I dragged it down a gully, away from the road. A stream, some birch and elder, the usual cans and bottles and torn plastic. I felt seedy, like a murderer hiding the body. I dug a hole beneath a holly tree and the wind, I swear, the wind played pibroch in its branches – a lament. I tucked the deer into the hole and promised that I’d return.
In 1956, in a suburb of Chicago, Leon Festinger joined a cult. Aliens were set to destroy the planet but they, the chosen ones, would be saved. Dorothy Martin, the cult’s leader, prophesied the date, and they gathered at her house to await the end of days. This is a true story. Leon Festinger was a psychologist. He’d infiltrated the cult to find out what might happen on the off chance, the remote possibility, that there would be no death ray, no shiny UFOs come to whisk them to safety.
The sun rose and the sun set. The paparazzi of the day gathered outside the house to await the cult’s response to the non-ending of the world. When prophesies fail there’s a dissonance, when the facts clash with what we believe it creates what Festinger termed ‘cognitive dissonance’. It hurts our head and often, to soothe, we’d rather twist the facts than break our faith or hear a different story.
Dorothy Martin informed the press that she’d received a communication from the aliens, in which they told her that because of the strength of her belief, and that of her followers, because of her virtue, they, the aliens, had decided to give earth a second chance. She’d saved the world and, best of all, in the aftermath, the cult’s following continued to grow. Cognitive dissonance – how we’ll avoid it, how we’ll hear only what we want to hear, and see only that which we want to see.
I killed the fox myself. Driving home late over the B729, the road empty, the night frosted and starry. A glint of green eyes and then a bump and braking fast, and running back.
The fox was surprised, sprawled awkward on the road, the green fading from its eyes. I picked up its hot fox body and put it in the back of the car and drove home slow, slack-jawed, with the windows wide open, letting in all the dark of the night. And in the morning, I buried it in the garden, offered up my hapless apology, and jumped in the car and drove to work.
In December 2012, Jyoti Singh got on a bus in New Delhi. She was beaten and raped on the bus and died a few days later from her injuries. That same week, my wife found a hare on the road and carried it home. These are her words:
I’m carrying the hare along the road. One of its back legs is hanging by a single tendon, blood seeping slowly in the cold. It’s early morning, but the hare is late. The school bus has taken it by surprise, for the last time. I’m holding it like a new born baby, one hand beneath its head, the other beneath its backside. It’s heavy. It weighs roughly as much as a full grown, well-fed tomcat. It’s the kind of weight I’d prefer to sling over my shoulder.
For some time now, I’ve been unable to let the images go: the bus in the semi-dark, the young woman and her male friend; the blood on the men’s hands and all their wide eyes in the confines of the vehicle; the metal air; the woman’s voice which I can hear, again and again, no matter where I look.
The body is still warm and limp, still supple, and I keep half-expecting its eyes to blink, its legs to jerk awake. I half-expect the hare to jump and charge away from me. But it doesn’t. I carry it into the woods and put it down beneath a rhododendron bush. I lay it out in such a way that the gashed leg is invisible and it looks, it really looks, as though the hare is wide alive and running. It doesn’t matter whether I’m doing this for me or for all hares.
I find a few branches and twigs and make a kind of woody tent over the body. I don’t do this for other roadkill, but I’ve been watching the hares all year – there’s a pair. Or there was. They circle the house like sentinels, beginning on the eastern side with the sun and working their way round through the orchard, past the hen-run and into the woods. I watch them through the windows, their black-tipped ears, their long, powerful hind-legs that work like suspension coils, easing the body up and forward, down and forward, perpetually sprung; ready, I supposed, for the unexpected.
By now it’s a familiar story. The woman with a young, smiling face and soft skin. Her softness in the last light of the evening. All the shouting men, their mouths, their drenched clothes.
It’s a small back road with little traffic, but the school bus passes twice a day and the driver doesn’t mean to hit it. He’s late and the kids are waiting, out in the cold on a corner of turf.
