Being a Beast (21 page)

These red deer well up from the ground. That might make it easier for them to go back into it. They are at home in a way that I cannot be.

Human localness is uterine, not geographical. Humans cannot be properly at home once the uterus in which they grew up into relationship is burned or eaten.

✴ ✴

Having lost the grand picture, I'd thought I'd make up for it with intensity. I'd understand 500 hectares. From the map, it should have been easy enough.

The red deer of Exmoor are moving fast up to the high moor – to Exmoor Forest-that-isn't-a-forest – pushed from the gentler, wooded, more accessible fringes and combes by the high price of venison. They're not made for the tops. The moors of Exmoor are a mountain top that just happens to undulate on for miles, so that it looks like a moor. The deer have no fat on their backs and don't have the temperament for a desert. There's peat under their hoofs here. They're walking on real paste from the trunks of the ghost trees they weave between. They may be safer from poachers' rifles there, but they're more vulnerable to the hounds. The huntsman can see them a long way off, and if the hunted stag does a big loop, the hounds can be taken across the chord.

It's a hop and a skip from the cottage – up Brendon Common to the road, over the bridge where there are newts and trolls, and then off towards Hoar Oak Water before you get to the car park with its pioneering brew-ups and rocking, grunting shag vans from Wolverhampton.

In the spring I sat on the moor, waiting for the grass and panicking when it didn't come.

In the summer I lay with the children in the woods and the bracken, watching streams of sugar, coursing through plant veins, bend aphids' snorkels. I pushed my own anarchic calves down when focussed, unrambling ramblers marched past.

In the autumn I walked, rolled and starved with the stags but cheered quietly when I saw a wayward hind, bored with the strident bellow of eugenic prudence from the big stag, slipping off down the valley to spin the genetic wheel with the punier boy next door.

In the winter I sat, lay and walked. Because the ground was hateful and made of dead stuff, I sat often in the branches of the trees I'd sat under in the summer. The deer endured, and I found again that I could meet them only in the shrivelled place of our endurance.

And then I did it all again, and again, and again.

I was wearying of this. Back in the cottage, I went in despair and disgust through the notebooks. They told me nothing about the world of a red deer and too much about my own, which I was trying to escape. I was deep in the sickly waters of anthropomorphic whimsy, and sinking fast.

There was one overwhelming reason. However heavy their antlers, however royal their step and however thick their necks, red deer are victims. Their landscape is the landscape of victims, and invisible except through victims' eyes. Apart from a few minutes as I ran from Monty, a few hours as I shuddered among the deer in Glencoe, and a few poetical moments of imagined solidarity with cold hinds in Hoar Oak, I couldn't be a victim. Imagination and ingenuity could help me hunt down and see reflected in myself everything except perpetual, defining vulnerability.

That failure vitiated the enquiry. There was no point in not cutting my toenails if I couldn't also be persecuted from the beginning of time. I was stuck forever in the restaurant car of the Caledonian Sleeper, my rifle beside me and my targets all around me.

I couldn't reach the red deer on Exmoor or in Scotland. I'd have been nearer to them in a cardboard box in a shop doorway.

Clap, clap, clap, goes the Sophoclean, but now I'm not sure if he's being sarcastic.

6

AIR

Swifts

Some humans think that they can write about swifts, dogs and termites. Here some reasons why they might think so, and some facts:

1. Some dogs know when their owners are coming home, even when the owner is hundreds of miles away, and when the owner has changed plans and is returning at a wholly unexpected time.
   
2. Some humans can do this too. Kalahari bushmen know when a hunting party has killed, exactly what it has killed and the exact time of return – all from fifty miles away. They used to assume that the white man's telegraph worked by telepathy.
   
3. A related phenomenon has its own name in Norway:
   vardøger
   . Someone hears footsteps, or the scrunching of a car on the gravel, or the opening of a door and the knocking of snow off boots. There's no one there. The person who's been heard will arrive in a few minutes. It's useful. There's time to make the tea or put on the posh frock.
   
