Being a Beast (9 page)

The town blared, belched, leered and cackled. There was more variegation on one leaf outside our sett than there was in the whole place. It fed itself by oriental airfreight, and everyone was the same colour. They talked about the adulteries of footballers and tone-deaf singers. The scent blocks were huge and crass; they lurched and swung and bellowed. I felt sick from shock and boredom and the heaving floors of deafening smell. Someone asked me the way to the cash point. It seemed as if he was shouting at the top of his voice, nose to mine. I jumped through the roof and nearly knocked him down. And yet, as an example of a human settlement, this is one of the very best. I've always been happy there.

I was desperate to get back to the valley. On the train I put in earplugs and looked out at the fields sliding past – the distances hideously shortened by the engine. Then I took out the earplugs and put on the calls of the woodland birds. I was missing something that I very urgently needed – something I had recently had.

So here is the first proposition: to thrive
as a human being
I needed to be more of a badger.

✴ ✴

Back home I forgot a lot very quickly. But, though my nose returned to its usual inertia and I became used again to the tinnitus that we call normal living, it wasn't all lost. I had the dreamy tetchiness of the exile. I knew that it was possible, as a matter of sensory routine rather than yogic contortion, to pay attention to the world in many planes at once rather than just our usual one or two, and something of what there is to be perceived when you do.

Tom and I went back to the sett in midwinter. There were cobwebs over the mouth, which was rather hurtful. I'd hoped that it would have been adopted, at least by foxes. The badger skull was still on the stick, but its position had shifted, so that instead of staring at the ground it looked up the hill, through the cracking old man's fingers of the oaks, past the silent rookery, to the house that Burt had built that summer, where Meg was mulling cider, reading the
Mabinogion
and calmly ignoring the epidemic of diarrhoea and vomiting that had felled all the children.

Our paths were still there, just about. They'd be gone by the spring, but they would still be the best way through the wood if you were crawling. When you lay on the ground, an aching cold, the colour of mourning, cascaded in, starting with the ribs, filling the chest and streaming down to the legs. The ground seemed hungry for us: it sucked and nibbled.

Outside the brown thickets of dripping bracken, the wood was bigger to the eyes, and sight much more relevant than it had been in the summer. There were sometimes clear horizons and often distinct trees. Winter gives badgers distance. But it takes away that succulent marriage with the earth which is brokered by noses and summer heat. The thin winter sun worked hard, but for us vainly, to smash the ground into grains we could smell. There was leaf mould and inchoate decay, and that was all. The winter wood was flat; much more like ours than the summer wood had been.

Ears came into their own. The longer sight lines meant that our ears could focus on sounds from distant objects, and since there wasn't so much going on, they could give a much fuller report on each sound now than they could in the humming summer.

The real badgers of the wood were quiet but about. There was fresh dung in their lavatories, grey and white hairs on the barbed wire, and pad marks in the mud on their highways. We heard them puffing along in the night like old shunters in a marshalling yard, out of condition. They should have felt close: their snorting was unbaffled by the thick green of June; the clear air had only to carry the call of a tentative tawny owl rather than the thrum and thrust and shrill of the summer. But they seemed further away than ever: we shared less; it seemed they had less to share, or that they were less willing than in generous June.

The sett closed coldly round us. This time its walls were jaws. The worms liked the heat that leached and was leeched out of us. They came, like hairy tongues from the jaws, and slimed over us.

‘I don't like this', whimpered Tom, shivering in a sleeping bag that was far too thin.

‘Neither do I', said I. ‘Let's go.' So we gathered up our stuff and went across the river, up a track that was straighter in the moonlight than in the noonlight, and back to the farm.

No badgers came out to salute us. They were warm. Their sett was much deeper in the wood than ours; far deeper than we could safely go.

