Being a Beast (12 page)

So the next night I walked over the bridge and along the path (dodging, by memory, the piles of dog shit), stripped by an ash tree, stood on a rock like an overnourished sacrifice to a jealous Aegean god and jumped in among the cock salmon. When my head broke back up through the film of foam and mayflies, I had a thick, leprous skin of seamless ears like the compound eyes of a bluebottle, each of them sucking in sound. This, to begin with, was far too much sensation for sense. My brain knew what to do with sound beamed into the sides of my head. It couldn't cope with sound from my little toe and my shoulder. It got dizzy with overload and with the unaccustomed angles and complained queasily, just as your stomach and your semicircular canals complain when you're being centrifuged with candyfloss at a fairground. But then my brain pulled up its neuronal socks, realised that it was up to the job of co-ordinating the broadcasts from each of its distant, outlandish outstations and swelled proprietorially, announcing that its body was big and young and capable of doing new, strange stuff. ‘Have you never heard with your knee?' it said. ‘Ha! Call yourself a human?'

Sound travels more than four times faster in water than in air. When you're down in the water, relying mainly on sound and feeling rather than sight, distances are exhilaratingly shrunk. A crayfish clattering across gravel fifty yards away sounds as if it's at the end of your arm. The water filling your ears is a mega-phone. If your only sense is phonic, things swell. Those clacking claws are monstrous. They'd usually occur only in lurid Jurassic dreams. The night-time pool is epic; a legendary playground.

Anyone who has paid good money to lie in a flotation tank (why would anyone do that, when there are rivers?) knows what happens when you turn down the dimmer switch on one set of senses. All the others are switched more fully on. (To switch them actually fully on is a yogic enterprise.)

I used a torch that first night in the river. I never used it again. Torches are an abomination. They don't illuminate: they obscure. They drain the night of its colour and freeze fluid animals. The rods in our retinas, which work at low light intensities, create black-and-white pictures; but whether by some immense subtlety of the retina itself or by some cunning central processing, the greys of night are as varied as the rainbow spectrum of noon. It's not just that we translate a particular combination of greys into the combination of colours that we know it represents. The neuro-alchemy is more mysterious than that. Our night brains aren't just pretending, pathetically but convincingly, that it's day. There's a wholesale translation of our brain into the brain of a night thing – one of the most complete and joyful shape-shiftings we can know. Like all graces, it is a fragile thing, and our instinct is to smash it up. This is easily done. A flick of the switch, and you're back in a world that doesn't exist at all, in either the day or the night: you're a creature of lithium-cadmium. We have a depraved craving for not-places, for not-food, for not-people. And so we buy torches.

Humans, made bionic by a cold bath, can see, hear and (before the cold knocks out their peripheral sensation) feel the most wonderful night things in the river. The river day is frigid. The weed waves prettily enough, but like sterile surgical drapes, with no erotic promise. It might as well be wallpaper or an overcurated exhibit in a clinically lighted, centrally heated museum. But at night it grabs your legs and strokes them up to the crotch. Sunlight rinses colour from the weed: lubricious blacks, reds and browns slink back when the sun's gone. In the dark wood the night clots; in the river the night is in solution.

That first river night spoilt the river days for me. But even the night couldn't redeem the winter.

✴ ✴

In my first summer on the East Lyn river I'd found a place where the water races through a tight spout into a deep pool. It travels so fast that it's pushed right to the bottom of the pool, carrying with it the air it has collected in the stony avenue that runs down from the moor – air full of greenness and birdsong. It hits the rock at the foot of the pool and spirals back, right to the top, weaving round the downward bubbles in an incomprehensible double helix. That first day, I put my face in it and made myself a mask of air with streamers down my head like silver dread-locks. When my face was in it, I had a million compound eyes, like an enormous fly. They smashed up the light and shot it into my retinas with a violence that made ordinary vision old and tired. I moulded the bubbles like a potter moulds clay on the wheel – pushing the helix in to make a waist and pulling it out in strands. In the light seasons I went religiously to the spout once a week. It became a Sabbath.