4. Many of us can tell when we are being stared at.
   
5. Termites are blind. They communicate by scent and by knocking signals. The information that can be transferred this way is very limited. If a termite mound is damaged and a scent- and noise-blocking baffle put in the breach, the termites on either side of the baffle can't communicate with each other. And yet they repair the two sides so that they join perfectly. There's a master plan to which the individuals have access. Similar comments can be made about many of the activities of most social insects.
   
6. Flocks of birds, shoals of fish and girls in a chorus line move together as part of a wave passing through the group. But the speed at which the wave passes is far faster than the reaction time of an individual. They're part of a superorganism, just as much as a honeybee.
   
7. Young cuckoos don't know their parents. Older cuckoos leave Europe for Africa about four weeks before the younger generation is ready to go. Young cuckoos find their way to the ancestral feeding grounds in Africa unaided and unaccompanied.
   
8. Monarch butterflies hatch in the Great Lakes area of the United States and migrate south to overwinter in the Mexican highlands. They migrate north in spring. But the first generation of migrants breeds in the southern part of the range (Texas to Florida) and then dies. It's their offspring who make it to the Great Lakes, where they breed for several generations. The generation that heads south for Mexico in the autumn is three to five generations away from any butterfly that made the trip south earlier.
   
9. Newly hatched chicks often get attached to the first thing they see. If that's a robot, they'll see that as their mother.
   

   In a famous set of experiments, a robot's movements were determined by a random number generator. But the chicks who saw the robot as mother wanted it to be near them. They were separated from it by a barrier. And yet they could draw it nearer. They psychokinetically overrode the controls. A control set of chicks, not imprinted with filial love for the robot, could not.
   

10. When a new compound is created (as happens a lot), it can often be very difficult to make it crystallise. It can take years. But if a group in, say, Cambridge manages to do it, a group in Melbourne will often do it the next week. The effect is well documented. Sceptics purport to explain this away on the basis that somehow the new crystal must have been carried to the other laboratory (the ‘chemist's beard hypothesis'), where it acted as a template for the crystallisation. But usually no such connection can be demonstrated.
    
11. Similar effects are seen in animal behaviour. If group X, in Oxford, manages after years to teach rats a particular trick, group Y, in Sydney, without any contact with the Oxford group, will suddenly succeed too.
    
12. If you kill one of the two cells of a two-cell sea urchin embryo, a whole sea urchin (not half) develops. If you fuse two sea urchin embryos, you get one giant sea urchin.
    
13. A hand, composed of millions of individuals cells of many different types, grows as far as it has to, and into the necessary shape. But no further than it has to, and not into just any old shape.
    
14. I like some people. I dislike others, even when they have no definable, relevant faults. There are some kind, generous, sacrificial, entertaining people in whose company we simply can't flourish.
    
15. There are some places in which we can thrive and be happy, and others, with apparently identical characteristics, where we cannot.
    
16. Love.
    
17. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox: particles that come from a common source (such as two photons of light emitted from the same atom) remain somehow connected, so that what happens to one is instantaneously reflected in the other.
    
18. Sexual reproduction: a headache for neo-Darwinian orthodoxy because it hides and dilutes, rather than putting on centre stage, genes which have been tested by natural selection and found to confer an advantage.
    
19. Although some diseases and trauma can ablate memory, no anatomical seat of memory has ever been identified in the human brain.
    
20. Altruism.
    
21. Community.
    

These are facts about swifts because they are facts about the world, and swifts are part of the world, as I am. The facts indicate that no qualification other than occupancy of a shared world is necessary for me to write about swifts. That is a great relief, because swifts are the ultimate other. I can write about them only because I'm other too or (depending on my mood) because nothing is other.

