Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 119

ful nursery rhyme or lullaby. It is called Pais Dinogad : Dinogad's Shift.
The mother tells her son, Dinogad, of his dead father's prowess as a
hunter.
Dinogad's shift is speckled, speckled,
It was made from the pelts of martens . . .
When your father went to the mountains
He would bring back a roebuck, a boar, a stag,
A speckled grouse from the mountain,
And a fish from the Derwennydd falls.
At whatever your father aimed his spear -
Be it a boar, llewyn , or a fox -
None would escape but that had strong wings.*
This is not, in other words, an account like the story of Cath Palug
in the Black Book of Carmarthen : the animals it invokes were real
ones. They belonged to the fauna of the time and would have been
known to the poet Aneirin, who wrote the manuscript. So what does
llewyn mean? Until the most recent bone was discovered in Kinsey
Cave (which happens to lie within the region in which Cumbric was
spoken), linguists assumed that the word could not have meant what
it appeared to mean, so they translated it as wildcat or fox. But the
new findings have prompted them to reassess it; it could, after all,
mean lynx. 71 (The modern Welsh word for lion, by the way, is llew .)
A ninth-century stone cross from the isle of Eigg shows, alongside
the deer, boar and aurochs pursued by a mounted hunter, a speckled
cat with tasselled ears. Sadly the animal's backside no longer exists: if
it had a stubby tail, that might have clinched it. 72 This could be the
last known glimpse of the native lynx in British culture. It might have
clung on in forest remnants - perhaps in the Grampians - for another
few hundred years, but it must have been extinct by ad 1500 at the
latest. Like the wolf, it sustained itself in small populations scattered
across Europe. Like the wolf, it is gradually emerging from these
enclaves.
The lynx does not pursue its prey. It is an ambush predator: it hides
beside the places and paths used by the animals on which it feeds, and
* Translated by Geraint Jones. 70