Matt, a plasterer from Dunster, met me outside the White Horse in Stogumber. His family had chased foxes and hares across Exmoor and the Quantocks for generations, and in the back of his van were some of the country鈥檚 best-nosed bloodhounds. One of them, Monty, was going to hunt me.

鈥淟et him have a sniff of your boot,鈥� said Matt. 鈥淚 bet we鈥檒l have you before you break a sweat.鈥�

I set off running along the side of a field of young maize. It had been raining, and there was now a hot fog rising from my footprints. It was bad weather for being a hunted deer.

I wasn鈥檛 going to be killed, but still the chase seemed to matter very much. That鈥檚 the neurotic temperament for you.

A piece of grit in my shoe, which I鈥檇 usually have ignored, was vast and malignant鈥攃onspiring with the universe for my destruction. The low, dry fences were high and slippery. I retched up my heart and it sat hunched in my throat, stopping the sea-fog-air from seeping into my blood. I was rushing, and, mockingly, nothing else was. The field was brutally, callously relaxed. A beetle crept calmly down a maize stem. I hated it for its leisure and indifference.

Then I stumbled out of the field and could stride, and my heart retreated to my ribs, and again there was a tide in my chest. The wood was still maddeningly leisurely, but it wasn鈥檛 out to get me. Everything seemed to have a voice, and now the voices were, by and large, sympathetic. The nettles apologized for stinging my legs and assured me that they鈥檇 do a far better job on Monty鈥檚 drooping lips, which were swaying up toward me.

But then I began to doubt the kindness of the wood. A carrion crow, which by all the rules should have scrambled as I thrashed past it, sat and watched me from a branch five yards above my head. I saw myself in its eye: hunched and panting. I鈥檇 have thought that everything in a crow鈥檚 eye would be black, but I was a brilliant red. I thought, absurdly, that it was waiting for me to be killed so that it could pick up some scraps. This was very undeerlike behavior.

In other ways, though鈥攎ostly unconscious鈥擨 was behaving very much like a hunted deer. My adrenals were pumping out cortisol and adrenaline. The cortisol made me taut. (The next day its immunosuppressive effect threw open the drawbridge of my throat to an invading virus.) Blood was diverted from my gut to my legs. Though I was slumping from the effort, I鈥檇 stop from time to time, hold my head up high, and reflexively sniff. If I鈥檇 had mobile ears they鈥檇 have pricked and swiveled. Though I looked for water, as deer do, to cool me and to send my scent spiraling away, I ran on the driest ground I could find. I knew (from well before birth, rather than because I鈥檇 read books and watched hounds) that dry earth doesn鈥檛 hold scent well, or, if it holds it, hugs the particles close, leaving few for snuffling noses.

Unlike a deer, though, I longed to be out of the wood. It鈥檚 often very difficult for staghounds to push deer into the open. Sometimes it takes hours. The deer double back, lie flat in deep cover, and saber-rattlingly confront hounds rather than breaking out.

It would have made sense for me to stay in the wood. Scent bounces off trees like balls in a pinball machine and eddies like the dark, curd-coated corners of the East Lyn River. It鈥檚 hard for even the most educated nose to read it there. Out in the open, there鈥檚 a slime trail of scent through the grass. It points in the direction of the prey.聽

My preference for the open was therefore strange. I suppose we want to die where we鈥檝e evolved, just as an overwhelming majority of people say that they鈥檇 prefer to die at home. We evolved on an East African plain. Like most people, I now express this inchoate preference in many neurotic ways: in a fear of the dark and of caves (though, like everyone else, I began life in a totally dark, pounding cave, and was safer there than I鈥檝e ever been since); in a need to have the curtains open at night so that I can see turning stars and tell myself that the universe is still doing what it should; in the malaise I get in a room with no natural light; in the conviction that maggots eating something underground are more obscene than maggots eating something in the sunshine; in shuddering at coffins. A private hospice on a mountainside could charge a lot more than one in the suburbs. It鈥檚 no surprise that seaside towns are full of retirees, desperate for a big view as the sun sinks. It鈥檚 all because of Tanzania.

No: I wasn鈥檛 going to die. But I couldn鈥檛 tell that to my adrenals. They pushed me on through the maize. My breath was deafening. I couldn鈥檛 hear anything else.

I hadn鈥檛 expected silence. I鈥檇 expected an exhilarating duet between baying hounds and rasping lungs. That would have been an appropriate, dignifying, and comforting soundtrack to the drama. But there was no noise at all behind me: no deep funereal belling from between wobbling jowls.

This silence was hard to take. That, too, is a legacy from the savanna, and another reason for my suspicion of woods. Neurologically I鈥檓 set up to expect dangers, opportunities, and options to be pretty clear. There are unseen, unheard, and unsmelled things on the plains, but they are calculable. There鈥檚 a fair chance that there will be lions in that long grass: I鈥檇 better skirt it to get to the zebra. My skill is not in detecting the dangers: it is in mentally testing out the possible responses; it鈥檚 in painless, risk-free optimization.

But, panting in that Somerset field, I didn鈥檛 have the data necessary to start calculating. I am physiologically set up to avoid dying gloriously in the open, and thus have a distinct preference for dying in the open rather than elsewhere. My heroic metanarratives have evolved to justify my physiological settings. 鈥淗ow can man die better,鈥� asked Horatius, urging the Romans to hold the bridge against the surging Etruscans.

than facing fearful odds;
For the ashes of his fathers聽
And the temples of his gods?

