heroic after a fluky lethal shot; or as I lay tucked up in goose down, watched by gilt-framed patriarchs in plus fours, listening to the rain that was lashing the back of the stag on the hill that I’d set out to kill after the morning kedgeree.

  Those moments helped, but it was really politics that did it. The moments contributed to the politics, but not as much as they should have done. I needed to see that humans were also victims in order to realise that there might be something wrong with animal victimhood. When I’d seen children ridden down by shareholders or wounded and left to die by CEOs, and death creeping sneakily up the glen to within rifle shot of my own family, I was ready to make the connection. Until I became a bleeding-heart lefty I couldn’t write meaningfully about bleeding harts.

  I continued, though, to think that being an effective predator helped me to know something about my prey species. That was very wrong.

  ✴ ✴

  Matt, a plasterer from Dunster, met me outside the White Horse in Stogumber. His family had chased foxes and hares across Exmoor and the Quantocks for generations, and in the back of his van were some of the country’s best-nosed bloodhounds. One of them, Monty, was going to hunt me.

  ‘Let him have a sniff of your boot’, said Matt. ‘I bet we’ll have you before you break a sweat.’

  I set off running along the side of a field of young maize. It had been raining, and there was now a hot fog rising from my footprints. It was bad weather for being a hunted deer.

  I wasn’t going to be killed, but still the chase seemed to matter very much. That’s the neurotic temperament for you. A piece of grit in my shoe, which I’d usually have ignored, was vast and malignant – conspiring with the universe for my destruction. The low, dry fences were high and slippery. I sicked up my heart and it sat hunched in my throat, stopping the sea-fog air from bleeding into my blood. I was rushing, and, mockingly, nothing else was. The field was brutally, callously relaxed. A beetle crept calmly down a maize stem. I hated it for its leisure and indifference.

  That was for the first few hundred yards, when the maize clutched my legs and the only rhythm was the tickling throb of my throat. Then I stumbled out of the field and could stride, and my heart retreated to my ribs, and again there was a tide in my chest. The wood was still maddeningly leisurely, but it wasn’t out to get me. Everything seemed to have a voice, and now the voices were, by and large, sympathetic. The nettles apologised for stinging my legs and assured me that they’d do a far better job on Monty’s drooping lips, which were swaying up towards me.

  But then I began to doubt the kindness of the wood. A carrion crow, which by all the rules should have scrambled as I thrashed past it, sat and watched me from a branch five yards above my head. I saw myself in its eye: hunched and panting. I’d have thought that everything in a crow’s eye would be black, but I was a brilliant red. I thought, absurdly, that it was waiting for me to be killed, so that it could pick up some scraps. This was very undeerlike behaviour.

  In other ways, though – mostly unconscious – I was behaving very much like a hunted deer. My adrenals were pumping out cortisol and adrenaline. The cortisol made me taut. (The next day, its immunosuppressive effect threw open the drawbridge of my throat to an invading virus.) Blood was diverted from my gut to my legs. Though I was slumping from the effort, I’d stop from time to time, hold my head up high and reflexively sniff. If I’d had mobile ears they’d have pricked and swivelled. Though I looked for water, as deer do, to cool me and to send my scent spiralling away, I ran on the driest ground I could find. I knew (from well before birth rather than because I’d read books and watched hounds) that dry earth doesn’t hold scent well or, if it holds it, hugs the particles close, leaving few for snuffling noses.

  Unlike a deer, though, I longed to be out of the wood. It’s often very difficult for staghounds to push deer into the open. Sometimes it takes hours. The deer double back, lie flat in deep cover and sabre-rattlingly confront hounds rather than breaking out.

  It would have made sense for me to stay in the wood. Scent bounces off trees like balls in a pinball machine and eddies like the dark, curd-coated corners of the East Lyn river. It’s hard for even the most educated nose to read it there. Out in the open, there’s a slime trail of scent through the grass. It points in the direction of the prey. It’s easy to extrapolate forwards and back. Yes, the wind can knock the scent about, but it usually just shifts the trail a few yards downwind: the line will still be clear enough.

