The Wild Hunt - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 15

with a great shudder onto the water. I paddled hard, submerging, ris-
ing, collapsing into the troughs, pushing through the breaking waves
into the rolling waters beyond.
I turned once, memorized the marks on the shore, then set out to
sea. There was a moderate, irregular swell with a few white horses.
The waves had the knapped faces of flints; their chipped crests span-
gled with sunlight. Ahead of me a fulmar glided down to the surface,
half-wheeled then soared away.
I let the line out, lodged the spool beside my foot and passed the
twine across my leg, just below the knee. As I paddled, I could feel
the weight tripping across the rocks of the reef. Occasionally the line
would drag, and I pulled it in to find clumps of crusty pink seaweed
attached to the hooks, or leathery ropes of ribbon weed, sometimes
twelve feet long. Half a mile from the land I crossed a band of lilac
jellyfish. They could almost have been oilspots, a faint, two-dimensional
bleaching of the water, but occasionally the wind would lift them, and
they roiled, fat and rubbery, through the surface. They poured under
the boat in their thousands. Some carried orange nematocysts on their
tentacles. Seedy, segmented, the jellyfish looked like burst figs.
On the far side of the reef a crabber made his lonely rounds, hauling
up his pots, rebaiting them, threading them back down the line as his
boat chugged slowly between the buoys. I could smell the bait and die-
sel across half a mile of sea. He headed back to shore and I was alone.
Towards the edge of the reef the swell rose. The line felt its way
through the sea like an extension of my senses, an antenna attached
to my skin, twitching and trembling. From time to time the spool
jumped up and the twine snapped taut across my knee, but when I
stopped and pulled I felt only the weight dropping back as the wave
that had lifted the line passed by. I was now a mile or more from the
shore, but I had not yet found what I was looking for. Every time I
encountered it, it seemed to be a little further from land than before.
A mile beyond the reef a gannet skimmed past me. It rose a few
yards into the air, folded its wings and fell like a dart into the water,
raising a plume of spray. It sat in the surface swallowing what it had
caught, flew on then dived again. I gave chase, but still the line
throbbed limply through the water. The sky had clouded over, the