✴ ✴

Sometimes they are not so far away. Just now, a few feet from my head, a swift has struck straight up – as straight as a plumb line, without braking or stalling, into the roof; as fast as thought, though bolder. If something is only as fast as thought, perhaps thought can keep pace. Yet thought cannot snatch the blueness of the height or know that the whole life of each swift is a gasp.

This swift, which was bringing a ball of 500 insects, bound with saliva, to bald nestlings in a hot vent in the eaves, screams down our street at the level of my upstairs study. It looks in at the making of books, people and tea; on flowery duvets, Edwardian plasterwork, fake baronial panelling, rows of monographs on the glories of the quattrocento; on bears, skulls, Tibetan masks, psychotic dolls and a lot of polite desperation. It screams up and down for no reason except that it is good to scream, and because the day deserves it. It's not hunting for aphids, airborne beetles or sex.

I can join it in the pointless scream.

✴ ✴

This swift hatched in Oxford, four years ago. For six weeks it swelled like a boil. Then it toppled out towards our dustbins, found its wings before it hit the railings, roosted that night in the air, a couple of kilometres above Oxford, flapping occasionally into the wind and circling slowly up, and then, two weeks later, started on the journey to Africa.

It came back the following summer, circled our house, didn't breed, went again, again and again to Africa, came back to Oxford and then found a hole in the house and a home for its semen. Until it flew into our roof above my head, it hadn't touched the ground, or a tree, or a building, or anything but insects and the air in four years.

✴ ✴

There are two classes of words commonly applied to swifts: words about ethereality, and violent words. They are not contradictory. The violence makes the ethereal accessible. Swifts lay open the sky so that we can go there. They slash the veil.

If the swifts didn't come, we'd be stuck with what we've got.

They were very late this year. I panicked. I'd get up very early, thinking that I'd heard a scream, and rush to the window. There was nothing there but pigeons as ponderous as I am: pigeons who sleep in trees and squat in the dirt.

And then, as I was lying on my back, they were suddenly there.

‘Why are you crying, Daddy?' said Rachel, who was watching my face instead of the sky.

‘Because it's all right', I said. ‘Because the world still works.'

‘Okay', she said.

They're always suddenly there or suddenly not there.

✴ ✴

The air crawls. Up there, like plankton, there are live things drifting in the wind; aphids, other bugs, spiders, beetles. An aphid might be sucked from a grass stem in an English wood, up a gurgling plughole in the air, across the Pyrenees and the Strait of Gibraltar and into the crop of a Zitting Cisticola at an oasis in Mauritania.

I've tried to map the vortices. It's best done from quite tall, bald trees with lots of footholds on which you can stand at many heights. It's a happy, mesmeric way to pass the day.

Airborne thistledown's the best marker of the vortices. Each seed probably doesn't weigh much more than an aphid.

Near the ground the thistledown is tentative. It moves from side to side, as if testing the worth of all the possible air channels. By four feet up it has decided where to go, though a fleck of down that started in the same flower head might well have chosen differently.

In a wood or above a field, the vortices are an unseen forest of tangled chimneys. The chimney walls are quite hard. Not much escapes from them. They're often very close together, but they're rarely exactly parallel, and they sometimes even cross. Each has a tight centripetal glug, but they don't just channel straight up. Each has tides and eddies. Bugs and seeds bounce off one another and off the walls: they somersault and arabesque. An aphid that almost made it out beyond the canopy might be blown back down by the fat cheeks of the summer and pass one coming up that started its climb from the under-growth an hour before.

At the top of the treeline there's a tangled delta. The chimneys swell, start to knot, and spill into a flat bowl which spins them together. The flotsam gathers pace; the streams are wider and denser.

The swifts graze the streams. Perhaps there's another delta and another flattening further up. Certainly by an altitude of 100 metres (328 feet) or so the pickings are thin. Yet swifts are often very much higher than this, where they're unlikely to be feeding.