Otters too take time out from the mania. They play with the water – pointlessly, if the only possible point is the acquisition of calories and the maximising of reproductive potential. But only when the spring comes and the input-output equations look healthier. Same for me.

When the spring gave me back to myself (how amazing to be able to use the words ‘spring' and ‘myself' – for the first time since October), I came up out of the earth, an elated escapee from the dark camp behind me, and slipped back epiphanically into the water.

‘You'll feel the change in your face', growled a Scottish farmer I knew. He was talking about the weather, or puberty, or sheep-dip poisoning, or orgasm. But it's not a bad general observation about the world. I felt the change in my face. It didn't grin, but it had possibilities again.

Otters experience the world mainly through the change in their faces. Their faces are chisels thrusting between the layers of river water. They're the first bit of the animal to cross the sudden seam between the shallow-warmed water above Rockford and the old, cold, green water sludging up from the dark basins. All that is obvious. But the intensity of the sensation is not.

Above my desk is the mask of a big otter killed by hounds somewhere in Dorset in the 1930s. He looks defiantly martial, as he no doubt was when his final attempt to escape the stockade of thundering poles failed and he turned at last to try to rip the testicles off the booming lead hound.

Part of that martial look, I've realised, is his whiskers. They're Prussian in their belligerence. They're the whiskers of treaty and border violation; of smoking cannon and multiple amputations. In other words they are long, thick and stiff.

They are buried deep in the skin of his face. In life, the base of each whisker lay in a densely woven nest of sensory receptors. From each nest, thick nerve cables coursed away towards that febrile brain, which collated the information and translated it into a picture of the world. Was it a visual picture? Was the end product something like ‘Fishy and edible three feet to the north-north-west', and marked by an image of a fish, generated by a buzz in the visual cortex and flashed around to the paws, the teeth and the appetite? I suspect so. Otters are insufficiently olfactory or auditory for any other type of stamp to be likely, and surely
some
stamp is inevitable. In normal circumstances we translate to visual: the scent of a fire or a woman becomes an image; a musical cadence conjures the sight of a landscape or of the concert hall where we first heard it. Only in extreme circumstances – and notably during sex – does the translation stop and we experience touch or smell or sound as it is, qua caress, musk or gasp. We're closest to a hunting otter when we're in a bed with a lover.

The knowledge of death first trembled deep inside the cheeks of my Prussian otter. As it lay in the river, all but its nostrils submerged, it would have heard first the chatter about scent and rural adultery and the hunt ball and the inadequacy of the cakes and then, more ominously, a hound speaking from the holt under the alders, and others joining it in a rolling chorus of menace. It may have got a whiff of vol-au-vents and Macassar oil and the sour urine and dead-calf belch of excited dogs. But none of this mattered much: it had all happened before. Not until the pressure waves from the thrashing legs of hounds bounced off the kingfisher tree and shivered through the water to those whiskers did things get serious. Even then it was a time for cunning and not for fear. Only when the cheeks thrilled to the water coming direct and hard from hounds' legs churning like mill wheels was it time to dart and turn rather than cruise; and only when the cheeks were overwhelmed, and gave way to sight, was it the end.

Although the nerve cables and the distant processing are important, the local sensation in the cheeks must remain intense. The otter's head must be like a perpetually engorged glans, pushing desperately into the world, seeking always more sensation.

There wasn't much I could do to re-educate my cheeks. Certainly growing whiskers myself didn't work. My whiskers made my face less sensate, not more. They weren't buried in a fizzing mass of nerve endings and, being flaccid things, didn't move much with wind or water or touch, and so didn't transmit much to their pathetic complement of nerves. I was far better off shaving as close as I could before jumping into a river, and avoiding like the plague those anaesthetic alcohol-based after-shaves which would probably kill all wildlife, like sheep dip.

Yet I can understand what it's like to be cheek-o-centric. It's far more intimate to reach out and touch another's cheek than to reach down and touch their genitals. A kiss is correspondingly more erotic than sexual intercourse. Everyone knows that prostitutes won't kiss: there are some things that aren't ever for sale.

