Being a Beast (7 page)

These rain-time worm bonanzas must create an agonising dilemma in the badger's mind. The wood becomes a groaning smorgasbord, but you have to get wet to feast. Badgers are cosy creatures. Their default setting is curled up with the others, dry and asleep in a bed of old bracken, deep inside a well-drained hillside. That setting can be overridden, but it takes a lot of doing. The worms were safe that night. We followed the badgers into our piece of hill.

✴ ✴

I lay at the mouth of the sett. It had a curtain of water, like those curtains of bead strands that fill the doors leading to the toilets in small Chinese restaurants. It was almost completely dark – at least to my collection of rods – except when lightning bled through the fault lines in the sky. Yet each water droplet seemed to act like a retina, sucking light efficiently from the wood and reflecting it on to my own grateful retinas, buried in my head, buried in the hill.

Our sett was cradled in the interlocking fingers of tree roots: beech on either side, oak from above. The whole wood bent to the wind. There was no overground or underground: it was all just ground. We rocked in our cradle, the roots around us straining and creaking like the timbers of a rolling ship. A wood mouse, displaced from a flooded or crumbling tunnel, scrambled in and hunched, shivering, in the crook of Tom's knee.

Without that wood mouse I wouldn't have slept. But it reassured me. We were in the best place – a sanctuary accredited by the wild – and so I snatched bits of queasy maritime sleep, which, laid end to end, were enough. Tom slept, which is what I expect badgers do in storms.

The storm didn't devastate: it culled. Some branches that had brazenly reached too high were wrenched hubristically down. Some trees that had imprudently spent their sun sugar on leaves rather than roots were weighed in the wind's balance and found wanting. The river snarled brown, and a dead crow circled the pool, as if looking for carrion on the gravel. But Nova Scotia's worst wasn't so bad.

Our sett wasn't damaged at all, but, out of gratitude to it and with a new proprietorial pride in having survived the worst of the summer, we set to that morning to make it even better. We excavated a new chamber, complete with shelves, reinforced the roof and built an imposing earth arch at the entrance. Then, as Tom was happily making his own purely recreational earth-works, I slipped into unbroken sleep.

I'd thought that this pattern (sleeping in the day, being out and about at night) would be hard to establish. I knew, of course, that I could slowly reset my own clock. That was a simple enough matter of cortisol levels. But I'd thought that the change would be psychologically strenuous – that I'd resent the loss of the sun so much that simply to exist as a nocturnal animal would be an act of exhausting protest against all my instincts.

It wasn't so. The cortisol took about four days to fall fully into line, but after a mere two I was willing it to obedience. There was nothing very profound about this: it was the simple lust of the curious tourist. That first night of nosiness, frustrating though it was, had shown me (no, that's a visual word; had ‘indicated'? Too generic. We need an olfactory version of ‘shown', and there isn't one) – had
demonstrated
(weak, but the best I can do) that within that wood there was a vertiginously strange and urgently desirable universe, untrodden and untreadable by man in his normal sensorineural boots. I wanted it badly.

This wasn't part of the poignant true-love quest for otherness, which wants to know in the desperate hope of being known. It was an Elizabethan desire to discover a new world. When I slid out of the sett each night, I was setting sail from Plymouth Hoe and heading west into the sunset in the hope of fame, spices and, importantly, somewhere new to live.

✴ ✴

Burt trundled back, not looking as solicitous as he should have been after leaving his supposed friend and a cub in a wood in an historic storm. This time it was lasagne.

Food worried me. Worried me because it didn't worry me: I couldn't duplicate the precariousness of the badger's life. We did our best: we ate earthworms, both raw and cooked, and any other flotsam tossed up by the valley that we could keep down. We scraped a squirrel off the road and had it with wood sorrel and wild garlic. But there were Meg's regular gifts, which we had neither the discipline nor the churlishness to refuse, and lying guiltily at the bottom of the backpack were sardines, tuna and beans.

Some later reading helped. Badgers really aren't, usually, neurotically urgent hunters. Starvation is an important cause of death, but mostly among cubs. The choice of earthworms as the staple is a good one. Earthworms are resilient – even to drought. In most English woodlands most of the time, a significant proportion of the earth's weight is worms. When the topsoil turns to dust, the worms dive and the badgers dig. Dry nights are longer and busier, but although drought affects breeding success (which no doubt makes for an unquiet psyche), it is rarely deadly for individuals. We could have eaten that lasagne less guiltily.