I stroke its long ears back against its head, stroke its fine coat, white belly, small face. Hares have kinetic skulls – they’re jointed – which allows for a degree of movement between the front and back sections. It helps absorb the force of impact as the hare strikes the ground.
The iron bar. The shadow faces. The quiet glistening of the steering wheel, an empty glass bottle, an eye.
Badger came last. I found it slumped on a humpback bridge not far from home. It was ill-shaped, greasy. More half-filled sack than badger. It’s the first one I’ve seen in the area, dead or alive. It’s dairy country, and even though they’re protected, and though there’s no cull proposed for Scotland, the farmers quietly ensure an absence of badgers. Because badgers are dissonant: they contradict the story our farmers like to hear – about how they’re in charge, how they have the right to protect the herd, for all our sakes.
This one had no need of the cull. No need for shotgun pellets or terriers at bay. Its head had been crushed beneath the wheels of more than one car. So much so that when I dug up the bones a year later, I thought the skull had been stolen, until I noticed the fragments: the curve of an eye socket, a shattered jaw.
Despite the smell and the flies, I carried it home, hands clasping a protective loop, its broken head at my heart.
There’s no template for making sense of this. In her poem ‘Frontier County’ Karen Solie says that ‘our separateness / among separate things unites us: a violent wonder / at convergence.’ But badgers are dissonant, and so are the foxes and hares and the roe deer, and I’m sorry, my dears, but there’s little wonder this time, only violence and forgetting, so that we really don’t see the rags of fur and tattered feathers on the roads, the splinters of bone in the verges. We don’t see the congealed blood, like dark blisters, on the tarmac.
Grief is a vessel, a conduit for the living and for the dead. By reflecting on the lives and deaths of these creatures, by honouring them, perhaps we help to carry them home.
Badger Dissonance was written and performed by Dougie Strang, with the exception of ‘Hare’, which is from a prose poem by Em Strang. It was performed on the opening night of In Other Tongues with musical and sung accompaniment by Kayne Coy. The performance included the creation of a shrine to each of the animals. Barry Lopez is quoted from his essay ‘Apologia’ (University of Georgia Press, 1998). Karen Solie is quoted from her poem ‘Frontier Country’, which appears in the collection Pigeon (Anansi Press, 2009).
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Em Strang is a poet. Her collection Bird Woman, which includes ‘Hare’, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and is available in the Dark Mountain Online Shop. Kayne Coy is a singer, musician, and Gaelic scholar.
I like the tone of this article. We need to respect the beasts. When I find roadkill I eat it, unless it’s too far gone. My vegan friend asks, but would you eat your friends? If she and I are ever marooned on a desert island with no food, she better watch out.
Hello Dougie
Here’s my roadkill badger story.
Last winter I found a roadkill badger early one Saturday morning. A young female. Fresh as a daisy, blood round her mouth, I guess she had been killed the previous night. In a spirit of honouring the dead, I loaded her body in the boot and brought her home, intending to skin her and bury the remains.
But after spending some hours peeling off the skin, it seemed the last thing I should do with this large, fresh omnivore carcass was to bury it. A better way to honour the badger’s life and untimely death seemed like the Indian way: to use every part of the body I could, and at the same time absorb some of the animal’s wild soul.
So I butchered her, fried and ate the heart and some of the shoulder. It had a ery powerful, wild and gamey flavour. I buried the skull, feet and intestines with a few words of thanks. The meat went into the oven and the freezer, to be brought out on special occasions — we ate the last of it six months later. A neighbour told me that in our area (northern Spain) locals used to eat badger when they could get it. Our friends and family started asking before eating any meat dish at our house: “¿Esto contiene tejón?” (Does this contain badger?)
I used the brain in a not-entirely-successful attempt to tan the skin, with the vague idea of making a shamanic drum. But it came our very stiff and greasy, and is now hanging over a pole in the shed — a wren has come to make her nest inside, so the skin has served a purpose too.
Thanks for your life, badger.
Cheers Robert, good to hear. Apparently badger hams were once considered quite a treat – right up until the 70s here in the UK.
Hope all’s well at Abrazo.
