RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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      I return to the Cape on the eve of the new year. The summer is long gone. The sun looks as strong as ever, but it is made milky by the cold, its span over the horizon shortened. The days open late, become public, flicker, then close early, reclaiming their privacy.

      As Dennis and Dory and I walk the beach at Herring Cove, the Arctic wind hits us full on. It bites at my face, tearing off the sun’s facile heat. I pull my scarf over my nose and stumble through the sand. Dennis kneels to the ground; we observe the rituals of the dead. A herring gull lies eviscerated, its guts pecked out by a glaucous gull which we saw at a distance, crouching over its cousin, ready and welcome protein. Dennis records the carcase on an index card. The blood, on pure white feathers, is strangely orange. The hole in its belly is big enough for me to wear the dead bird as a hat, should I so wish.

      I throw Dory’s ball. She is naked, save for her collar. I worry that she might be shivering too. Her brow furrows and she cocks her head to one side as she asks me to throw the ball again. When we are with dogs, physicality is uncomplicated. They walk beside us as our outliers. Part of the human party, they are also our bridge with the natural world. They are our other. They are not cleverer than us, so we love them.

      Like all animals, Dory has extraordinary eyes. Hers are fringed with pale lashes. No human could look so exquisite, or so feral, so unadorned. I can see why people once worshipped dogs. As we drive to the beach Dory perches on the armrest between Dennis and me, peering intently ahead, seeing and hearing things we do not see or hear. We only know because her ears rise or her eyes twitch. She knows where we are going. Perpetually expectant, as if every experience were a surprise, her body quivers with the excitement of just being alive. It is Funktionslust; an animal’s pleasure in doing what it does well, in being itself.

      Dory is an import, like everyone else here, rescued from the backstreets of Miami. Now she scents foxes and chases balls, sometimes letting them roll into the surf, then staring at them as if daring me to go in after them. Her breeding, such as it is, may be Caribbean – a wild dog, the sort you see roaming Haitian beaches in packs and howling in the heat of the night – but her compact body seems suited to this winter landscape. Her neat flat coat is the colour of the dunes and the parched grass, although now she is growing fine silver hairs through her desert pelt. She never stops being, never stops running for her ball; I think her heart would burst before she let up the chase. Her life runs ahead of ours, speeding up as she races alongside us in another time zone. I’d like to talk to her in her voice, but like Wittgenstein and his lion, I wouldn’t understand what I might hear. Debbie, Dennis’s wife, says that sometimes Dory comes back from the woods shaking as if in fear, as if she’d seen something out there.

      ‘I am secretly afraid of animals,’ Edith Wharton, an erstwhile New Englander for all that she spent almost all her life in Paris, wrote in 1924, ‘– of all animals except dogs, and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the Usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them; left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.’

      The wonder is that all animals are not afraid of us. J.A. Baker, who spent the nineteen-sixties observing the wildlife of Essex, wrote of finding a heron on the winter marshes, trapped by its wings frozen to the ground. Baker dispatched the bird, humanely, watching the light leave its frightened gaze and ‘the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud’.

      ‘No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man,’ Baker concludes, in a deeply affecting passage, cited by Robert Macfarlane: ‘A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on the descending wall of air, if you try and catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis … will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. We are the killers. We stink of death.’ Nature writing becomes war reporting. I remember the countryside of my childhood infected with that disease. In his ‘Myxomatosis’, written in 1955, Philip Larkin sees a rabbit ‘caught in the centre of a soundless field’, and uses his stick in an act of mercy. ‘You may have thought things would come right again | If you could only keep quite still and wait.’ My sister remembers our father having to do the same thing: the same terrifying eyes, the same dispatch.

      We only play our roles; animals’ fates are our own. The fifteenth-century orator Pico della Mirandola, in his essay ‘On the Dignity of Man’, declared that to be human is to be caught between God and animal: ‘We have set thee at the world’s centre that thou mayest more easily observe what is in the world.’ Five hundred years later, the Caribbean writer Monique Roffey saw that ‘Animals fill the gap between man and God.’ That gap has widened. As John Berger observed, animals furnished our first myths; we saw them in the stars and in ourselves. ‘Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal.’ But in the past two hundred years, they have gradually disappeared from our world, both physically and metaphysically: ‘Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.’

      We expect animals to be human, like us, forgetting that we are animals, like them. They ‘are not brethren, they are not underlings’, the naturalist Henry Beston wrote from his Cape Cod shack in the nineteen-twenties; to him, animals were ‘gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear … other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail СКАЧАТЬ