The Triple Goddess (85 page)

Looking about to satisfy herself that people’s minds had been cast sufficiently in the badgerine mould for her to move on, Ophelia flipped her pad to a fresh page, drawing and colouring as she spoke.

‘Now imagine that I’m a different animal altogether, a fox. Reynard, or Mus Reynolds, or Mr Tod, as some of us might say.
Vulpes vulpes
, in case you didn’t hear it the first time. In temperament we foxes are the opposite of badgers: we’re sarcastic animals with short tempers, by nature factual and unromantic. If we dream at all it’s of catching a squealing rabbit and cracking its bones with our teeth, or breaking into the farmer’s hen house, or slaughtering a lamb.

‘A fox’s home is called an earth, or den, and it’s dirty and has an acrid smell. There are chicken and rabbit bones lying about that I never bother to pick up and bury outside. But in public I’m quite the dandy, as svelte and well dressed as the badger is thickset and drably grey. I have a smart red coat, pointed ears, sharp eyes, a refined muzzle, slim legs, and a brush for a tail. Instead of lumbering along and flattening everything in my path like the badger, I move fast, either high-stepping and dainty or close to the ground so that you can hardly tell where I’ve been from my footprints. I have excellent vision as well as hearing and scenting ability, and although like the badger I’m nocturnal and sleep for most of the day, it’s always with one eye open for an opportunity. I have a mercurial mind and eccentric habits: hence the phrase “crazy like a fox”.

‘Instead of eating plants and worms like the badger, I live mostly on rabbits, and one of my ingenious methods of catching them is to hypnotize them by dancing ever closer and closer, until dinner is one snap away. In this and many other respects I am, though I say it myself, extremely clever. For example, in order to get rid of the fleas that infest me owing to my slovenly lifestyle, I will back tail-first, very slowly, into a stream with a twig or piece of sheep’s wool in my mouth. Then, when only my snout is above water and all the fleas have gathered on the twig or the scrap of wool, I let it go so that all those pesky fleas are carried away by the current to drown or find some other animal to infest.

‘As a fox I have to confront a much more serious situation when human beings, whose practice it is to hunt animals to the death without having any intention of eating what they catch—though they would certainly regret it if they tasted me—send packs of hounds chasing after me, while they do their best to keep up on horseback after I’ve I’ve been flushed from covert and “gone away”. It’s a tally-ho! and tantivy! sport for them and a deadly trial for me; but there’s nothing like being in mortal danger to sharpen one’s survival instincts and cunning.

‘What I must do to save my skin, and brush, which if they catch me they will bear off as a trophy after the hounds have rent me into pieces, is trick the humans into losing the trail of my smell, which no amount of bathing or attempting to disguise it by rolling in manure can neutralize. So I jump into the stream, because the hounds can’t trace my scent in the water, and stop giving tongue, and I run or paddle along the stream and jump out on the other bank a distance away; and then I double back on my track to confuse them even more as they cast about, and mingle with a herd of cattle, which has a strong smell of its own; and then I climb a tree and lie foxo on a branch until the hounds and riders are far off. This means that the hunters have lost me and must accept defeat; unless instead I go to ground in my earth, in which case they will come and dig me out and kill me. Or “been “bowled over”, or “accounted for” as they euphemistically call it.

‘At night when I’m safe again, I celebrate having outwitted them by singing eery magic songs from the hill.’

Ophelia completed her drawing of the fox.

‘Now, as a rabbit or coney,
Oryctolagus cuniculus
a—ouch—though I live near the badgers and foxes who prey on me, I’m a very different sort of animal. We rabbits are sociable creatures, in the sense of being gregarious rather than so very friendly with each other. We have more relations than you can count, and live in communes amongst other extended families like our own. We’re all related to one another and have myriad cousins, and a plethora of first cousins, and second cousins, and cousins once and twice and thrice removed.

‘Our rabbit homes are an underground maze called a warren, the ins and outs of which are so complicated that we get lost in it ourselves. There’s no point in our drawing a diagram to remind us, because we’re forever digging new tunnels and it’d be out of date the next day. We have so many bedrooms that we never have to sleep in the same one.

‘Like sheep, we rabbits eat grass and leaves and shoots, and we’re out as much in the day, when the foxes aren’t around, as we are at night. We are built for speed and can outrun most dogs, twisting and turning, and we have long ears to pick up the slightest sound. If we see or smell danger we thump on the ground with our powerful hind legs to warn the others to get underground as fast as possible in one or other of the holes we never are far away from.

‘Just because we rabbits are so numerous doesn’t mean we’re not scared for ourselves. We are afraid of everything and have a lot to be afraid of: foxes, guns, dogs, snares, ferrets, stoats and weasels, and disease. Humans drive their cars up the bostal and shine lamps in our eyes at night, to dazzle us so that we freeze and they can see to shoot us. And they set traps for us. If any one of us gets sick, the illness spreads fast because we live so close to each other. Ferrets, stoats, and weasels, because they are slim and fast, follow us into our burrows and when they have us cornered at the end of a passageway they kill us and drink our blood. Because we are good to eat, the humans keep ferrets to chase us out of our burrows into nets that they put over our holes. ‘Next: instead of an animal let me give you an example of a bird, by drawing a magpie for you. There. Now I’m a magpie,
Pica pica.
Like all members of the crow family, I have an awful voice, as harsh as a corncrake, and mine goes
chak-chak-chak-chak-chak
, very fast, even when I’m serenading my bride-to-be with a sound that I consider to be tuneful and sweet. Again, Jimmy? Very well:
chak-chak-chak-chak-chak
. How was that? Thank you, Jimmy, you’re welcome. No, I think that’s enough for now.

‘As you can imagine, that rough noise I make means I’m the last person the songbirds would ever ask to join their choir. So I take revenge on them by robbing their nests and eating their eggs and fledglings. The heartbreak that I, as a magpie, cause in other families doesn’t make me feel any better about myself. I’m still jealous of the nightingales and blackbirds and thrushes, and the robins and wrens, all of whom have beautiful voices, who say I’m tone-deaf and that my voice is discordant and ugly. Beauty is in the ear of the listener, I say. Also, I wish I were small and delicate like the warblers instead of awkward and ungainly, for while they hop and flit from place to place, I can only waddle and flap.

‘But despite all the contumely I have to bear from the other species, I live in hope that one day the others will tell me how pure and lovely my voice is, and ask me to sing for them; which is why I never change out of my evening-dress concert attire of crisp white shirt and glossy black tail coat, in case I get called onto the stage to perform.’

Ophelia had drawn her picture of a magpie to show it straining to produce a musical note, as the other birds cover their ears with their wings.

‘Lastly, I’m a barn owl,
Tyto alba
. As soon as evening falls I leave my roost and go out on silent patrol, hovering over the fields as the somnolent earth breathes out its summary of the day’s events. I look like a ghost, as if I’m already part of another world; and at night when I’m abroad I float above the foxes and badgers and rabbits without them knowing I’m there. I have binocular vision that can pinpoint the location of the mice and voles that I eat on the ground, and my head can swivel quickly far around for my ears to pick up their direction and distance, and the wide deep orbits around my eyes capture very low levels of light. I have soft cushioned plumage and fluted edges on my feathers that enable me to fly without a whisper of sound; and my hearing is so acute that I can detect the slightest rustle in the undergrowth, and pounce on my prey in the dark.

‘But now I’m Ophelia again, and I live in a cottage in the village; and I’m asking you, Jimmy, and everyone else here today, to try and make a whole out of the pieces that I’ve just given you and the pictures that I’ve drawn.

‘I’ll give you a little help—it’s what I’m here for. Let us say that we each have a bit of the badger in us, and a bit of the fox, and the rabbit, and the magpie, and the barn owl, and others besides that I haven’t mentioned. Do you think, everyone, that these animals and birds—I mean wild animals and birds, not pets—are as capable as we are of experiencing emotions, of being happy or sad?

‘I say yes, and no. Why? Because they aren’t happy or sad in the way that we are capable of being happy and sad, they are just at one and the same with everything, with Nature as they find it and as they leave it. Those animals and birds can’t tell good from bad, they do what their instincts tell them to, and that to them is right without seeming to be right. The joy of spring does not make them rejoice, or the heat of summer, nor does the winter cold upset them. Animals and birds take no pleasure in the birth of their cubs and babies, any more than they mourn when one of them dies or is killed. They are not selfish, just driven to survive. The weak and sick die without feeling sorry for themselves. Life goes on until it ends, is the way they understand it without giving it any consideration, or understanding it, and while life lasts it carries natural obligations, to find food, and to reproduce, and to protect themselves and their families against marauders and those higher up the food chain. Animals and birds feel no compulsion to improve their lot, they have no expectations or ambitions, and they have no recreational vices. A badger does not long for spectacles, and a fox never considers taking a bath, and a rabbit is not longing to be able to bite a ferret’s head off, and an owl does not wish for a deep-freezer so that it doesn’t have to go out hunting for fresh food every night.

‘The only thing I may have misled you on a bit, and I’m sorry about this, Jimmy, is that a magpie may not know how awful his voice is any more than he likes the sound he makes. I said I’m sorry, Jimmy…well, Jimmy, because one has to dress these things up a little in order to entertain. In the animal and bird kingdom no one wants to be someone or something else than what they are, or go on holiday, or have a lie-in in the morning. No one desires to be rich in a world where there is no money and no need for it, and no such thing as possessions or entitlements, and where the only wealth is life—which for the animals and birds is neither wealth nor an inheritance or gift or lottery win, only a fact that they do not question because there is nothing to question.

‘Sure, birds and animals play games from time to time, as you’ll know if you’ve seen fox cubs frolicking, but keeping their wits sharp is part of getting ready for the day when their parents stop feeding and looking after them. Animals and birds are born with the skills that will see them through their lives. They do not have to tidy their rooms or go to school or take baths, or eat and drink things they don’t like…Jimmy, your mother shall speak to you afterwards. They do not go to the doctor or hospital. The grooming and preening that they must do to keep themselves in condition, they do themselves. Nothing that they do is not connected to the deadly serious business of living. Has anyone ever seen a rabbit boiling a kettle to make a cup of tea, or eating a bar of chocolate, or posting a letter to a friend, or sitting next to one in the cinema?

‘Oh good…Alice has, thank goodness it’s Alice this time—I think that’s why you put your hand up, Alice dear, isn’t it?. Yes, Alice has, but then she is more observant than the rest of us.

‘As human beings we may lack the confidence of the duckling as it takes to water for the first time, of the foal that struggles from the ground as soon as it is born, and of the golden eaglet as it launches itself from the precipice without its mother’s assurance that it is sufficiently fledged to bear itself aloft. But we should not mistake what they do for confidence because it is not confidence, it is an urge to get on with life and do what they know without thinking they must do.

‘We humans, on the other hand, are not born with confidence, but with talents. Each of us has talent or talents of some kind, to greater or lesser degree, but it is not a sin or evidence of failure or a deficiency in ourselves if our natural skills are not apparent or lesser or fewer in us than they are perceived to be in others. Some may be industrious in developing their talent through hard work, tutoring, training, and practice; or they may be lazy and ignore it. Talent in us is the equivalent of the instincts that are inherent in animals and birds.

‘But we humans have one thing that no animal or bird has: the power of choice. We humans may not be equally talented but we are all equally able to make decisions, for better or for worse: moral decisions, decisions that we know, if we are “sane” in a certain sense, when we make them that they might be either right or wrong. We all know that there are such things as right and wrong, and that there is a difference between them, for reason that we know our personal decisions affect other people as well as they do us.

‘It is because of this knowledge that we may question our judgements, and change our minds, and revise our opinions, and repent of what we have done wrongly, and attempt reparation, and endeavour to do better in future. That we can do so is proof positive that the greatest reality of all is that which cannot be proven, and that the future or consequence of our decision-making is not predetermined or certain. If to a child there is no difference between dreaming about being able to fly, and doing so “in reality”, why should it not be true? Perhaps we can fly, or will be able to when our minds and bodies tell us that we can. Oh dear, I’m sorry…Jimmy, your father shall also speak to you after Service.