Elegy

There was a dead badger on the road this morning, sprawled across the white lines in the middle, its innards smeared across the tarmac. I watched the line of traffic on each side as it passed, imagining the mixed responses to this scene of casual death: the concern, the indifference, the sadness, the disrespect. The colours of its pelt were different from those in my memory; not so much black-and-white, but a rich mixture of earth and grey, russet and charcoal. It seemed so large to be lying there between the passing wheels, so vulnerable.

It is not always the slower-moving species which are victims of speeding cars. Deer will often vault the hedges in the early morning into the path of a motorist. I saw one as I was cycling from the village a couple of weeks ago; the four-wheel drive turning and driving slowly back up the road, the flailing limbs on the carriageway in front of me, the rasping of its breath, the closed eyes, the thread of spittle hanging from its tightly clenched mouth. I dragged it from the tarmac to the soft grassy verge; a useless gesture, a poor attempt at atonement.

Afterwards, I found myself thinking of Barry Lopez’s short story Apologia, in which he describes a journey through the mid-west to visit friends, stopping to carry fresh roadkill from the asphalt, the sense of shame at the waste of animal life. He brings into focus the individual damage of each tragedy, the shocking breadth of species that come to an end on the highways of the great wilderness. It is, at one level, a deeply affecting piece; it makes the reader to look afresh at every death on the road. It just may not be enough to change our driving habits.

I think of JA Baker, cycling along the tracks and lanes of Essex in search of the Peregrines that obsessed him for ten years, on foot through the wet clay soils of winter fields, shrinking from the taint of humans by which the birds were spiralling to extinction. ’We stink of death.’ He wrote in The Peregrine, ‘We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost.’ By slipping free from the daily drive to work, the confined world of tarmac and concrete, Baker understood the curse we have placed on the animals and birds which flicker at the margins of our lives, like a warning whispered at the edge of hearing. The stink we carry is of petrol and limestone dust, of scorched rubber and hot tarmac, of carrion picked clean by scavenging birds on a country road.