  My preference for the open was therefore strange. I suppose we want to die where we’ve evolved, just as an overwhelming majority of people say that they’d prefer to die at home. We evolved on an east African plain. Like most people, I now express this inchoate preference in many neurotic ways: in a fear of the dark and of caves (though, like everyone, I began life in a totally dark, pounding cave and was safer there than I’ve ever been since); in a need to have the curtains open at night so that I can see turning stars and tell myself that the universe is still doing what it should; in the malaise I get in a room with no natural light; in the conviction that maggots eating something underground are more obscene than maggots eating something in the sunshine; in shuddering at coffins. A private hospice on a mountainside could charge a lot more than one in the suburbs. It’s no surprise that seaside towns are full of retirees, desperate for a big view as the sun sinks. It’s all because of Tanzania.

  No: I wasn’t going to die. But I couldn’t tell that to my adrenals. They pushed me on through the maize. My breath was deafening. I couldn’t hear anything else.

  I hadn’t expected silence. I’d expected an exhilarating duet between baying hounds and rasping lungs. That would have been an appropriate, dignifying and comforting soundtrack to the drama. But there was no noise at all behind me: no deep, funereal belling from between wobbling jowls.

  This silence was hard to take. That too is a legacy from the savannah and another reason for my suspicion of woods. Neurologically I’m set up to expect dangers, opportunities and options to be pretty clear. I’m a long-distance viewer of zebra herds, shifting clouds and waving grass. There are unseen, unheard and unsmelt things on the plains, but they are calculable. There’s a fair chance that there will be lions in that long grass: I’d better skirt it to get to the zebra. My skill is not in detecting the dangers: it is in mentally testing out the possible responses; it’s in painless, risk-free optimisation.

  But panting in that Somerset field, I didn’t have the data necessary to start calculating. I am physiologically set up to avoid dying gloriously in the open, and thus have a distinct preference for dying in the open rather than elsewhere. My heroic metanarratives have evolved to justify my physiological settings. ‘How can man die better’, asked Horatius, urging the Romans to hold the bridge
against the surging Etruscans, ‘Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods?’ That’s the poetic corollary of being able to see zebras and to have a pretty fair stab at anticipating lions. We are creatures with faces. We face things. We’re good at it. And when we can’t, we panic. We always panic when we can’t do what we’re good at, which is why office workers, who are naturally good at running down wounded kudu, are stressed to hell, fearful and overmedicated.

  There was no hound for me to face, and that scared me. Adrenaline and cortisol didn’t help much here. In fact, they were a detriment, just as they are to hypertensive wage slaves. They steeled my muscles but froze my mind.

  I knew I hadn’t won. These hounds are as inexorable as age. They can follow a scent that’s twenty-four hours old. They don’t hurry. They have faces so funny that they are well beyond a joke. They can’t be conned or distracted. They work steadily down the ledger, calculating and double-checking. They’re not excited by what they do, and so there’s no hope of mistake, as there is with exuberant, blood-hungry foxhounds. Foxhounds get drunk on the scent and dribble with excitement. Bloodhounds dribble all the time, but with diligence. Foxhounds are the charismatic prosecutors; bloodhounds are the dull ones who’ve read and reread the brief. If I’m a guilty defendant, give me a flamboyant prosecutor every time.

  Monty caught up with me on the side of another maize field. He was ten yards away when I first saw him. When he saw me, from under those heavy, roller-blind lids, he just turned away. He didn’t need any consummation other than a tick in his time sheet. The job was done. He turned round and ambled back up to Matt, who was several minutes behind.

  The silence hadn’t just been unnerving; it was hurtful. I ride a clanking bicycle round Oxford and have a prepared speech that I make to myself whenever people can’t hear me approach and don’t get out of the way. It goes something like this: