Free Being a Beast by Charles Foster Page B

And you’ll know something of the outrage of the badger feeling the bellow of the engine in its ears, the trembling of the road in its feet and the whole bloody bombardment in all of it, deep down and throughout – rape, offence, invasion, totalitarianism. Badgers feel low-frequency sounds in their feet. A distant footfall in a darkening wood shudders into their pads. They freeze, which isn’t a great strategy in front of a bus, until reassured (easily done in the wood by scratching: they love the sounds of normality). In the road there’s no reassurance for any of us.
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    A big black bale, full of the worst that Nova Scotia could find, bundled towards us. It shuddered over Snowdon, spilling some salty Atlantic shavings, and then spun on, up and up until the sharp green air over the wood slashed through its electric sheet. Down it rolled, angry and old, bundling up rain, dust, feathers and swathes of insects like a big baler and sealing them all in an electric sheet instead of a piece of plastic. Tom and I, nose to ground, felt its approach in the back of our necks. The sun fell through a tense and sickly sky.
    There was a businesslike urgency in the wood – a hurry to feed off the usual before the unusual arrived. It was a good crammer for the olfactorily remedial student. As the light went, we found ourselves in intimate tunnels of touch and scent. The world outside the tunnel was made of sound, but as we crawled and sniffed, it seemed increasingly distant and irrelevant, and when the rain came, the shocking reports on the leaves all round our heads were a fusillade which dismissed all of that bigger context. There was no way of hearing the scrambling of the wood pigeons in the next-door field. There were just our heads and, around them, a halo, with a radius of about six inches, of hiss, crack, mumble and scent. The fusillade split open the ground. Scent came spinning out so fast that it reached even our noses. It was as if the ground were bursting to tell the story of that summer. A badger’s nose can detect the tales of each of the actors in the drama of the wood; we got a muddled medley, new and thrilling to us. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as a play without players; that if you cut away the particular you’re left not with the generic but with nothing; that the generic is a monstrous abstraction from which I’d come to the wood to escape. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that what was rising into my nose was the summer, or that that conclusion was better than no conclusion at all.
    The rat-a-tat of the rain had summoned the earthworms as a military parade drummer draws the crowds. The earth opened up and out they oozed, dripping from the hill like mucus candles from a snotty-nosed child.
    These rain-time worm bonanzas must create an agonising dilemma in the badger’s mind. The wood becomes a groaning smorgasbord, but you have to get wet to feast. Badgers are cosy creatures. Their default setting is curled up with the others, dry and asleep in a bed of old bracken, deep inside a well-drained hillside. That setting can be overridden, but it takes a lot of doing. The worms were safe that night. We followed the badgers into our piece of hill.
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    I lay at the mouth of the sett. It had a curtain of water, like those curtains of bead strands that fill the doors leading to the toilets in small Chinese restaurants. It was almost completely dark – at least to my collection of rods – except when lightning bled through the fault lines in the sky. Yet each water droplet seemed to act like a retina, sucking light efficiently from the wood and reflecting it on to my own grateful retinas, buried in my head, buried in the hill.
    Our sett was cradled in the interlocking fingers of tree roots: beech on either side, oak from above. The whole wood bent to the wind. There was no overground or underground: it was all just ground. We rocked in our cradle, the