I tried to push into the world more consciously with my face. I bent my head forward when I came into a room. I tried not to advance towards new people with my hand extended (as I'd been told from birth was how gentlemen behaved) or swaggeringly foot first (as it had been insinuated at public school was the way to make your mark, showing that you're a man with legs to march across other people's countries, and feet to kick the butts of the workers).

I lingered longer in the sexless cheek-to-cheek greetings of the middle class, getting known as a deviant. I nuzzled lawns, chairs, door frames, cake, tablecloths, trees and trains. I lay long in rivers, facing the current, telling myself to notice the shape of the water storms and leas made by the crown of my head and the fussier, angrier ones made by my nose. A horse leech fastened to my lip, and I didn't notice for an hour.

It was all rather silly. Cold water quickly makes the face as numb as a pork knuckle, and although I could channel a bit more of my mind into my face, I couldn't make my face behave like fingertips – even like the fingertips of my own hands, badly mutilated as they are by Arctic frostbite and Scottish rockfall.

But I could, I slowly realised, turn my fingertips into whiskers. Any decent somatotopic map would have told me that that was a sensible thing to do. That, in fact, would emulate the otters' neural world quite well. I couldn't teach my fingers to decode, as I imagine an otter's vibrissae do, the pressure contours of the river. But generally those whiskers aren't acting alone, like a single antenna on a high ridge: they're acting in busy, bloody concert with the teeth and the front paws.

✴ ✴

We've all seen exciting underwater sequences in which, with symphonic elegance and grandeur, otters chase huge fish in huge tanks just as cheetahs hunt antelope in the Serengeti (and often with the same soundtrack), weaving and turning with such speed that they're clearly moving through the virtual space between the water molecules rather than through the water itself. The show ends with the triumphant otter in the shallows, struggling to shift the dead fish and taking a bite out of where the fish's shoulder would be if fish had shoulders.

Forget it. At least for most English otters most of the time. I've only rarely found big fish bones in the spraints of Devon otters. Our hard-pressed otters are often pushed to options 2 and 3 in their spreadsheet. They are bottom feeders: they turn over stones with their front paws and hope for a panicky bull-head to bolt past their whiskers. As the Somerset otter man James Williams observed, it's like nothing so much as cricket: the little fish come off the bat at an angle, and the slip-fielding otters dive for the catch. There's not much meat on a bullhead, but there are a lot of them, they're there throughout the year, and a bit of gentle fielding isn't anything like as energy consuming as those Tchaikovskian pursuits of big game.

Otters, then, are highly tactile fumblers. It's quite effective fumbling. In the fumbling, but not the efficacy, I can follow them. Like everyone, I've tried chasing big fish, and like everyone who's not armed with a spear gun, I've failed (though once, wearing fins in a sea pool on Kintyre, I touched the tail of a sea trout and thought I was a god).

I fumbled particularly in the Badgworthy. It's easiest in fairly shallow water, where you can lie face first, breathing through a snorkel. Often I used just a snorkel, with no mask, hoping that my face and my fingers would be more alive. And then, more or less blindly, I turned over stones with my nose or my hands. When I used my nose, I made a net round the stone by cradling it with my arms. When I used a hand, I pushed my head right up to the stone to block one plane of escape, and tried to cover the other routes by circling them with my other arm.

It wasn't a great success: I managed to grab a couple of blotchy stone loaches and a truculent miller's thumb. A disoriented stickleback, no doubt taking my open mouth for a cave, swam inside. Its fluttering spines grazed my palate like the probe of a Parkinsonian dentist. I should have crushed it between my fillings and swallowed it. I couldn't, any more than I could stamp on a mouse. My failure is illogical: I pay good money for other people to winch cows bellowing to their deaths so that we can serve up buttock muscle for Sunday lunch. My illogicality isn't original, of course, which perhaps makes it worse, and certainly makes it less interesting. It's about distance; about vicarious guilt being less intense; about the little physiological details of death that speak more intimately to our moral intuitions than any amount of argument; about the fact that physical proximity connotes relationship, even with a very basic animal, and that almost any sort of relationship makes it harder to kill.