3

WATER

Otter

Every morning five otters watch us having breakfast. They are dead, Victorian otters, bleached white by the taxidermist in the manner of the day, looking haughtily out like cavalry colonels, their feet on vanquished fish. The Victorians wanted white otters, and so they got them. We all tend to get the otters we want. They are tools, in a way that few other species are. Henry Williamson (
Tarka the Otter
) figuratively mashed up his otters and used the paste to paint north Devon and to smear as balm on the wounds, real and imaginary, left by the trenches. Gavin Maxwell (
Ring of Bright Water
) wanted, and therefore got, rollicking, boisterous otter friends who wouldn't ask him too much about himself and could be cuddled on lonely Hebridean nights. I have only this advantage over those true masters of otter writing: I don't like otters very much.

Being an otter is like being on speed. In suburban life the nearest I can legally get to it is to stay up for a couple of nights, drinking a double espresso every couple of hours before having a cold bath followed by a huge breakfast of still-twitching sushi and then a nap, and then keep repeating until I die – which I would do most authentically by running in front of a car or from septicaemia from an abdominal wound.

Writing about otters is, more than for any other animal, an accountancy exercise. They are metabolic businesses running with very tight margins. They spend more than three-quarters of their lives asleep. That's more than eighteen hours a day. The remaining six hours are spent in frenetic killing.

They have a resting metabolism about 40 per cent higher than animals of comparable size. That rises massively when they're swimming, particularly in cold water. A swimming otter's metabolic motor is running at around four and a half times the speed of a dog's. It doesn't quite work like this, but imagine your dog's heartbeat jumping to five times its exercising rate. The chest wouldn't really thump: it would flutter as if a huge hummingbird were caged inside it. An engine like that needs an unfeasible amount of fuel – around 20 per cent of the otter's body weight each day.

I'm around 15 stone – 95 kilograms. If we go just by the weight of food, to keep up with the otter's intake, each day I'd have to eat about eighty-eight Big Macs (all three tiers, with both patties, cheese, iceberg lettuce, pickles, onions and that strange pink sauce). Or 3,800 standard bags of crisps, 229 regular cans of baked beans or around 792 typical lamb chops or fishcakes.

Eighty-eight Big Macs in six waking hours is around fifteen per hour, or one every four minutes. It's no wonder that otters never look as if they have time for reflection.

Otters are made sinuous only by physics. There are many poems celebrating their lubricity, but these are celebrations of the water, not the animal. Otters are spiky things. We want something to flow with its environment, for some reason about which we can wax all metaphysical. But real otters won't do it. We talk about flow and laminae; we should talk about bristle and snap and scrabble. They are invaders, not citizens. They shove those winsome little noses between the laminae like surgically gloved fingers pushing inside an orifice. They are wedges, splitting up the river. They turn fish away from the flow and crush them. They hardly belong in the water. They've not been there long enough to be the foundational-mythical water animals we want them to be. It's only been about seven million years or so.

They are land animals who dabble, impressively but precariously, in the water. They're much more stoat than seal. Evolution has only just begun to tinker with these primordial stoats, flattening their skulls, shifting their eyes and nostrils to slightly more advantageous positions and giving them thicker coats, tails like hairy outboard motors and some half-hearted webbing between their toes. And with those modest bequests, evolution threw otters into the deep, cold end and told them to get on with it, tyrannised by horrific thermodynamic arithmetic.

The arithmetic makes them wanderers. In a warm, fecund lowland river an otter might be able to run on the fuel it finds in six miles or so of water. In leaner Scotland it might need to cover thirty. The numbers also make them vicious: lose a fish to an invader, and the balance sheet starts to look scary. Too scary, most of the time, for playful niceties. More than half of the dead otters autopsied have been in recent fights. The injuries are typically very unpleasant: otters fighting in water go for the underbelly and the genitalia. Bellies are unzipped and guts unravelled; testicles are ripped off; penises are snapped. And that's not the worst of it. We don't see the worst injuries: they must kill the otters quickly, leaving them stiff in a bankside bush for the rats, or at the bottom of a pool for the scavenging fish. We see otters only when they survive long enough to be hit by a van.

What can I do to get close to these jangling, snarling, roaming, twitching bundles of ADHD, other than acknowledge that, like them, I'm a pretty shabby evolutionary compromise with a short attention span, poised on the edge of an ontologic precipice? Well, I can start by getting to where they are and, when I'm there, resetting the physical boundaries of my world so that they coincide with the otters'. This, to begin with, is a matter of pins in maps.

