WINTER
‘I’m always trying to do what dead people tell me
[ … ] Who are the ghosts [ … ] us or our dead?’
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be [pacified] lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.’
Igulikik Inuit hunter to Knud rasmussen
‘Reports concerning peoples from parts of native America, Europe, Africa, and Asia show them to be almost unanimous in prohibiting the telling of sacred stories in summer or in daylight, except on certain special occasions.’
Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales
I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill.
A couple of days earlier I’d been standing in a Victorian court in central London wearing a horsehair wig, a stiff wing collar, starched bands and a black gown, arguing about how much a damaged uterus was worth. Then I’d rattled on the sleeper up to Scotland, drinking Chianti, been disgorged at a Highland station, driven in a Land rover to a big country house, made to shoot at a picture of a charging Russian and released onto the hill in a tweed suit.
For six hours I tramped, scanned and crept. At last I saw a big enough stag and said, ‘He’s mine.’ He was in a hollow just below the crest of the hill, and it was the devil of a job to get up to him. The wind ricocheted off the rocks, and I hoped I was high enough to stop my scent bouncing down to him. I crawled up a burn, with water coming in at my neck and out at my socks, and lay behind a stone for a couple of hours. I couldn’t go any further, but if the stag didn’t move there was no way I could get a killing shot.
A raven gave me away. It swooped, saw me and croaked. The stag knew something was wrong, stood up, sniffed and gathered his hind legs under him to take off. It was now or never. I raised my head, pushed off the safety catch and squeezed. The bullet took him in the chest.
It was good enough. He coughed and staggered off towards the sea, but he wasn’t going far.
We found him jerking in the heather. His brain was electrically dead, and his heart had stopped, but most of the cells in his body were still alive. The stalker, Jimmy, took a knife from his belt, stuck it in the belly and ripped it open. The guts uncoiled and steamed like hot snakes. Jimmy hacked out a piece of liver and handed it to me.
‘It’s grand just now,’ he said.
What was I expected to do? Jimmy cut out another piece and started to chew it, so I chewed on my piece too. One surface was elegantly domed where it had pressed against the diaphragm. It had been pushed down thousands of times a day by a bellows full of salt air from the Outer Isles. Now the whole thing moved like a slug. The end of a tube nipped my tongue and squeezed blood into my mouth.
‘Good, eh?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Great,’ I said, trying not to be sick.
There was still blood on my face when I got back to the house. I bathed, changed and went for dinner. It was very fine Burgundy that night, and a beautiful woman sang some Schubert lieder at the piano afterwards.
* * *
The following week I was back in court, wondering aloud about the relevance of an eighteenth-century case to a twentieth-century paediatrician, deafened by the dissonance between the different modes of my life, wondering what sort of thing I was, where I’d come from and what the hell I was going to do about whatever the answers turned out to be.
And then, of course, I did nothing about it for years. The dissonance became an irritating but not particularly intrusive tinnitus. I got on with travelling and killing and reproducing and speechifying and trying to persuade, and, dangerously, I sometimes even persuaded myself. The whirr of the busy-ness made it possible to ignore the tinnitus, except in the early hours of the morning, or in the few frightening moments when I was alone. But then, prompted by nothing obvious, it swelled until it filled my head, and I knew I had to do something about it.
* * *
What I had to do was to start as near the beginning of my story (and your story) as I could: to walk the step, to meet the family, to feel the forces that made me the shape I am. But there are limits. Our start was a mathematical convulsion that became an explosion – an explosion that never happened in time because time hadn’t started, and that happened nowhere because space hadn’t been invented. You can’t start there without going mad.
It would have been just silly to join our story when the family were sponges in the sea off modern Madagascar, or shrews scuttling between the legs of London triceratops. But it wasn’t so silly to join it 40,000 years ago, when humans, with bodies and brains as modern as yours and mine (just better), lived in caves and shelters in Derbyshire.
It was cold then. There was shrill, bleak tundra rather than the dense forest that came when the last ice gave up. The men grew beards, and their hair hung low on their shoulders, but their bodies were as hairless as mine, though harder. They wore neatly tailored hide clothes, had roasts on Sundays, loved their children and didn’t want to die.
There was one big difference between them and us. Their sense of self wasn’t as intrusive and tyrannous as ours. If they had some sort of language (which they did – but more on that later), they didn’t befoul every sentence with ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
Up near my friend Sarah’s Peak District farm there’s a wood. I think one of these men lived there with his son, when there were only little, scrubby, occasional trees and tough grass. I daren’t call this man by a modern name. I’ll call him X. If I can find him and look him in the eye, I’ll know what I am.
Perhaps one day I will know his name.
* * *
Tom and I take a train for 150 miles and 40,000 years. We change in Derby, where we drink tea, play cards and finish off a flint spearhead.
‘Very irresponsible,’ a highly scented woman had said the week before. ‘By all means indulge your own fetish for squalor, and your own perverted ideas about cavemen as Philosopher-Kings, but don’t force poor Tom to come along too.’
‘Have you seen the forecast?’ asked a man with little hot eyes who believes what he reads in newspapers and plans to hold his wife’s wake in an airport hotel. ‘Sounds like a case for Social Services.’ He was serious, according to his brow and his CV.
Tom is thirteen, and wonders what all the fuss is about. We’d lived in holes before. Now we’re going to a wood we know well, and we’re going to make a shelter, kill things and stare into fires until Christmas. Then we’ll get the train back in time for all the usual things.
His teachers were understanding: ‘Interesting time, the upper Palaeolithic. Try to keep up with your maths, won’t you?’ His mother wasn’t. ‘Do you know how behind he is already?’
We’ve heard all the jokes about mammoths ever cracked. Our faces are tired from forced smiles.
At a tiny country station the taxi that’s going to drive us up to the moor is waiting. A plastic dog wobbles on the dashboard.
Copyright © 2021 by Charles Foster
