Being a Beast (8 page)

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Most mammals spend a lot of time sleeping. Badgers certainly do, and so did we – much more than usual. We became more tired the more multimodal we became. We should have expected it. We were paying attention to so much more. It's exhausting trying to make sense of lots of voices clamouring for a hearing. Normally when we're in the countryside, our sight works overtime. Every step on a walk is a completely new and cognitively challenging view. We have never seen before the arrangement of stones upon which our left foot is about to descend, nor that completely different one upon which our right one is about to descend; and so on. To say nothing of the orientation of those leaves on that branch of that tree in that gust, which have never been that way before in the entire history of the universe and never will be that way again.

Our ‘normal' views are in fact deeply abnormal and crushingly dull: Those chairs, in that corner of that room. That picture over the mantelpiece – perhaps an ossified version of one tiny fraction of one outdoor second, which nonetheless (it's better than the chairs) eases the retinas designed to catch the millions of utterly different fractions that in fact followed it. The only moment-by-moment visual differences in the lives of most of us are the changing characters on a computer screen, and we don't see those as visual at all: we see straight through them to the abstractions they represent. No wonder our poor starved brains will drink down any change they can get – even if it's the flashing of Simon Cowell's dentistry. Take any of us for the mildest of country walks, and we're immediately in thrilling – but exhausting – sensory overload. We're bombarded with change. Everything demands a response. We have to pay unaccustomed attention. And this, I presume, is why people say that they sleep better after a bit of fresh air.

Now imagine what a wood is like if you're paying attention to what enters not just through your eyes but also through your ears, your nose and your skin. And imagine that through each of these portals barges a different world, which maps only mystically on to the others. It's tiring even to think about it. It's exhausting to experience. It takes a lot of processing. So badgers and yogis sleep, and so did we.

Badgers aren't blind: they just don't open their sensory batting with their eyes. Their eyes seem to build a version of the wood composed mostly of shapes. They are silhouettegenerators, and their visual memory seems to be concerned mostly with comparing the presently visible silhouette with previous versions. In other words, they're on the lookout mostly for change in the gross structure of the wood. Put the Empire State Building on the ridge, and they'd be spooked on Wednesday night and, so long as it didn't change or belch out threatening smells, cautious on Thursday and blasé on Friday.

We can do better than badgers in the day, of course, and even in the gathering dusk we can pick out visual nuances for rather longer than they can. Yet for most of the time that matters to badgers, we're visually on a level playing field: we're silhouetters. To make use of this skill, we need their capacity for the recollection and comparison of successive images. Most of us have this in embryo already. If a very minor change has been made to a familiar room, we'll say: ‘Something's different.' That itself, without more, is useful if you're living in a potentially hostile wood. Even if the change can't be identified, the fact of the change will be enough to keep you underground, away from teeth and claws. But actually badgers seem able, often, to be more specific. They'll note a change, then they'll identify its location by reference to their library of previous images, and then they'll swing their noses and ears on to the target to collect further information.

This demands an intense
localness
– a knowledge of the exact relationship of the individual badger's body in both space and time to the wood. It was this localness, above all, that I wondered if I could acquire. I hoped most desperately that I could.

Alan Garner simply and wonderfully wrote: ‘On a hill in Cheshire the Garners
are
'. From that fact flowed all his books, all his worlds, all his power. The resonance of that hill is the timbre of Fundindelve, its evenings the fading light of Elidor. I envy Garner enormously his ability to write this sentence. There has never been anywhere that the Fosters
are
.

We have had two strategies to deal with this. The first (my own) is to try to pretend that we are at home everywhere. This has failed predictably and dramatically. It has resulted in pretension, superficiality and neurosis. The second (that of most of the rest of my family) is to insist that it doesn't matter that we're not at home wherever we happen to be. This has generated a sort of hereditary lantern-jawed stoicism: we're islands in a wicked sea. But we've never really had any shared characteristics other than the name, and the strategy has not made us thrive. In practice it mainly meant that we watched too much television.

