Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 78

cameramen adjusted their tripods and stamped their feet to keep
warm. An ecologist uncapped his binoculars. The volunteers - baggy
jumpers, torn trousers, dreadlocks and nose rings - smoked roll-ups
and spoke in tense whispers. From the larch plantation on the moun-
tain to the west I could hear the distant baying of hounds and the
occasional warble of a hunting horn. The still, cold air trickled down
my neck.
A monstrous bull mastiff, all saggy skin and jowls, that had been
snuffling round our feet, suddenly leapt into the air, squealed like a
piglet, then ran whimpering to its owner: it had touched the electric
fence.
'I think we're ready to go,' someone said.
Two young men with blond beards wedged hoardings into the mud
on either side of a great box. One of them drew out the pins which
secured the panel facing the pond. A moment later there was a flash
of chocolate fur between the boards, then another: two large animals
blurred past and disappeared into a rough hut of sticks and rushes
that had been built at the water's edge.
After a few minutes, just as one of the bearded men had promised,
the willow branches shutting off the far side of the hut began to shud-
der. The sticks soon started falling to the ground. The animals, he had
told me, had to be allowed to chew their way out: then they would
believe that the structure belonged to them. We waited for another
minute, then a creature which contrived to look both utterly alien and
perfectly matched to this place emerged from the hole it had made.
The onlookers cheered. It raised its big blunt head and sniffed the air,
peering dimly towards the source of the noise. Then it waddled for-
ward as I would expect an ankylosaur to have moved: hunched and
heavy, dragging its belly and tail over the marshy ground.
It slipped into the pond, pushed its way through the waterweed
and, suddenly slick and graceful, began to swim. Its head and back
looked almost perfectly flat, emerging just an inch above the water,
interrupted only by the little round ears. Half seal, half hippo, it pad-
dled about in a circle. Then one of the cameramen shifted to get a
better view and it flipped over, gave the surface of the pond a great
crack with its tail and disappeared under the water. It emerged a
moment later and began to swim along the bank, sniffing and poking