Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  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.

  I’ve always thought that this was nonsense, and I still do. But I come nearest to believing it in the case of those manic otters, too consumed by their desire to consume to have anything spare for the construction of a self.

  How do I know this about otters? I don’t, of course. It has no neurobiological basis at all. It is deeply unscientific to come over all Beatrix Pottery with badgers but deny to their very close cousins, the otters, even the ability to feel pain. But I can’t help my intuition. And I don’t apologise for it much.

  I’m very surprised to be writing such terrible things about otters. I used to love them uncritically and sentimentally. I took a cuddly otter to bed for years and mortgaged a Lego set to buy a stuffed one from a junk shop in Glastonbury. I stroked the real one’s scarred muzzle as I slank into sleep, thinking that the scars came from the hounds and that I could make it posthumously better. I still like many of the things that go with otters – all the things that people write poems about. I am glad that their bodies, though as big as fat foxes’, can flutter like gutweed in a gust of water; that they can turn on themselves like paper clips; that they whicker and whistle; and that their noses twitch as if they’re always flicking off a horsefly. I like their occasional capacity for patience, the appearance of big, happy, family outings and the fact that they curl up in the day in the sort of places I always went when I was on the run from piano practice. I agree with them about the best places to live, and share their disdain for canalisation, fertiliser and fences. They make a good show of personality. But I’m no longer convinced. There’s less in a brown head under water than in a black-and-white-striped head under earth. Otters suffer less than badgers, foxes or dogs. And I have betrayed my childhood.

  Otters made me wander. Otters themselves have always wandered. Williamson has Tarka ranging over the whole of the land of the rivers Taw and Torridge – a truly epic Bedouin life, if it’s true. And it may have been. Williamson was writing in the 1920s, when West Country rivers were still happy, seething places. Since then we have devastated our rivers with pyrethroids and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other nasty things with benzene rings in them. In particular, we’ve annihilated the eels that are the otter’s preferred food. They’re around 80 per cent of an ideal otter diet, and their numbers are down by about 95 per cent.

  I doubt that Tarka really undulated throughout the land of the two rivers. If he did, it wasn’t because he had to, but because he wanted to: there are, no doubt, otters like that
, just as there are people like that. But it would be surprising if a modern-day Tarka didn’t roam much further than his early twentieth-century ancestors: the fish pickings per mile are much leaner.

  The benzene rings make otters cross moors, watersheds and, dangerously, roads and the paths of other otters. Hunger breeds aggression: those disembowellings and castrations can be traced to a human hunger to increase shareholders’ profits.

  The shareholders, too, have made otters more visible than they were. Otters prefer to hunt at night, but, as generations of hard-pressed humans have found, if you can’t make ends meet by working normal hours, you have to moonlight – or, in the otter’s case, sunlight. To the stern injunctions of the otter’s own physiological accountants – those accountants who keep the metabolism running on such tight margins – are added the crushing demands of the actual, besuited accountants in Frankfurt boardrooms, who squeeze things even more tightly and make highly strung animals strung to the point of snapping; who snatch otters’ sleep; who make otters less local.

  Otters hold big maps in those small heads. This is a surprise. You’d expect maps that big to go with a more sedate, chugging, philosophical pace.

  They are maps not just of space but of time, coloured by memories of panic, satiety and loss. My own map says: ‘The river runs through a steep gorge. On the north side, deciduous trees rise steeply to a plateau, and a stream cuts through them to meet the river a quarter of a mile from the pub. On the south side there’s mixed woodland.’ And my experience and intuition add: ‘Rachel cut her knee going down there, and she screamed so loudly that the wood, which had buzzed and whistled, was silent for an hour. Then we climbed to the pub, and you can get steak and kidney pie from 12 o’clock.’ The otter’s map is, as we’d now expect, more like a spreadsheet or a to-do list. It’s abrupt, prosaic and light on adjectives and adverbs. It’s divided rigidly by season. It looks like this:

  Except that a real otter’s syntax is less flowery and literary than that in the table.

  I can make my mind, and so my language, work like that. I’ve done it. It involved several days of sleeplessness, a disastrously re-re-re-reforged relationship which had been characterised by years of mutual laceration, three days of cold rain, three days of fasting, a lost tent pole and a badly stubbed toe. The process would be speeded up by any of the traditional techniques of psychological attrition: white noise, water dripping slowly on to the head, daytime TV or commercial radio. It would be helpful too to have done something irreparably bad, and so to have nothing to lose and nowhere to hide.

  I decided to be a relatively relaxed, pre-PCB otter, travelling by night. But you can’t start at night. You have to get to know the river by day. Health and Safety, and all that. This is a great shame. It means that the night river – the otter’s real river – will always be described by reference to the day. The day is primary. References and comparisons always distort. This puts the otter behind yet another swathe of gauze, as if it weren’t indistinct enough. But there’s no way round it, particularly if you take kids with you, as I sometimes did, and they’ve got a caring mother who can conjure apocalypse out of the kind air of the Lyn valley.

  But mostly I was alone, because otters are. The popular picture is of cubs romping alongside the bitch. That indeed happens, for about a year. It has to, because the river is unreliable. In February one pool might feed a family; in May it’ll be empty. The cubs can’t intuit that there will be frogs in an area of swamp in April and exhausted, easily caught cock salmon after the spawning in December. A whole year of systematic and geographically wide-ranging education is necessary. Failure to attend one class could well be fatal.

  But this sociability isn’t the norm. It is very costly for the bitch. She wants to stop paying those crippling metabolic school bills as soon as she can. Most otters, most of the time, are alone. They have to be. Our sickly rivers aren’t fecund enough for sociability. One pool, at one time, might feed one: it won’t feed two.

