Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  I undressed and slipped into the pool. I went down to my thighs in the mud, threw myself back in alarm, wrenched my legs slowly out, and lay panting on my back, trying to keep my body submerged and out of reach of blood-lapping horseflies.

  The pool was a nursery. Larvae whipped, floundered and, losing their hold on the tense, two-dimensional tightrope of the water surface, fell to the mud, which was made of other bodies. The water was frantic with dying things that hadn’t been born. They matted on my skin. When a stag leaves the pool, the sun dries all these animals on his coat. When you see him on the hill, you see the red hair through a seamless lens of dead invertebrates.

  I lay until the alarm calls in the trees turned to territorial business as usual, which was when the mud had settled on my chest. Then I came primordially out, my limbs about as effective as a coelacanth’s fins, and curled naked in the bracken, trying to conjure danger and fear in place of the feeling that this was interesting and colourful.

  I couldn’t do it. But I could be watchful, which is how the stag would be with its danger and fear. I could map the bird territories so that I could plot the metastasis of alarm.

  I could chart the wind and face away from it so that my eyes could cover the ground that my nose would not. I could recalibrate my visual sensitivity to movement, so that I’d freeze when a branch swung in a new arc. And, like a diligent veterinary student, I could become very familiar with the normal so that I’d know the abnormal. So I learned the skyline, photographing it in my head and then closing my eyes and trying to recall every bump. I learned the voices and temperaments of the farm dogs above and behind me.

  I badly wanted to get dressed. My mud and chitin coat helped, but the flies were thirsty. I cupped my scrotum like a footballer facing a thunderous free kick. But I’d rationalised my pants back on too often. I soaked all my clothes in the pool so that they wouldn’t be inviting, and went off to explore the wood.

  I could do this at my own natural head height. An adult stag stands about 127 centimetres (50 inches) high at the shoulder, and from that shoulder height there are probably another couple of vertical feet to eye level. At my own eye level they’d taken desultory bites from the bracken (never a favoured food) along their paths. They saw what I saw, though with red-green colour blindness (draining the summer wood of some of its definition and variegation) but a sensitivity to ultraviolet light (blocked by robust filters in our eyes) that must make the flat blue sky, when it’s visible through the swaying oak, swirl and crash like an angry Turner.

  The challenge was to translate the wood not from deer sense to man sense but from man time to deer time. This is the pace of growing, swaying, creeping things and then, in the space of a snarl, a bound from crouch to 40 miles per hour. The head and the rest of the body must feel as if they’re involved in two different road traffic accidents. The drag from the antlers must pull the head savagely back as the head and the body disconnectedly accelerate out of the furze.

  I wallowed slowly in light, dew and mud, trying to let the slow throb of the wood, rather than my own fibrillation, push the blood round my imagination. I raised my head at the speed of the sun. I tried to remember that the basic unit of time is a solar day and that anything smaller is as artificial as Diet Pepsi.

  For six hours I watched a single stem of robin-run-the-hedge move. Nothing around it moved. There was no tunnelling vole beneath it or fanning bird above. It steadfastly waved. The other stems steadfastly did not. Then it stopped. Abruptly. It didn’t gradually wind down. The sun dried up the birdsong.

  I moved to a patch of sorrel. The flies liked it less. From here, for another eight hours, I watched a spider bridge a gap between a baby beech and a baby oak. When the evening dew came, I saw that I’d missed almost all the web. An ant tried to crawl up my urethra. It seemed a compliment.

  There’s a time, just after dark, when the wood both clutches tightly to itself the last few shards of sunlight, seeming to arch over to stop them running back, and exhales some of the sun it’s soaked up in the day. This is the warmest time for a naked man, happily cushioned on sun and with sun thrown over him.

  But the stars are pitiless. I pulled on my drenched clothes and walked back to the house.

  ✴ ✴

  Later that summer I lay in the middle of a gorse stockade on the top of our hill. The flowers were so yellow that they scorched the view, burning up all other colour. The smell was an incongruous coconut.

