Wild thing

In Competition No. 2948 you were invited to step into the skin of a species of your choice and provide an account of the experience.

In his fascinating, funny book Being a Beast Charles Foster attempted ‘to learn what it is like to shuffle or swoop through a landscape that is mainly olfactory and auditory rather than visual’. As a badger he took up residence in a hole and ate earthworms (they taste of ‘slime and the land’). And as an urban fox he ‘lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans living in terraced houses all round — which wasn’t hard’.

It’s a mighty tall order to enter the cognitive and sensory world of a different species. Foster himself acknowledges that any attempt to shuffle off his human skin entirely was doomed to failure. The best you can do, he says, is to ‘go as close as you can to the frontier and peer over it’. The exacting nature of the task was reflected in the standard of the entry, but the best of the bunch are printed below. They earn their authors £30 each and the bonus fiver belongs to D.A. Prince.
 
I must locate the chestnut I buried three weeks ago. Scent is no clue: a fox has drenched this garden, and lawn fertiliser overwhelms the subtlety of decay. The ceramic pot of winter-flowering pansies, now uprooted across the terrace, yields nothing; six rapid excavations in the lawn produces only worms — and blackbirds have no sense of community beyond the avian. My nails are black with earth. But here’s a pine cone, only part-gnawed: the nuts are hidden but the woody husks are bite-able, tearable until the milky, musty pulp is chewable.