Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 106

something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant
trees, I asked myself: what's the message in the land? What's the story
it's telling us? My question was: “What's Nature seeking to do here?”
That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination.
Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.'
This land, he hoped, would within fifty years be used by capercail-
lie, ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels, boar, beavers, perhaps lynx.
But these were the less contentious of his proposals. 'My aim is to
have wolves back in Scotland by 2043. That would be 300 years after
the last one is said to have been killed here. It's one generation from
now. Ecologically they could live here today. The obstacles are cul-
tural and economic.'
I stood, braced against the bitter wind, under the torn canopy of the
old trees, absorbing what he had just said, my synapses firing, my
thoughts slipping across a world that had suddenly become more
labile, more thrilling, less predictable than any I had pictured until
then. I felt a shiver of transgression - of sharing a thought forbidden,
abhorred - mingled with confusion and doubt. Was this possible? Per-
missible? Even to imagine?
We ate our sandwiches in Alan's car, then put our seats back and
slept. He fell asleep immediately, as if he had turned off a light. I
drifted for a while. Wood ants swarmed over the land, darkening the
earth, each one carrying a seed in its mandibles, now frantically ruf-
fling through the earth with their snouts, eared and bristling, shoving
in the seeds and scraping the soil back with their trotters, swarming
on, tusks and antennae, over the mountains and through the next
glen . . .
I will not try to disguise my reasons for wanting to see missing ani-
mals reintroduced. It is not, as the previous chapter might have
suggested, the desire to control floods, or reduce erosion or hinder the
spread of disease, though all these might be useful side-effects. My
reasons arise from my delight in the marvels of nature, its richness
and its limitless capacity to surprise; from the sense of freedom, of the
thrill that comes from roaming in a landscape or seascape without
knowing what I might see next, what might loom from the woods or