✴ ✴

‘It's ridiculous to think that you can know this wood like a badger', said Burt a week or so later. ‘You can't even know it like me, and a badger knows it like me, but far, far better. We've only been here five hundred years or so, but even so, you'll never catch me up. A man whose DNA has been sloshing round the wood for half a millennium knows more about a badger's world than someone who sniffs and slithers around for a few weeks.'

I was annoyed. I was determined to take one part of the wood – the badger's part – from Burt. It shouldn't be hard, I thought. He's just a man. I'm halfway to being a badger.

The first step in any campaign is to know where you are. You need a map. And you need to know what's possible and what's not. That second step was easy. Burt's nose has been devastated by years of roll-ups, and his brain by generations of agricultural reductionism. We'd been in hard olfactory training with lumps of cheese, our noses were a badger's height from the mulch, and we were humble: O so humble. We could quickly overtake his ancestral, generic understanding of the land with our specific olfactory wisdom.

So, over several squirming, scraping, scratching weeks, we made our own map of the wood. It was a scent map, and its contours were very different from the physical ones. When you walk through a town, you see piles of bricks with holes in, topped with slanting tile and penetrated by pipes. You do a bit of processing and call these things ‘houses'. You do a bit more processing and call them, on account of the shape of the holes or the angle of the tiles, houses of a particular type. From a pile, via an eye, to some sort of Platonic abstraction in a millisecond. After a while our noses began to brew abstractions too, but using the metaphors encoded deep in our brains by the processing of visual information.

The bracken formed big, emphatic, monolithic blocks – the olfactory equivalent of a grand but grey and uniform housing development. It was too strongly and monotonously aromatic to be satisfying. Better noses than ours would make something of the sparse vegetation around the bracken roots, and even we began, slowly, to be able to see slight differences in the window fittings, the roof angles and the decorations around the doors.

The oaks – even the small ones – were all determinedly different from each other. They followed the unpatterned pattern of a house I once knew on a plain in east Africa: built with a systematic ramshackleness of grass, mirrors, surfboards and copies of the
Proceedings of the Linnean Society
, all cemented with elephant dung and garnished with human bones, nappies and fragments of Catullus on cork boards.

You'd have thought that trees close to each other would smell alike – or at least more alike than trees far apart. But it wasn't, or wasn't necessarily, so. We could mark our blindfolded crawls from the sett fairly well using just the nearby oaks: ‘Out of the tunnel, turn right. Fifteen yards; raw tobacco, mostly Turkish; straight on. After half a minute, wall of limes and sick in front. Resolves into oranges rubbed on leather to your left and mushroom risotto with too much parmesan to your right. Head gently downhill. Flaking saddles, with neat's-foot oil somewhere on the shelf. Bear on down for cobwebs and garlic paste.'

Individual ashes were similarly distinct, but less emphatically: Arts and Crafts houses somewhere in the Sussex Downs. We couldn't distinguish between individual beeches (mansion blocks off the Brompton Road), elders (yellow brick, plastic windows, red tarmac drive for the company car) or alders (terraces in Bradford). (‘For God's sake', said Burt. ‘I used to like metaphors until I met you.')

The more monolithic the blocks, the more fiercely and successfully they fought with other blocks for domination of the valley. The oaks didn't stand a chance: they didn't exist as a block at all. In high summer the bracken generally had the upper hand. When we returned in the autumn the beeches ruled the wood, and were themselves edged out by the elders by the time of the first frost.

But to these crude rules there were many exceptions. We were in a seething bottle. Scent sometimes rocketed up from a particular tree and came down in a strange pattern, reaching distant ground before it hit the tree's own shadow. The edges of the wood, and particularly the hedges, seemed olfactorily sterile – or at least hopelessly confusing to scent-hunting predators. They were relatively safe corridors, along which tender, timorous, succulent things crept, invisible to black noses above sharp teeth.

