Being a Beast by Charles Foster

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