Being a Beast (19 page)

Monty caught up with me on the side of another maize field. He was ten yards away when I first saw him. When he saw me, from under those heavy, roller-blind lids, he just turned away. He didn't need any consummation other than a tick in his time sheet. The job was done. He turned round and ambled back up to Matt, who was several minutes behind.

The silence hadn't just been unnerving; it was hurtful. I ride a clanking bicycle round Oxford and have a prepared speech that I make to myself whenever people can't hear me approach and don't get out of the way. It goes something like this:

You're in my way. I'm a fast-moving frame of steel and fat, and I'm making a noise that, half a mile off, would have sent any of your ancestors on to their bellies, clutching their assegais and trying to stop their hearts bursting out of their chests. I'm a yard behind you: you've no idea I'm here. You've lost so, so much. I'm better than you. I'm going to recall you to the possibility of being alive by sounding this enormously powerful horn, thus…

I've got evangelistic about this. I go out of my way to cycle through the parts of Oxford grazed by huge placid herds of insensate tourists, hoping to summon them back to what they might have been.

Monty had managed to do exactly the same to me. He'd never have done it to a red deer. But I was glad to be comprehensively humiliated and scared. To be brought down with a whoo-whoop after a five-mile point on airy downland wouldn't have taught me about being prey. It would have been like a greyhound race – a contest between two predators – in which I'd come off the worst. Being prey is never glorious.

Usually large prey species are killed quickly. Those epic hunts of caribou by wolves for many hours make good TV but are unusual. Usually wolves explode out of the trees, course for a few hundred yards and then either kill or give up. That's just how the thermodynamic arithmetic generally works.

Unlike wolves, staghounds don't give up. That's at the root of most reasoned opposition to stag hunting with hounds. Red deer, the argument goes, never evolved to be long-distance runners. They rarely had to be. They're sprinters. But hunted deer on Exmoor run for an average of around twelve miles and for around three hours. That, it's said, is likely to exact a painful physiological price. If you've trained to run 100 metres, it's going to hurt to run a half marathon. There's a loud, bitter debate about whether there is credible evidence of those physiological costs.

We can argue about what the high levels of lactate mean for the stag's subjective experience of suffering, or whether the burst red blood cells are artefactual. The physiological debate is important, but I'm not sure that it contributes much to the ethical debate. Of course there is a physiological cost to pursuit: the animal is brought to bay precisely because it runs out of the funds necessary for continued payment. The cost is plainly more than where a high-speed projectile smashes up the heart of a grazing stag. And the physiological toll must have some ‘emotional' corollaries. (You leave those quote marks in or out, as you please.) There's much more adrenaline surging round the hunted stag; its neurones are burning like the bars of an electric fire as the messages spurt through them. But whether that's painful or not is a matter of definition and opinion. The membrane between pain and pleasure is often thin and sometimes invisible. Pain brings pleasure: as the tiring stag leaps over a farm gate, tearing some muscle fibres, its brain gets a euphoric, analgesic dose of endogenous opioids.

I've run long distances: sometimes fifty miles at a time, and then up the next morning to run a lot more, carrying all I need on my back. The cacophonous scream of the muscles is orchestrated by a masterly Mozartian brain into harmonies that are lovely – lovely because they chime with the frequencies of the rest of the wild. When I've crept, cramped, bleeding and blistered, into a sleeping bag, I've always said: ‘So this is what legs are for, and this is what being alive feels like!'

This might be because I'm a masochistic pervert, in which case it's unlikely to say much about hunted red deer. But that's not necessarily the case.

I'd rather be killed outside, after fifteen heart-bursting miles, having tried every possible ruse: having taken the hounds plunging through pad-ripping gorse, with my legs having been tried and found wanting, with a good chance achingly forfeited, with my natural heroin beginning to prise my consciousness out of my throbbing head, with a splendid, malicious hope of disembowelling a hound, with a look, through salt-stung eyes, through the haze to Wales, than be chewing cud, and then a thud and the dark.