There were tides in the wood, as powerful and predictable as on any beach. As the sun rose, air, and thus scent, was sucked up the side of the valley. The elders moved, like Birnam Wood, through the stands of beech and bracken and by midday could be found on the lip. They stayed there until nightfall and then slowly retreated back to the river. They were fully back home by three in the morning.

So we made some progress with that scent map. But after a few weeks on my belly in the wood, I despaired. I had an unchangeably visual world. I painted it in shapes and colours, and then added in smell and hearing as extras. Sometimes smell could be powerfully evocative: a smell would pick me up and dump me back in the past with a speed and force that the wraiths of visual memory could never manage. Smell, buried deep in the most ancient part of the brainstem, could petulantly remind me of the sovereignty it had when my ancestors were fish and lizards. Sometimes a voice came first out of my memory. But smell and hearing were always and only the assistants of vision, the great conjuror who brings our worlds out of the hat. No parlour games with cheese and joss sticks could change that. The problem wasn't mainly to do with the sensitivity of my nose; it was about the architecture of my universe. Badgers lived in a universe that wasn't even parallel to mine; it was aligned at an angle to mine that no geometry I knew could coherently describe. So I'll settle for incoherent description.

Consider two examples, both from Ernest Neal's classic book,
The Badger
.

In the first example, a man placed his palm on a badger path for one minute at 11 am. At 10 pm a boar came along the path. He stopped where the palm had been applied, sniffed and made a detour. A sow who came along at the same time simply wouldn't pass: she took her cubs back to the sett.

And here is my reworking, using the language I learned in the wood:

Along the path there was a wall, built of scent particles sticking to the veins of dead leaves and the squashed casts of long-dead worms. To the boar, that wall had definite dimensions: he could skirt round the edge and go into the world beyond. For the sow, made conservative and fearful by maternal responsibility, the wall was indefinitely high and long and the world beyond it unthinkable.

In the second of Neal's examples, a badger path went across a grassy field. The field was ploughed up and sown with corn. Badgers took precisely the same route across it.

My reworking: This second path lay between two high but transparent and permeable walls. They each had two dimensions: a physical and a mental. The scent particles that made up the physical part of the walls were tumbled and deep underground, yet they generated a psychic field that rose high into the air above the corn and cut a swathe through the badger's brain. The path wove around obstacles that had long since ceased to exist save in the nose-brain memory.

✴ ✴

An eight-year-old has a plastic nose and can recover quickly the old knowledge of how to use it. After the first week, as we were watching ladybirds mash aphids, Tom had said, ‘I can smell mice', and he'd set off along a new path, swimming breaststroke through the grass, his nose grazing the ground. He was very nearly right. He'd smelt and uncovered a network of bank vole runs, marked by droppings, fine chopped stems and urine. But what was more interesting was how he hunted. He sniffed very fast – several snuffles a second. This, I later learned, is precisely what scent-reliant mammals do. It's called ‘odour sampling', and it increases the percentage of air that's diverted to the nasal epithelium. Normal efficient breathing sends air direct to the lungs. I tried it; it works dramatically. I now make a different and very unrefined noise at wine tastings.

There's little point in being able to climb neuronally down the evolutionary tree (terrible and terribly constricting vertical language, that) if you're too fastidious to leave the top branches. Tom had mercifully few of my inhibitions. He licked slugs (‘The big black ones are a bit bitter, and the bigger they are, the bitterer they are: I prefer the browner ones; they're sort of nutty'), crunched up a grasshopper (‘Like prawns that taste of nothing'), had his tongue bitten by a centipede and his nose invaded by ants, and sucked up earthworms like spaghetti (‘The big ones are hairy, and I don't like that so much').

It wasn't just his nose that was plastic. All of him inched smoothly towards badgerhood. His Achilles tendons stretched and his wrists and neck tightened so that he could frolic four-footed through the fern arcades. He swore he could hear a woodpecker's tongue being thrust through holes in tree bark. ‘I can, you know. Imagine a nail file whispering.' (I'm imagining, Tom, and how the hell can we make you go to school to unlearn it?) When the night congealed around the base of the trees, he'd go over and stir the clots of dark with his finger, saying that they swirled and stuck to his hand. His body in the sett or on one of our midday couches seemed to flow round the stones. The wood never stuck into him, as it did into me.