Bog Myrtle & Peat

Two weasels were fighting in the road near the hospital. By the time I stopped the car to watch, there was blood on the tarmac and the brambles were alive with warning birds. I could hardly have made myself more obvious to the animals as they fought, and my first impulse was to take a photograph before they vanished. But they didn’t care that I was there, and I can’t remember ever having had such an excellent chance to watch these animals at close hand. And the fight itself was staggering. They screamed and battled, and soon their bodies were lacquered in blood and saliva beneath my wing mirror. I sat back and took in the show. 

The fight ran on for ten minutes. At one point, they fought over the kerb and into the brambles. I watched the leaves twitching and the screaming dinned in the early evening. Then they spilled back onto the tarmac again, and neither showed any sign of getting tired. But then a car drove briskly towards me, and it seemed inevitable that both combatants would be killed beneath its wheels. I flashed my lights and jumped out into the road, flagging down the vehicle as it approached. The driver was a smiling man of about my age, with his wife in the passenger seat and two young girls in the back. 

I was right to stop the car; the man hadn’t seen the weasels and would have driven straight over them. I said I was sorry to hold him up, but he should take care to avoid “them” as he passed. I pointed to the weasels, which during the course of their fight had actually rolled over one of my boots. All eyes turned to the fighters, and a light seemed to switch on. Something interesting was happening, and with her eyes like saucers in excitement, the man’s wife asked if they were dogs. That took me by surprise. I take so much of this stuff for granted, I’m often thrown by the realisation that nature has become specialist knowledge. I told her they were weasels, and she immediately asked me who they belonged to. By this time, the kids had piled out of the back seats into the front and watched the battle which continued to rage between the cat’s eyes. Whenever one weasel seemed to be gaining an ascendancy, the other would turn the tables and flip its opponent onto its back. They were biting at each others’ faces; we could hear their mad panting and the sawing rasp of phlegmy breath.

I told her they were wild animals, and it was very unusual to see them at such close quarters. The driver asked me why they were fighting, and that shut me up because I didn’t really know. My certainty melted, and I began to offer generic explanations like “maybe they’re fighting over territory”, or “it’s possibly part of a courtship gone-wrong”. But without stopping the fight to interview the combatants, my best guess was oddly speculative. One of the kids had missed my answer, so she asked her Dad why they were fighting. Without taking his eyes of the weasels, he said “They’re fighting over territory”, and just like that, my guess had become a fact.

I reckon it’s fair to conclude those weasels really were fighting over some territorial dispute. That’s the kind of thing that animals do, and it satisfies our expectation of what’s normal. But in truth, we’re almost never certain what’s happening in the natural world, and our list of potential interpretations is clumsily brief. They can be fighting or mating or seeking food, but even a hunt or one animal’s pursuit of its prey is likely to be seen in fragmentary glimpses; if you witness a pursuit which afterwards crashes away into the undergrowth, you’re left wondering how it played out. Vice versa, if you witness a kill, you’re only privy to one small piece of how it came to pass. And we rarely perceive the reality of life in the wild because it seems to occur at a pace that is irritatingly ponderous. If you’ve ever watched deer, you’ll understand that the vast majority of their time is spent doing nothing at all. They doze for hours. If they stand up, it’s almost never to fight another deer or engage in reckless displays of drama. They walk quietly and wait at the field margins. Time slides around them, making a mockery of our impatience.

This sense of time and consciousness shines in Charles Foster’s book Being Human, in which he attempts to live like a stone age hunter gather in Derbyshire. Days pass where he has nothing to do. He notes his growing awareness of a sense of wakeful dreaming, neither conscious or absent in which leaves shimmer overhead and the landscape becomes fantastical and strange. All kinds of unexpected ends are opened in this space.

We think we live alongside animals, and we compress their lives into stories that we can understand. But as described in the work of Schopenhauer and the poetry of Ted Hughes, their lives are completely unfathomable. Writing in the New York Times recently, the author Jonathan Franzen explained that “a wild animal simply doesn’t have the particularity of self, defined by its history and its wishes for the future, on which good storytelling depends”. We are so deeply defined by our love of stories that it’s hard to get our heads around this simple, obvious fact. And if I had been surprised to meet a family who didn’t know what a weasel was, it was useful to realise that my own knowledge doesn’t go much further.