Being a Beast by Charles Foster Page A

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.
    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.
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    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