Monty caught up with me on the side of another maize field. He was ten yards away when I first saw him. When he saw me, from under those heavy roller-blind lids, he just turned away. He didn鈥檛 need any consummation other than a checkmark on his time sheet. The job was done. He turned around and ambled back up to Matt, who was several minutes behind.

I was glad to be comprehensively humiliated and scared. To be brought down with a whoo-whoop after a five-mile point on airy downland wouldn鈥檛 have taught me about being prey. It would have been like a greyhound race鈥攁 contest between two predators鈥攊n which I鈥檇 come off the worst. Being prey is never glorious.

Usually large prey species are killed quickly. Those epic hunts of caribou by wolves for many hours make good TV, but they are unusual. Usually wolves explode out of the trees, course for a few hundred yards, and then either kill or give up. That鈥檚 just how the thermodynamic arithmetic generally works.

Unlike wolves, staghounds don鈥檛 give up. That鈥檚 at the root of most reasoned opposition to stag hunting with hounds. Red deer, the argument goes, never evolved to be long-distance runners. They rarely had to be. They鈥檙e sprinters. But hunted deer on Exmoor run for an average of around twelve miles, and for around three hours. That, it鈥檚 said, is likely to exact a painful physiological price. If you鈥檝e trained to run the hundred meters, it鈥檚 going to hurt to run a half marathon. There鈥檚 a loud, bitter debate about whether there is credible evidence of those physiological costs.

Of course there is a physiological cost to pursuit: the animal is brought to bay precisely because it runs out of the funds necessary for continued payment. The cost is plainly more than when a high-speed projectile smashes up the heart of a grazing stag. And the physiological toll must have some 鈥渆motional鈥� corollaries. (You leave those quote marks in or out, as you please.) There鈥檚 much more adrenaline surging through the hunted stag; its neurons are burning like the bars of an electric heater as the messages spurt through them. But whether that鈥檚 painful is a matter of definition and opinion. The membrane between pain and pleasure is often thin and sometimes invisible. Pain brings pleasure: as the tiring stag leaps over a farm gate, tearing some muscle fibers, its brain gets a euphoric, analgesic dose of endogenous opioids.

I鈥檝e run long distances: sometimes fifty miles at a time, and then up the next morning to run a lot more, carrying all I need on my back. The cacophonous scream of the muscles is orchestrated by a masterly Mozartian brain into harmonies that are lovely鈥攍ovely because they chime with the frequencies of the rest of the wild. When I鈥檝e crept, cramped, bleeding, and blistered, into a sleeping bag, I鈥檝e always said: 鈥淪o this is what legs are for, and this is what being alive feels like!鈥�

This might be because I鈥檓 a masochistic pervert, in which case it鈥檚 unlikely to say much about hunted red deer. But that鈥檚 not necessarily the case.

I鈥檇 rather be killed outside, after fifteen heart-bursting miles, having tried every possible ruse: having taken the hounds plunging through pad-ripping gorse, with my having been tried and found wanting, with a good chance achingly forfeited, with my natural heroin beginning to pry my consciousness out of my throbbing head, with a splendid malicious hope of disemboweling a hound, with a look, through salt-stung eyes, through the haze to Wales, than be chewing cud, and then a thud and the dark.

But perhaps that鈥檚 just me. A quick, unreflective death (ideally, it seems, a catastrophic heart attack at dinner) is what everyone seems to want. It鈥檚 a fashion. A few generations ago people prayed to be saved from sudden death: they prayed for time; for context; for goodbyes; for the chance to take stock and to make memorable gestures. Now the prayer is to be spared all this: to be catapulted without warning into the void. Very odd.

Red deer, though, don鈥檛 have much idea about their own death. Timor mortis shouldn鈥檛 be added to the indictment against the staghunters. Hunted deer are fearful, but you can have fear without having a clear reason to be afraid, and indeed there are many reasons other than the fear of personal extinction to be afraid of snapping teeth.

Red deer are programmed to avoid danger, but in their definition of danger there鈥檚 no existential category, and so there鈥檚 no existential angst.

Fearing one鈥檚 own death and empathizing with the death of another aren鈥檛 the same thing: presumably death row psychopaths don鈥檛 go quietly into the night. But there鈥檚 an obvious connection. If deer were horrified by the sight of a dead deer, we could start to argue that they subjectively fear their own extinction. The fact that they鈥檙e not makes it hard even to begin the argument.

That鈥檚 not to say that the deaths of other animals are emotionally irrelevant. Herbivores have relationships with one another that no doubt have some emotional color. To kill an animal that has been part of the survivor鈥檚 life is to destroy an ecosystem. That鈥檚 bound to disturb. But it seems that with ruminants, horses, and pigs, the disturbance is not triggered by outraged empathy. Indeed, there鈥檚 little evidence that they鈥檙e empathic at all. They鈥檙e machines; islands; cold gene bearers.

C. S. Lewis remarked that if the reductionists were right, humans should not complain as they do about death. They should breezily accept it as something as natural as breath. 鈥淒o fish complain of the sea for being wet?鈥� he asked. That humans complain about death was an indication for him that they weren鈥檛 designed to die. That red deer don鈥檛 complain about death is an indication that they are.

Morality, at least in part, is about the fulfillment of natural expectations. It鈥檚 less morally culpable to eat an herbivore than a carnivore. Herbivores expect it, and carnivores don鈥檛.

In every culture there鈥檚 a taboo about eating carnivores. The shamans agree with Yahweh.

Excerpted from by Charles Foster, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, LLC. 聽Copyright 漏 2016 by Charles Foster. 聽All rights reserved.

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