But perhaps that's just me. A quick, unreflective death (ideally, it seems, a catastrophic heart attack at dinner) is what everyone seems to want. It's a fashion. A few generations ago, people prayed to be saved from sudden death: they prayed for time; for context; for goodbyes; for the chance to take stock and to make memorable gestures. Now the prayer is to be spared all this: to be catapulted without warning into the void. Very odd.

Red deer, though, don't have much idea about their own deaths.
Timor mortis
shouldn't be added to the indictment against the stag hunters. Hunted deer are fearful, but you can have fear without having a clear reason to be afraid, and indeed there are many reasons, other than the fear of personal extinction, to be afraid of snapping teeth.

The rumpus, noise and confinement of the slaughterhouse alarm cattle and sheep which are processing to their deaths, but they don't seem to be particularly distressed, or make any obvious attempt at evasion, when a captive bolt pistol or a gun is put to their heads. They graze happily around the recently dead corpse of a flock or herd fellow. Horses behave entirely naturally in the presence of other, badly injured horses, even when there are major wounds, copious haemorrhage and protruding bones. They'll have a sniff of a horse corpse in a field and then carry on eating. Sheep and pigs aren't obviously affected by witnessing the stunning and sticking of conspecifics. When farmed red deer are shot in a field, the others are slightly alarmed by the noise of the shot, but the sight of the cadavers themselves doesn't seem to move them until there's a sufficient number lying dead for the deer to perceive the gun (as opposed to the death that springs out of it) as a specific personal risk. They'll happily eat potatoes that have fallen out of the mouths of dead deer – unless they're visibly covered in blood. Red deer are programmed to avoid danger, but in their definition of ‘danger' there's no existential category, and so there's no existential angst.

Fearing one's own death and empathising with the death of another aren't the same thing: presumably death row psychopaths don't go quietly into the night. But there's an obvious connection. If deer were horrified by the sight of a dead deer, we could
start
to argue that they subjectively fear their own extinction. The fact that they're not makes it hard even to begin the argument.

That's not to say that the deaths of other animals are emotionally irrelevant. Herbivores have relationships with one another which no doubt have some emotional colour. To kill an animal which has been part of the survivor's life is to destroy an ecosystem. That's bound to disturb. But it seems that with ruminants, horses and pigs the disturbance is not triggered by outraged empathy. Indeed, there's little evidence that they're empathic at all. They're machines; islands; cold gene bearers.

Although there are methodological difficulties with many of the studies on animal empathy, there's significant evidence that some species are genuinely empathic. Rhesus macaques, rats and pigeons may refrain from pressing a bar to obtain food for themselves if doing so causes another conspecific to receive an electric shock. In macaques the effect is stronger if the monkey doing the pressing is familiar with the victim or has been shocked itself. And after a fight, chimpanzees (and possibly several other mammal and bird species) disproportionately console the recipients of violence (as opposed to the aggressors). Muttering ‘reciprocal altruism' or ‘kin selection' won't make the emotions associated with this behaviour any the less real or intense.

If pigeons, rooks and rats are empathetic, it's perhaps surprising that charismatic larger ruminants aren't. You'd expect something big, brown eyed, and long eyelashed, which spends a long time meticulously and sacrificially mothering a single calf, to do better. Perhaps it's because death is part of their constitution in a way that it's not for other species. They are made to be food. It's what they're
for
and what they
are
. Death isn't alien: it's not an invader that needs to be feared.

C. S. Lewis remarked that if the reductionists were right, humans should not complain as they do about death. They should breezily accept it as something as natural as breath. ‘Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?' he asked. That humans complain about death was an indication for him that they weren't designed to die. That red deer don't complain about death is an indication that they are.

Morality, at least in part, is about the fulfilment of natural expectations. It's less morally culpable to eat a herbivore than a carnivore. Herbivores expect it, and carnivores don't.

In every culture there's a taboo about eating carnivores. The shamans agree with Yahweh.