  ‘Give me five minutes’, I’d said to the children. ‘Then come and find me and kill me.’

  ‘We will’, they said.

  It took them ten minutes to make the predictable mistakes: to look in the places that were obvious because they were not obvious; and then in the places that were obvious because they were obvious. Then they had to think.

  ‘He’s trying to be a deer’, I heard one of them say. ‘He’ll have gone to the water.’ So they searched the stream.

  ‘He’ll be under the trees’, said Tom. ‘I heard him say that deer are really from the woods.’ So they looked under the trees. Then they got bored and went home to destroy something.

  They didn’t think of the gorse, because they didn’t think I’d need physical protection. Deer these days don’t. Gorse is useful because, unlike bracken, it reduces to an easily monitored few the number of lines along which a wolf can oil or dash.

  But there are no wolves. There haven’t been since the fourteenth century, which is, for that reason, when modernity began.

  These red deer spend a lot of their lives in ghost forests, whose trees were long ago felled for ships and sheep. They see the ghosts as solid: they duck to avoid entangling their antlers in branches that were lopped before Agincourt; they graze in the shadow of oaks that have cast no shadow since the Bronze Age. They can never exorcise the land. If they did, they’d exorcise themselves.

  In this at least I can follow them. In fact, I can’t help it. No human can, although most modern humans – brutally exiled from the present by their neurology as red deer are by theirs – live in a phantasmal future rather than the past. But for me, a walk in the woods, or through a mall, is a seance. On a good day I’ll spend about an hour being where I am, when I am. All of that hour demands either intense attention (when I’ll bellow at myself, without much conviction: ‘I am HERE! THIS is IT!’) or children. For the rest of the time, I look at a farm and smell woad bubbling, hear swords clashing and see grey wolves bringing down red deer.

  ✴ ✴

  In his lyrical monograph, Red Deer, Richard Jeffries says this about Exmoor: ‘On Haddon Hill the glance passes from Dunkery, which overlooks the Severn Sea, to Sidmouth Gap by St. George’s Channel, so that the eye sees across the entire breadth of England there.’

  Red deer have good eyesight. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t see the breadth of England. So this was going to be a study of big sweeps; of context; of how an animal could be regional and hence representative. I was going to swing for miles across the moor, fix my eye, seamanlike, on the misty blue horizon, sleep in ditches and drink spring water from Parracombe to Dulverton, hear the dialects of many hedges, write about geology and come over all macroeconomic. It was going to be great.

  But it was all ruined by the radio-tracking data. No two fixes for any one animal were separated by more than 9.6 kilometres (5.7 miles) for stags or 7.2 kilometres (4.2 miles) for hinds. ‘Average range sizes within any one month or season’, wrote the zoologist Jochen Langbein, dispiritingly, ‘suggest that red deer [on Exmoor] remain within fairly small areas spanning less than 4 km (2.6 miles) for the majority of their time’. Mature hinds range over around 428 hectares (1,057 acres). Adult stags do more travelling: they have (as I used to have) two distinct core ranges – one used mostly during the rut, and the other for the rest of the year – and the total territory is just over 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres). They do more travelling during the rut – just as I did. But the rut and the non-rut ranges are only 2 to 6 kilometres (1.2 to 3.5 miles) apart; eeri
ly close, in fact, to the distance between mine, now that I recall those taxi rides between Bethnal Green and Fulham. In my species and theirs, the males tend to do the travelling.

  It’s not that these West Country deer are unusually parochial. Scottish Highland hinds have home ranges of 400 to 1,000 hectares (988 to 2,470 acres), their stags 1,000 to 3,000 hectares (2,470 to 7,410 acres) – bigger than those on Exmoor, yes, but only just, and only because the pickings on those bleak hills are much leaner. In the rest of Europe, seasonal shifts in range are small – rarely more than 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) – and are often nothing more ambitious than a winter shift downhill to keep out of the cold.