  So most of the time my own cubs rampaged round the cottage, destroying furniture and re-enacting the Cain and Abel story, while my wife screamed and despaired, and I let the river take me.

  ✴ ✴

  I have swum the rivers of Exmoor for years, generally by day, usually without a wetsuit, and often with a mask and snorkel. But my expression ‘the rivers of Exmoor’ is grand, flabby and meaningless. You can never step twice into the same river, observed Heraclitus. Quite right: and you can only ever describe one momentary sense impression in one brain. The connections between those impressions are delusory. Yet to make coherent prose, we rely on those delusions: the delusions make for readability, tone and mood.

  If a director were making a film about the valley of the East Lyn, she’d pick, for the background music, something between Debussy at his most anodyne and Wagner at his most hysterical. She’d generalise; she’d have a small set of categories: fierce, Arcadian and (to show she was sophisticated) ambiguous. She’d never get the speed of the transitions right: the river can lurch between fierce and Arcadian in ten minutes, and is always ambiguous. But the otter, which seems to inhabit the river, and (despite being an evolutionary newcomer to the water) in a way does, has a different set of cadences altogether: it’s far more garage band; nails down the musical blackboard. It clashes painfully with the director’s categories. Which all goes to show that generalisations are nonsense; that anyone who tries to evoke the mood of a natural place is a fraud; that it is all – all – in the particular; the detail; the slash, the wrench, the individual panting breath, followed by the next individual pant; the little flickers of consciousness coaxed by memory out of the tiny brain of a whistling, bristling, undulating little bastard wedged by the rush of evolution between the water and the wood.

  Direction is mysterious. When an otter moves its head down beneath the surface it is really climbing up: it suddenly acquires height. It’s immediately on a summit, looking down. The moment before, there was just foreground; the shuddering hide of the water. That slight move of the head doesn’t just change the view: it multiplies the dimensions in which it is possible to live. A pit in the riverbed is a peak: as it hunts trout in the pit, the otter treks along a path cut in negative space.

  A river is a landscape, with its own storms and shades and holes. Out of the eye of a water wind in the Badgworthy Water, below a magpie’s nest, there is a column of absolute still. Move sideways an inch and you’ll be spun away and down, faster than the magpie’s flight, on to the rocks where an old ewe has been pinned for years. She had an eel caged in her ribs, fat and complacent as a hunting farmer in a timber-framed house. I came up behind, one February day, shoved a garden fork up where the ewe’s diaphragm used to heave, and pulled him thrashing to the bank. While I was feeling strong and manly he bit me in the bollocks and snaked away back to the Eocene.

  Just below the sheep pool, in the river-that-momentarily-is but-never-was-and-never-will-be is a sharp rock staircase that leads down beneath the rolling deck of water to a cave where the river is slow circling syrup. The cave keeps for itself a cache of sycamore keys. Nothing else. They spin up inside the cave, and then they spin down. And then they spin up. And so on, until they rot.

  Just downstream of the staircase the moor bleeds into the river. A red earth cloud billows out like blood in a pub toilet after a fight. When you’re lying on the riverbed, looking up from underneath the stain on a bright day, the red earth and the blue sky mix on your retina’s palette into an Episcopal purple.

  If a newly dipped sheep walks chest high into the water to drink, everything downstream for fifty yards will die. If the day’s hot and it goes further in to cool off, it’ll clear the river for half a mile.

  There’s a ford. There are sometimes otter tracks and spraint there. Coaches carrying crinolined ladies used to lurch and rumble through it, and it was the ideal place for a lazy highwayman. The shallowness of the river must have caused a lot of robberies, which no doubt caused a hanging or two, which no doubt cau
sed all sorts of other things, including the incubation of many blowfly larvae in the corpse on the gibbet; and no doubt some of the descendants of those blowflies have been slung on hooks to catch the fish of Exmoor.

  All of which is to say that the river is a stream of stories, and stories have no beginning and no end. It’s in this stream of stories that otters hunt, and into it that I went after them.

  ✴ ✴

  I’m always after them. Always looking at faint tracks on a patch of mud or a sandbank; always sniffing at little piles of dung; always looking at an old dead fish with its liver sucked out like a milkshake through a hole behind the gills. I’ve never been ahead of them, or with them. Sometimes I’ve had, for a whole moment at a time, the laughable conceit that I’ve ambushed them: that I’ve got there before them, and they’ve walked in on the stage that I built. But no: they’re only seen when they choose to be seen. I resent this very much. They give nothing – not even the delusion of companionability. Otters deny reciprocity even more shockingly than cats. It’s even more disturbing than their wiredness, or their sleepless, trembling, thirsty killing.

  After them into the water I went.

  It’s important to be in the water a long time. An experience of anything for ten minutes is not qualitatively the same as an experience of an hour. Neurobiological arithmetic is odd. The difference between twenty minutes and ten minutes is not ten minutes. If you don’t believe me, get up early in the morning and sit cross-legged on a cushion with your eyes shut, trying to think of nothing: pick up each intruding thought between your finger and thumb and sling it out of your mind. Do it every morning for three months. Then tell me that ten minutes plus ten minutes is twenty minutes.

  Which is why, despite all my macho posturing and all my subcutaneous fat, I tended to wear a wetsuit. A good case can be made for the wretched things on other grounds too. Otters, unlike me, have very little fat, but they have instead two layers of hair: a fine under-layer and a coarse outer coat. They trap air very effectively, and air is an appalling conductor of heat and thus an excellent insulator. Wetsuits work in a similar way. Most of their insulation comes from nitrogen bubbles trapped in the neoprene. It’s more otterlike, not less, to wear one.