It's different in open country. There the sun sucks up the earth hard. Banks of wind surf roll across the land, hit a wall, a ditch or a ripple and surge up, becoming mushrooms. The stalks of air are huge, writhing rivers of tiny spiders and aphids, sometimes hundreds of yards wide, racing in tumbling spate from the fields to the high clouds. They rasp a hand plunged into them.

The summer sky is usually a rigidly stratified bird sandwich. The swifts feed at the top; the martins are below them; and swallows wobble the top of the grass with their wake. But the swifts sometimes slice down into the martins' patch, and when the sky is heavy with wet electric power they're pushed further down, among the swallows, to the fields and the lakes.

Swifts are selective, fastidious feeders. Although they catch 5,000 or more insects a day, and though they have wide gapes like the mouth of a trawl net, they don't usually trawl. They go for the big stingless insects. You can see them swing off their course to get them. And their discrimination is nuanced. When they hunt bees, they take the stingless drones selectively. Try telling drones from workers at a speed of fifteen metres (forty-nine feet) a second. They're not just responding crudely to insect warning livery: they take plenty of stingless bee and wasp mimics. We don't know how they tell the difference, but it must be visual.

They are raptors – aerial gaze hounds – snapping like terriers, and so they have two foveae: a shallow, monocular one, and a deep, magnifying one. This deep device probably gives them some binocular vision, used for computing the distance of speedy insects. They're like cheetahs or peregrines. When a swift first spots a likely kill, it'll be at a similar distance from it, relative to the size of the prey, as a peregrine would be from a pigeon, a cheetah from a Thomson's gazelle, or I from a deer far across the hill. Identical visuospatial problems have to be solved in each case. Like a peregrine, the swift nods its head as it bears down, switching between devices – between the big picture and the detail. Both are needed for an efficient kill that won't leave a sting in the mouth.

Though they're mainly trophy hunters in the sky plains, swifts are not above a gulping, glutting feeding frenzy if the chimneys are serving up a fresh hatch.

I was once in the middle of one of these kill orgies. I was dragging a very small child along to nursery to be contained for a while, when the air above a wood by the road exploded in black, screeching sparks. The swifts were among a new hatch rising from the treetops; not bothering with hairpin turns, just ploughing through, jerking open-mouthed heads from side to side to hit the areas of deepest density.

We ran across the road. I told the three-year-old to wait in the nettles and scrambled up a tree as high as I could get. That was quite high. I swayed in a fork just below the top and pushed my head out into the killing zone of the delta.

I saw a tongue, squat, grey and dry; I saw myself, pinched and saucer eyed. I felt the cool electric grace of a downstroke on my face. I snapped a mouthful of nymphs and spat them on to the roof of a brand new Merc dropping off a child from a house 300 yards away.

It was the closest I ever got.

But becoming a swift? I might as well try to be God.

✴ ✴

I strapped myself into a harness and was tugged by a parachute into the sky. It taught me the taste of height – but the taste to a palate designed for six feet above the earth, not six thousand. It taught me about the roar of the wind, but the roar in flapping ears fixed on the sides of a big crude block of a head, forced under a gushing tap. It didn't teach me how the temperature changed as I climbed: my face was too flushed with fear and thought to notice, and the rest of my body was wrapped in wool and nylon.

Swifts feel the ground by the shape of the breath it exhales. They smell their way through the scent columns. They hunt in a reflected image of the earth – an image as dense and sticky as a toffee apple.

I looked down at woods and fields and saw woods and fields. For a swift, woods and fields are pizza home-delivery joints. You never go to one of those. You just call and speak to a disembodied voice. You don't really have much of a picture of what's there. You've never thought about it. You probably know vaguely where it is. If pressed, you might use its location as part of a set of directions to somewhere else (as a swift may use some terrestrial signposts for navigation). But it has no intrinsic interest other than as the source of your pizza. The swift stays at home in the air, and the earth delivers.