  These are not regional creatures after all, and there was to be no big picture for me. Red deer would have to be yet another study in localism, and thus of locality. I’d wanted to walk long because to stay and to understand was too strenuous. If someone describes himself as a ‘traveller’ on his website, as I do on mine, you can be sure he’s on the run, and you should ask from what. In my case, I’m not telling.

  These red deer well up from the ground. That might make it easier for them to go back into it. They are at home in a way that I cannot be.

  Human localness is uterine, not geographical. Humans cannot be properly at home once the uterus in which they grew up into relationship is burned or eaten.

  ✴ ✴

  Having lost the grand picture, I’d thought I’d make up for it with intensity. I’d understand 500 hectares. From the map, it should have been easy enough.

  The red deer of Exmoor are moving fast up to the high moor – to Exmoor Forest-that-isn’t-a-forest – pushed from the gentler, wooded, more accessible fringes and combes by the high price of venison. They’re not made for the tops. The moors of Exmoor are a mountain top that just happens to undulate on for miles, so that it looks like a moor. The deer have no fat on their backs and don’t have the temperament for a desert. There’s peat under their hoofs here. They’re walking on real paste from the trunks of the ghost trees they weave between. They may be safer from poachers’ rifles there, but they’re more vulnerable to the hounds. The huntsman can see them a long way off, and if the hunted stag does a big loop, the hounds can be taken across the chord.

  It’s a hop and a skip from the cottage – up Brendon Common to the road, over the bridge where there are newts and trolls, and then off towards Hoar Oak Water before you get to the car park with its pioneering brew-ups and rocking, grunting shag vans from Wolverhampton.

  In the spring I sat on the moor, waiting for the grass and panicking when it didn’t come.

  In the summer I lay with the children in the woods and the bracken, watching streams of sugar, coursing through plant veins, bend aphids’ snorkels. I pushed my own anarchic calves down when focussed, unrambling ramblers marched past.

  In the autumn I walked, rolled and starved with the stags but cheered quietly when I saw a wayward hind, bored with the strident bellow of eugenic prudence from the big stag, slipping off down the valley to spin the genetic wheel with the punier boy next door.

  In the winter I sat, lay and walked. Because the ground was hateful and made of dead stuff, I sat often in the branches of the trees I’d sat under in the summer. The deer endured, and I found again that I could meet them only in the shrivelled place of our endurance.

  And then I did it all again, and again, and again.

  I was wearying of this. Back in the cottage, I went in despair and disgust through the notebooks. They told me nothing about the world of a red deer and too much about my own, which I was trying to escape. I was deep in the sickly waters of anthropomorphic whimsy, and sinking fast.

  There was one overwhelming reason. However heavy their antlers, however royal their step and however thick their necks, red deer are victims. Their landscape is the landscape of victims, and invisible except through victims’ eyes. Apart from a few minutes as I ran from Monty, a few hours as I shuddered among the deer in Glencoe, and a few poetical moments of imagined solidarity with cold hinds in Hoar Oak, I couldn’t be a victim. Imagination and ingenuity could help me hunt down and see reflected in myself everything except perpetual, defining vulnerability.

  That failure vitiated the enquiry. There was no point in not cutting my toenails if I couldn’t also be persecuted from the beginning of time. I was stuck forever in the restaurant car of the Caledonian Sleeper, my rifle beside me and my targets all around me.

  I couldn’t reach the red deer on Exmoor or in Scotland. I’d have been nearer to them in a cardboard box in a shop doorway.

  Clap, clap, clap, goes the Sophoclean, but now I’m not sure if he’s being sarcastic.

  6

  AIR

  Swifts

  Some humans think that they can write about swifts, dogs and termites. Here some reasons why they might think so, and some facts:

  Some dogs know when their owners are coming home, even when the owner is hundreds of miles away, and when the owner has changed plans and is returning at a wholly unexpected time.

  Some humans can do this too. Kalahari bushmen know when a hunting party has killed, exactly what it has killed and the exact time of return – all from fifty miles away. They used to assume that the white man’s telegraph worked by telepathy.

