The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 186

11
The Beast Within
(Or How Not to Rewild)
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a
mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a
million or two humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of
that slim yellow mountain lion!
D. H. Lawrence
Mountain Lion
Four Czech skinheads, dressed in black muscle shirts and combat
trousers, eyes glittering, jabbed their fingers at the weapons and talked
in low, intense tones. They strained with anger and excitement. For
them, it seemed, the war deemed to have finished almost a century
ago was not yet over. Here, 600,000 men had died in the First World
War, on a front now largely forgotten in northern Europe - the Soška
fronta - where soldiers of the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies
faced each other in conditions as brutal and lethal as those on the
Somme, along the Soca valley and over the mountains, in some cases
across a few metres of bare peak, in trenches hacked into rock and ice.
Walking in the Julian Alps, we had followed the old supply lines,
seen concrete emplacements and stopped at the remains of cable sta-
tions which were used to haul equipment from one peak to another.
As we passed other hikers in bright colours, with friendly greetings in
a dozen languages, watched the ibex placidly chewing the cud in the
high mountain pastures and fed the choughs on scraps of cheese, the