At the centre of our map is a little grey cottage on the edge of a moor in Devon. If you climb through the bracken to the top of the hill, you look over the Bristol Channel to the lights of Wales. Herring gulls tug ticks from the anuses of red deer. We pull our water from the stream that runs past the cottage. The stream slices through badger woods, picking up speed and oak leaves and coating the stones with peat as if they've been dipped in a chocolate fondue. Mysteriously, it slows down just before it meets the East Lyn river, as if it is having second thoughts about leaving the hill: it weeps resentfully under the road and is bowled off to Lynmouth for lobster and chips.

But with us it is a cheery little river. It pauses and pools. There are chiffchaffs, toad nurseries and algal fans like Cranford doilies. Our hill is a strong, rosy-cheeked bit of moorland, which throws its weight around. The caddis-fly larvae use boulders, not grains, in their coats. But beware of thinking it's all simple and bucolically beery. There's a stand of tortured trees sprawling and sucking like mangroves. The children won't go in without leaving limpet shells as propitiatory gifts for whatever sleeps on the hammocks of moss.

At the very top of the valley, three minutes from our tea table, just as the river leaks off the moor, there was, as an act of grace, an otter spraint.

Otters use sprainting (depositing dung) as a way of saying ‘This is my patch' or ‘This pool has just been fished: don't waste time here.' It may not be their only remote method of territorial signalling (urine might be important, and there's a gratifyingly vigorous debate about the significance of anal jelly, a rich, marmalade-like substance that probably eases the passage of sharp fish bones through vulnerable gut). But it is certainly the most visible. Indeed, it is usually the only sign that there are otters around, but spraint study has badly distorted our understanding of their biology. It has been truly said that we study spraint, not otters.

Spraint's a merry specialty. Its professors shamble happily along riverbanks with their clipboards, charting, extrapolating and eating cheese and pickle sandwiches. But it's rather vain. Shit just won't bear the scientific edifices we purport to build on it. You can't reconstruct my life from my stools. Dung is good for some things, though.

You'd expect the otter's bowel habit to reflect its extraordinary metabolic rate. And indeed it does. Hans Kruuk devotedly monitored sprainting behaviour in Shetland. In winter, when sprainting is much commoner than in the summer, he recorded about three spraints per hour. And that was just spraints – depositions on the riverbank – rather than episodes of defaecation. He must have missed some spraints and even more evacuations – some of which must have happened in the water. Assuming six hours of waking time and thus sprainting time per day, that's eighteen spraints a day. That's a lot of signalling. Those are busily conversational bowels. Assuming one and a half bowel movements per child per day, an otter can mark in a day what it would take each of my children twelve days to do.

I gave the children a little lecture on sprainting and then sent them off up the valley. ‘Spraint', I said. ‘But don't fall in, and be back for supper.'

It was a failure, of course. Human children can't produce bowel movements to order, and to give them laxatives with the rice crispies just for the purpose of this book would be at least unkind and possibly illegal. So I changed the instruction. ‘Whenever you need to go, go up the river and choose a place. It must say: this part of the river is mine.'

Out went the children. They instinctively mimicked the sprainting behaviour of European otters, choosing exactly the same exposed, strategic stones that otters would have used. When there were no stones, they even created, just as otters do, ‘castles' – little grass or sand platforms on which to display their spraints, as engagement rings are displayed on velvet cushions.

The next thing was to see how distinctive each spraint was – how emphatically it declared its origins. This was a revolting job and must have looked deeply perverted. We crawled up the river, sniffing.

The results were surprising. Our children have identical diets, but they produced very different faeces. It wouldn't be kind to match the type of stool to the name. So I'll just say that A is the outlier: he must metabolise his bile salts in a very eccentric way. B is placenta and balsamic. And so on. We did blind sniffings: all five of us (my wife stayed fastidiously inside, optimistically reading about gracious living in a glossy magazine) were right about 80 per cent of the time.