  A related phenomenon has its own name in Norway: vardøger. Someone hears footsteps, or the scrunching of a car on the gravel, or the opening of a door and the knocking of snow off boots. There’s no one there. The person who’s been heard will arrive in a few minutes. It’s useful. There’s time to make the tea or put on the posh frock.

  Many of us can tell when we are being stared at.

  Termites are blind. They communicate by scent and by knocking signals. The information that can be transferred this way is very limited. If a termite mound is damaged and a scent- and noise-blocking baffle put in the breach, the termites on either side of the baffle can’t communicate with each other. And yet they repair the two sides so that they join perfectly. There’s a master plan to which the individuals have access. Similar comments can be made about many of the activities of most social insects.

  Flocks of birds, shoals of fish and girls in a chorus line move together as part of a wave passing through the group. But the speed at which the wave passes is far faster than the reaction time of an individual. They’re part of a superorganism, just as much as a honeybee.

  Young cuckoos don’t know their parents. Older cuckoos leave Europe for Africa about four weeks before the younger generation is ready to go. Young cuckoos find their way to the ancestral feeding grounds in Africa unaided and unaccompanied.

  Monarch butterflies hatch in the Great Lakes area of the United States and migrate south to overwinter in the Mexican highlands. They migrate north in spring. But the first generation of migrants breeds in the southern part of the range (Texas to Florida) and then dies. It’s their offspring who make it to the Great Lakes, where they breed for several generations. The generation that heads south for Mexico in the autumn is three to five generations away from any butterfly that made the trip south earlier.

  Newly hatched chicks often get attached to the first thing they see. If that’s a robot, they’ll see that as their mother. In a famous set of experiments, a robot’s movements were determined by a random number generator. But the chicks who saw the robot as mother wanted it to be near them. They were separated from it by a barrier. And yet they could draw it nearer. They psychokinetically overrode the controls. A control set of chicks, not imprinted with filial love for the robot, could not.

  When a new compound is created (as happens a lot), it can often be very difficult to make it crystallise. It can take years. But if a group in, say, Cambridge manages to do it, a group in Melbourne will often do it the next week. The effect is well documented. Sceptics purport to explain this away on the basis that somehow the new crystal must have been carried to the other laboratory (the ‘chemist’s beard hypothesis’), where it acted as a template for the crystallisation. But usually no
such connection can be demonstrated.

  Similar effects are seen in animal behaviour. If group X, in Oxford, manages after years to teach rats a particular trick, group Y, in Sydney, without any contact with the Oxford group, will suddenly succeed too.

  If you kill one of the two cells of a two-cell sea urchin embryo, a whole sea urchin (not half) develops. If you fuse two sea urchin embryos, you get one giant sea urchin.

  A hand, composed of millions of individuals cells of many different types, grows as far as it has to, and into the necessary shape. But no further than it has to, and not into just any old shape.

  I like some people. I dislike others, even when they have no definable, relevant faults. There are some kind, generous, sacrificial, entertaining people in whose company we simply can’t flourish.

  There are some places in which we can thrive and be happy, and others, with apparently identical characteristics, where we cannot.

  Love.

  The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox: particles that come from a common source (such as two photons of light emitted from the same atom) remain somehow connected, so that what happens to one is instantaneously reflected in the other.

  Sexual reproduction: a headache for neo-Darwinian orthodoxy because it hides and dilutes, rather than putting on centre stage, genes which have been tested by natural selection and found to confer an advantage.

  Although some diseases and trauma can ablate memory, no anatomical seat of memory has ever been identified in the human brain.

  Altruism.

  Community.

  These are facts about swifts because they are facts about the world, and swifts are part of the world, as I am. The facts indicate that no qualification other than occupancy of a shared world is necessary for me to write about swifts. That is a great relief, because swifts are the ultimate other. I can write about them only because I’m other too or (depending on my mood) because nothing is other.