✴ ✴

By being chased for a while and by obsessing hypochondriacally about death, I hadn't undone decades of apprenticeship in predatorship, nor could I unravel the double helix. Yes, I have ancestral memories of narrow eyes just outside the reach of the fire, and fire itself makes me feel secure. You can buy a calming MP3 of the noise of a crackling fire. I'm happier where there's a tree with a low branch that I can reach but wolves can't. I feel that it's important, not just entertaining, to read
Little Red Riding Hood
to the children. Death itself is a maw, with, sometimes, a wiggling uvula. I have a thirst for physical integrity and a curiosity about amputation that can be explained only by a subliminal fear of death by rending.

Yet these are only punctuation marks in my story, not defining adjectives. The story is about me striding out from the fire, brand and spear in hand, and the eyes scattering. The wolf in grandma's bonnet is a victim. I always get to the low branch and taunt from there before throwing the lance. I'm kept warm in my own ice age by the skins of speared wolves. I'm the predator of predators: I eat steak without becoming steak.

Only the cold turns me into a deer. We grew up in it together, sometime in the Pleistocene.

✴ ✴

In the winter, deer come down from the tops. They were near the track across Rannoch Moor from Inveroran: heads down, even when I was close, a few of them raking the snow with sharp feet, using each other as wind baffles; most of them still. Their heavy coats couldn't hide the tucked-up bellies. Snow had been lying here for a couple of mean months. There was grass there if they scraped hard enough: August sun freeze-dried. But it was touch and go whether it was worth it: the margins were tight, and the tentativeness of the feet showed it. Tentativeness like this is never far from death. Wilderness cooperates only with prudent confidence.

I took off my backpack and crawled towards them on my hands and knees. This wasn't an attempt at concealment: I was in full view. Nor was I trying to be a quadruped. It was just slightly more efficient than walking on my hind legs. Each step took me in above my waist. It was better to swim-burrow through the snow. I was more of a mole than a deer. I couldn't understand how the deer could stand just ankle deep, or how they could get to the grass. I didn't meet a blade of grass for 200 yards in my trench. Then the ground climbed and the snow fell away, and I knew that the deer were standing on a high plateau and that the wind had swept it clean for them.

They saw that I was an unarmed torso with useless, flailing, bloodless limbs. They had a bovine vacancy I'd not seen before in deer – even in fat, farmed, unstimulated deer. I had their sour wind. I took it in my throat, not my nose. There was something else on my nose: pear drops – the ketones of starvation. These deer were burning their muscle and were going to die. If the stalker dropped hay all round them they'd stand and look at it and then lie down and be eaten. By the time it gets to this point, it's a kind enough way to go. You go to sleep and are blown away, and what's left freezes to the ground and is then carried up to the crag on black wings.

I sat there among them for hours. By the end of that time there was no more scraping. They were all dead still, like memorials of themselves. They barely turned their heads when I burrowed back to the path.

I'd been stupid. I was wet through. I'd been warmed by solidarity with the deer, but now there was danger. There wasn't much light left. I'd struggled a long way up from the road running through Glencoe, and now there were feathers of snow in my face. A black figure rose out of Loch Linnhe. It straightened up over Kinlochleven, then leant over Glencoe and opened its mouth, and out of its mouth stooped a fat flapping bird of a snowstorm, which skimmed low over the Kings-house, spread its wings wide over Rannoch and landed with its claws out. The claws didn't get me, but the wings clipped my face, blinded me and pushed me to my knees.

I got up, and went down, and got up and went down and got up and went down. And after a while I didn't care much. The snow punched me; the cold bled me. It was very interesting. Then I got too tired to be interested. I badly wanted to go to sleep, mainly because sleep meant blankets and cosiness. I wanted to pull something over me, and I didn't really mind if that was snow. With a blanket over me the noise would stop: the growl rolling in from the sea.

Then a thin, clear, pedantic, ascetic voice, which I recognised as mine, said something like ‘You'd better get out of the wind.' And I replied: ‘Ah, to stop the growl, and be warm?' And I replied to it: ‘Well, yes, if you want to see it that way.' And then I added, seeing that some advocacy was called for: ‘If you don't, you see, you'll not have beans on toast again.' ‘Ever', I added histrionically in the pause that followed.