I found this very moving, Dougie. Thank you.
I’ve also made a practice of at least lifting roadkill out of the traffic and laying it on the verge since I read that Lopez piece.
I’m in the heart of badger-cull territory, and frequently come across dead badgers slung out of cars, dragged out of setts by I imagine terriers and savaged, and obviously hit by traffic (often after their sett entrances have been blocked). A few years ago I was told that where I was living in Devon then was a popular area for ‘gangs’ to come down from Bristol or the Midlands to trap badgers for baiting, with dogs, until one or other was fatally injured. Obviously, all of that is illegal. And it’s utterly heartbreaking.
I’ve been an active member of the anti-cull movement here, Seems we’ve lost – at least for the moment.
And heartbreaking too is the new absence of badgers on our land where we had a couple of active setts – we’ve forbidden any trapping/culling on our land but since the badgers’ nocturnal journeys take them over the bank into our neighbours’ fields I can only imagine that despite our vigilance one way or another they’ve been disposed of.
I miss the badger latrines that so trashed our field, and the way the badgers dug in the potato crop! At least I knew we were helping to protect a tiny pocket of an iconic species.
Cheers Roselle, and sad to hear of the loss of the badgers from your land.
This is a difficult thing to write as I really don’t want to upset anyone, particularly the author of a beautifully written and sensitive piece. Also this can be challenging but please, bear with me.
Most animals and birds (and, who knows, maybe all creatures) mourn when they lose a family member or mate, and this can include grief between different species. But ‘honouring’ the dead by burial is a human thing that should not be forced onto wildlife. Other animals by and large don’t do it. They don’t seem to see the need.
European badgers are rare in that it is known that, if a badger dies within the sett, the other sett/clan members will inter it somewhere in the sett. And note, they inter, not bury. That means they will simply block up the tunnel/chamber where the body lies. There is only one known incident where a badger died just outside a sett, and two badgers pulled it inside to inter it. American badgers tend to live solitary lives, so this behaviour doesn’t apply.
And elephants do appear to have ‘elephant graveyards’, and have been filmed playing with or fondling the bones of dead relatives. No one knows why nor should we attach any human assumptions to it. All cats, large and small, bury bodies of animals they have killed but that’s to hide the food until later (one of my cats always tries to bury his dish if he hasn’t eaten all the food in it).
All those working to protect UK badgers do remove badger carcases from the road onto the verge, but there are reasons beyond the natural distaste of seeing a body smeared all over the tarmac by traffic. In the early part of the year bodies are examined to check if they are lactating females, in the hope that the cubs can be rescued from a nearby sett rather than starving to death.
During the useless and cruel badger culling period, road-kill bodies will be sprayed with a bright colour to prevent the cullers from using the bodies to a) claim money for a kill and b) add the body to the total kill allowed by Natural England. And all year round road-kill badgers are examined to see if they have been shot. Unless licensed to do so by the government, it is illegal to kill badgers. Those who do so often place the bodies on roads so they will be mistaken for road-kill.
And we all do our best to remove bodies from roads where they will be driven over again and again. We do not bury them, just put them out of the way of traffic, either on the verge or tucked into the edge of a wood or field. We (and, yes obviously, I am part of this) do this for badgers, deer, rabbits, hares, assorted birds and any other wildlife.
But here is the important thing about dead animals. All ecologies across the world include a host of different scavengers, whose role it is to clean up the environment. Burying unsightly bodies deprives them of their food. Should they go hungry so that I can feel comfortable?
If we cannot cope with that we have not yet become part of the ecological web, where all things are equal, where Nature fits things together and human feelings hold no sway. The biggest challenge to understanding that we humans are not superior but simply a part of all life is learning to accept, fully, how things work, and sometimes that is very uncomfortable.
Thanks for your thoughts Lesley. I agree about the importance of carrion as a food source. Normally I wouldn’t bury, but I knew I wanted the skeletons of each of these particular animals to be part of my performance piece, and burial is the best way to clean the bones and keep them together. I’ll rebury, with thanks, once this performance cycle is finished.