Being a Beast by Charles Foster Page B

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.
    â€˜I don’t like this’, whimpered Tom, shivering in a sleeping bag that was far too thin.
    â€˜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