Being a Beast (20 page)

So I, or we both, found a bit of a wood and a bit of a wall, and we took out a jumper and another hat and one of those big, thick plastic survival bags that you never use, and through the night we worked our fingers and toes and added up and tried to factorise all the phone numbers we could remember, until there was a kind of dawn with no growl in it, and on each side of us, against the wall, were red deer that didn't stink of pear drops and yet looked at us like old kind dogs.

✴ ✴

I couldn't eat what the red deer eat. Wherever the deer are, half or more of their diet is grass; then (at least on Exmoor) come ericaceous shrubs and herbs, and then the leaves of broadleaved trees, all with an occasional garnish of lichens and mosses and an odd coniferous leaf. But I knew well every plant that the deer like. I'd smelt them and pureéd them and made soup from them and pulled them up with my teeth and chewed them and then tried to vomit them up so that I'd have the taste of a cudding (not a successful or popular activity). Indeed, I'd tried generally to belch more – to live with my food for longer; to revisit repeatedly, and well into the night, the lunchtime fish fingers and chips.

In a little book I had lists of adjectives for chewed bramble, ivy, nettles, sorrel and many species of moorland grass. I had similar lists of adjectives for other parts of a deer's world that I'd aped: what it's like to defaecate into the north wind; what it's like to be woken by a jay; how a dead calf smells in the sun and how in the rain.

I let my hair grow shaggy and coated it with mud. I noted how long the smell of my own urine lasted on peat, on stone and in broadleaved woodland in various climatic conditions. I speculated about the reasons for red deer's distaste for coniferous woodland, why hinds spend a much higher proportion of the night than the day in deciduous woodland and why it's the other way round with stags, and I lived the patterns of both for several nights and several days in several seasons.

I made parallels between athlete's foot and foot rot and, to learn the feel of overgrown hoofs, didn't cut my toenails for months.

I said to myself: I can scan my olfactory inputs as a CT scanner takes slices of an object and examine each slice for traces of anything I want; there's no need to take the scent of the valley as a whole. You'd never say to a waiting waiter, ‘I'd like to order the menu, please.' Only human noses would do that. Slowly, slowly, I began to have an à la carte nose.

It might seem sensible to set out the results of all these games. But I won't. I came to see them as pointless.

✴ ✴

Meeting with the deer in the cold – when we were both on the cusp of annihilation – was one thing. But then we were hardly ourselves. Whatever we were was so lean and strung out that it didn't have the shape of a striding human or a leaping deer. To meet deer there wasn't really to meet deer at all: it was to meet wraiths. It's not true that extremity shows us our true colours. They're seen in times of plenty. What matters – what makes us – is how we handle wealth.

The deer wait, patiently or impatiently, for plenty. It comes in the summer. If they're to be known, that's the time to know them, and that's the time when they're hardest to know.

In the heat, Exmoor deer are often buried antler deep and deeper in the combes, the wood winding all around and over them, columns marching along their brow tines, fly clouds like a humming perm round their dung. The deer lie still, listening for grass being parted and crushed rather than stirred, chopping up the scents, grading them in order of seriousness and attending to them strictly in that order.

On a day in mid-July, just after dawn, I climbed into the steep side of an old oak wood and slid down with the sticks to the valley bottom, where there were a few yards of tangled respite from the hegemony of gradient.

From above and far away the wood looks like moss. From inside it looks the way that moss looks to a weevil. Sometimes there's a suggestion that a branch has moved, far off, against the grain of the breeze. But it is never more than a rumour. You never get more of a rumour of red deer in the high summer woods.

They'd been here. Yet the fact that they'd been here made them seem less accessible than if there were no sharp slot among the wood vetch. The slot meant absence, as the belongings of a dead parent mean absence. If the belongings hadn't been left, there would always be the possibility that the person might reappear. It's the artefacts that make it impossible to deny the loss.

There's a pool here, the shape of a twisted lip. Bracken leans over it, and bracken leans over the bracken, except where a red stag has lumbered up and out, taking a snagged slipstream of fronds on his head. This green cap on the pool pens in the stag scent. The scent is gently stirred, but not diluted, by air seeping down from the moor. There are thick, criss-crossing stag hairs on the water surface. The pool looks like a shattered window or a psychotic dream of 10,000 telescopic rifle sights.

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; eerily 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.