That was with fresh dung. Sun baking rapidly reduced our accuracy. So did low temperatures. It was what we'd found in the scent world of the badger. After a week, in any conditions, dung was simply dung, and we'd have to respraint if we wanted to say anything with it. Otters do the same: the chain of signals is constantly eroded by the rain, the sun and rising water and is diligently reforged, usually immediately before or immediately after a meal.

Our sprainting told us (for a while) who had been on the river and where they had decided to make their mark. C, tiny and tentative, had a correspondingly tiny territory. D made little scatological shrines around a single pool, every offering nestling under arches of fern or reed. A and B, colonially aggressive, sought to extend their own territories far up on to the moor, and to annexe the other's. They hunted down each other's spraints and kicked them into the river, substituting theirs, or crowingly topped the rival spraint with one of their own.

If we fed our children more distinctive food than we do, we'd have been able to reconstruct the meals of eight hours ago. But all this information amounts to very little. Those spraints hardly say much about the lives either of the individual children or of human children generically. A lot of published otter biology is, literally, shit.

✴ ✴

I was having far too good a time. Having a good time was inauthentic. Otters don't. At least not in these hard-pressed days. They jangle fearfully from fish to fight, never sure how the figures are going to stack up when the latest bellyful of bone and slime has passed on. Henry Williamson tells us, so emphatically that it's in the subtitle, that
Tarka the Otter
is about Tarka's ‘Joyful Water-Life and Death…'. If Williamson was right, Tarka was an unusually, pathologically euphoric otter. There are joyful badgers, deer and swifts. Lots of them. But few constitutionally joyful otters. They don't have time for emotional fripperies. To be a perpetual hunter, in an economy like ours and theirs, is to be perpetually hunted. And that's what you see: in their time sheets, their little cold eyes and their corticosteroid levels.

Otters don't have horizons other than the level of the water. They are furry worms, and there's no point in them seeing far. They bore tunnels through the river and the sea and kill things in those tunnels as moles kill worms. They live in their tunnels. It is psychologically apt that they should. When humans are – no, when I am – consumed with the anxiety that reflects the way the otter has to live, I too am in a tunnel, visually suffocated. I stand higher off the ground than an otter, but see just as little. I might be walking through the Renaissance gallery in the Ashmolean, but might as well be wriggling through wet cow parsley on a riverbank, my eyes full of rain and my nostrils full of the assurance of death. Even my distractions, which a naive biologist might think are evidence of playful hedonia, are failed attempts to break out of the pain. The biologist would see the attempt; he wouldn't see the failure. I play with my children in the unbelieving hope that they might be unlike me and so might be spared the tunnel.

Otters bend. They can look up. But when they do, they see the rising bank ahead, washed with green, or the hairy teeth of nettles, or an ash arch, or a slug oozing over a burdock ceiling. They know the sky is there, but they do not watch it. Their country brushes against their flanks and slowly unfurls at the pace of a paw strike: it does not leap or roll as ours does. There are no steep valleys, because nothing is steep if it is taken at that height and pace. There are no prolonged ascents or descents in an otter's life, because there is no prolonged anything. These animals inhabit the instant, but not in a way that redeems it. There is a wretched, desperate, hypertensive, hungry moment. Then there is another such moment. And another. The dots are not connected, in that flattened head, to form a personality. Anxiety, when it is severe, erodes the self. If it is constitutional it precludes a self. Otters are circuit boards. There's nothing else there.

C. S. Lewis thought that animal suffering wasn't as worrying an indictment of the goodness and/or omnipotence of God as one might imagine, because in order to suffer properly, as we do, you've got to know that the noxious neuronal storm at point A in time is connected to the neuronal storm at point B, and hence is likely to persist, noxiously, into point C. A lot of the angst is in the extrapolation and the attendant unpleasant anticipation. Animals, lacking the conviction of an ‘I' that's the subject of pain, and, in any event, lacking the neuronal hardware to extrapolate a present nasty sensation into a troubling conviction of a future one, don't suffer.