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of the water, failed to reach the top of the falls and crashed back into
the plunge pool.
'Did you see that?'
'No, what?'
'I saw a salmon.'
'You're kidding.'
'Watch.'
A minute later another fish hurled itself into the air. We sat on the
rock and brought out our lunch, and for the next hour or so we
watched salmon large and small rising from the water, wriggling
through the air as if to gain purchase on it then tumbling back into
the white chaos from which they had sprung.
Willing them upwards, elated by their flight, catching my breath
every time a fish appeared, I found myself enraptured. I felt at that
moment as if I had passed through the invisible wall that separated
me from the ecosystem, as if I were no longer a visitor to that place
but an inhabitant - a bear perhaps, emerged from a bimillennial
absence back into this ancient scrap of wildwood (which might
indeed have been one of the last places in which its species held out),
leaning over the falls, mouth agape, fur sodden with spray, knowing
at that moment only the water and the fish and the rocks on which it
stood.
It was then that I realized that a rewilding, for me, had already
begun. By seeking out the pockets of land and water that might inspire
and guide an attempt to revive the natural world, I had revived my
own life. Long before my dreams of restoration had been realized, the
untamed spirit I had sought to invoke had already returned. By equip-
ping myself with knowledge of the past while imagining a rawer and
richer future, I had banished my ecological boredom. The world had
become alive with meaning, alive with possibility. The trees now bore
the marks of elephants; their survival in the gorge prefigured the
return of wolves. Nothing was as it had been before. Like the salmon,
improbably returning from the void, the depleted land and sea were
now gravid with promise. For the first time in years, I felt that I
belonged to the world. I knew that wherever life now took me, how-
ever bleak the places in which I found myself might seem, that
feeling - the sense of possibility and, through possibility, the sense of
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