Badgers
belong
to a place and hence (terribly important, that
hence
) own it, like few or no other animals do. Their hillside dynasties outlive our own most hoarily heraldic, begartered families. Their bodies are built from the recycled earth of a few acres. They burrow deep and know whatever roams our underworld. They have the connection with a body of land that one can get with any body only by penetration. Their hold on this local life is viciously strong: they're terribly hard to kill or displace. Their skulls are thick. Spades bounce off their sagittal crest. Once they've locked their teeth in the throat of an invading terrier, you have to break the jaw to prise them off.

Badgers, for me, are the embodiment of the genius loci.

We don't know of many badger gods from old Europe, but one, Moritasgus (‘Great Badger') is commemorated in some Gaulish inscriptions from the Côte d'Or. He seems to have been syncretised with Apollo and thus regarded mainly as a healing deity. The theology of this association is uncertain but not hard to guess. When a badger disappears into the earth, it is on a shamanic journey. It can, if the ritual is right, carry on its broad shoulders the petitions of the people. It will take them to the Great One, of which it is an acolyte, and if the Great One is pleased to do so, it will send the badger back to the upper world with the transforming blessing.

But, as usual, there are many layers. The root of ‘tasgus' in ‘Moritasgus' probably came from the Old Irish
tadg
– one of several words for a poet. (
Tadg
may be preserved in our own modern word ‘badger'.) Such was the knowledge of the power of words in that world that the functions of poet and shaman, and the meaning of the words for them, tended to merge. Yet the fact that the badger was seen specifically as a word bearer, a logos-smith, an incantator, is significant. Here's my fancy: the badger carried between the world above and the world below the words that interpreted each side to the other. It enabled each side to make sense of its context and hence of itself. It shuttled like a sewing machine, stitching the world together, making it whole, giving it an integrity it would otherwise have lacked. And it still does.

If this is possible for a badger, perhaps it is possible for us. Perhaps even for me. Perhaps if we all shuttle enough across frontiers the world won't fall apart.

A few weeks in a wood doesn't make you local. Localness means that you weave round your mouldering ancestors. Yet our human lives are so long, and our capacity for skin shedding so great, that we can become our own ancestors. The ground in which the ancestors moulder has to be real, not figurative. But we can settle in a place and by living sufficiently completely to each moment, die completely to each moment too, so that the place becomes littered with our own corpses, and we can fix our landscapes by reference to their graves. I'm trying to live, and thus to die, on a piece of moorland in Devon and, partly thanks to the badgers' lessons, making some progress.

Of course we never began to know the wood as Burt did. Over a few centuries you can't help sharing some of your collective unconscious with the dwarf oaks next door. We merge with our neighbours. Every shared breath is an act of copulation in which our DNA gets mingled. (‘You, my friend, are one seriously disturbed freak', said Burt.) Yet even in our short time there, we started to seep into the wood, and it into us. We noticed that our first slitherings had found, with uncanny canniness, the easiest ways across the landscape from and to our sett. Our prone bodies felt the land, moulded it and were increasingly moulded by it. We got callouses where it was good to get them; our legs learned to stretch to slide easily over a fallen beech. We followed these paths religiously and increasingly automatically. Badgers are the same: they have firmly established paths, from which they are very, very reluctant to deviate. They are marked with the scent of badgers who died during the Civil War, and it would take a landslide or a bulldozer to change them.

For all my wilderness fetishism, I found that I wanted the land to bear my mark. Badgers obsessively mark all sorts of objects in their territories with the secretions from their musk glands, and defaecate diligently on the borders. I have a less healthy relationship with my own dung, but found that I put my hand repeatedly on the same parts of the same rocks, just to see a reassuring polish. This was my musking. I had to know that
I
had been there. This wasn't a thirst for possession, but a need to confirm that I belonged to the place – that we had shared some continuity. The ‘I' part was strong. If you take a badger cub and put it in a pen, it'll frantically, incontinently musk. Then it calms down, as if reassured by the smell of itself and the knowledge that it and the pen share some history. It was like that for me.

