Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 30

settled back into the mud. Now I understood what had happened
before. Instead of making a hump on the sand, it curled itself around
a ripple, perfectly mimicking not only the colour but also the shape of
the riverbed. Even when I hovered right over it, it was impossible to
see. It did not dart off until I almost trod on it.
By now I had crossed the weather curtain. The wind whipped the
water and the rain pitted the surface: spotting fish became still harder.
One or two fair-sized flounders darted off, but into deeper water
where I could see nothing. I went back and fetched the boat. As I pad-
dled upstream, I saw the great slurping mouths of mullet protruding
from the water. I was tempted to fling the spear at them, but knew
that it was useless. Soon the stream I was following petered out in a
wilderness of sand and empty cockle shells. It would take at least an
hour for the tide to connect it to a main channel. The weather was
worsening, so I turned round.
The flow had changed again: I had travelled against it in both direc-
tions. I returned to where I had seen a broken lobster pot marooned
in the middle of the flats; now the sea was lapping round it. The wind
rose; I struggled against air and water. As the tide flowed past me I
marvelled at its filing system. There were lanes of twigs half a mile
long, strands of seaweed, then a drift packed with what at first I took
to be dead shrimps. There were millions: I feared for a moment that
there had been a plague or a poisoning. But when I scooped some up
I saw that they were cast-off skins: perfect little suits of armour, with
a gauntlet for every pleopod and palp. Nowhere did I see twigs in the
shrimp lane or shrimp skins among the seaweed; the current had
chosen a stream for each of them.
A week later I tried again, perhaps for the last time. I launched the
boat at the head of the estuary. My plan was to intercept the flounders
on their way out of the tidal creeks that fed into the rivermouth. Here
the drowsy summer pastures met the scoured flats of the windfunnel.
Sheltered by bluffs and embankments, cattle flicked their tails in the
deep July meadows. Two dabchicks flipped underwater as I
approached; a kingfisher blurred along the bank.
I found the mouth of a stream, hidden between walls of reed. I
passed between the banks, cut off by the rustling screens from other
sights and sounds. The reeds gave way to wild banks of bramble,