Karen Blixen, when she was about to leave Kenya, asked: ‘Will the flowers on the plains of Africa reflect a colour that I have worn?' The answer, for her, was no, and there was some sort of self-ablatory salvation in the answer. Andrew Harvey was explicit: ‘It is the things that ignore us that save us in the end.' Blixen's conclusion was wrong. The Ngong Hills were immutably different because she had breathed and worn a red dress among them. And even if she was right, I have to believe that Harvey was wrong. If he got it right, there is no possibility of relationship with anything, and thus no possibility of any sort of salvation. You can't live or die like that. It's that sort of salvation that I was seeking as my hand stretched out to the rock by the beech bole.

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The winter broods over the summer, finding its way into the sunniest August badger. There's a new urgency in the snuffling and rooting. Cereals and fruits are added to the worms and slugs; they're good at fat building.

We too know that winters are coming. For many of us it is the ruling fact: the whole year is surrendered to the cold. The thoughts and itineraries of the summer are the lackeys of the dark.

I fight hard against this demonic capitulation, but it is hard to enjoy an August day qua August day. The stronger the fight, the greater the acknowledgement of the eventual defeat. I race round, like the badgers, manically soaking up the heat. The greater the mania, the greater the depression that follows. It shouldn't be like this: I should be able to live in January as a smug, torpid parasite on the body of July. That's what the badgers do. They don't hibernate, but there's not much in the diary from November to March apart from sleep, the occasional sortie for worms, stretching and a change of air, and gestation.

There's a week in early May, after the Green Man has been piped and carolled back, when the world seems all right; when resurrection rules and it's possible to believe that resurrection is the rule. But this faith fades fast. By mid-June, when we were first in the sett, the liquid sun of the blackcap's call starts to sound like a taunt (‘It'll soon be gone, soon be gone, it will') and its name ominous.

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I chewed, licked, gagged, sniffed and waddled my way towards the badger's world. Sometimes I felt that I came near, only to find that the conceit of that feeling meant that I was further away than ever. We heard the real badgers every night as they crashed through the bracken, and occasionally got a Belisha flash of head stripes in the dusk or a darkening of a shadow as a badger lumbered into it. We'd often try to approach them and got good at hearing them pause, then putting their fears to rest by loudly scratching ourselves. We put our front paws on trees and stretched as soon as we came out of our hole. We defaecated on mounds chosen for their view of the hill. We acquired a thick patina of scent that even Burt, his nose full of lanolin and diesel, could know and resent. When Tom was ahead of me in warm, damp weather, I could pick up his vapour trail for twenty minutes.

Burt's jibes and meals became less frequent. We were left on our own to be encrusted by the valley. We saw strange lights in a long-abandoned house. Our hackles rose when we heard farm dogs. Distant figures in nylon were as far away as the moon and a good deal less relevant. We cared about the weight of the clouds, the colour of the leaves and the hunger of the midges. We put a badger's skull on a stick outside the sett for no reason I can identify clearly. We washed very occasionally, and even then patchily. Our mouths tasted of mud and smoke. A wren speared a caterpillar on Tom's leg as he lay snoring in a clump of dead bluebells. My watch seemed offensive: I took it off, put it in a plastic bag and ceremonially buried it. We stood to attention. I played the Last Post on my tin whistle.

And, for that summer, we had to be content with that: had to be satisfied with knowing that in some ways, perhaps for a few minutes, we had lived in the same place as some badgers.

That's all we thought we'd done.

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I dug up the watch. We went back to Abergavenny station, thinking that we'd failed – that the Puck of otherness had dodged away, as usual, away into the murmuring greenwood.