Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 31

hemp agrimony, knapweed and vetch. Where an oak had fallen across
the water, I stowed my paddle, lay back in the boat and pulled myself
under the branches. The water was so clear that I seemed to be drift-
ing through air. I could see every speck and fibre on the bed. But not
only did I spot no fish, I saw no life of any kind: no beetles, skaters,
nymphs or shrimps. No dragonflies patrolled the banks, no caddis or
mayflies danced over the water. Perhaps this stream had passed
through old lead mines. Lead has been worked here since the Romans,
and even mines abandoned many years ago produce effluvia so toxic
that almost nothing survives in the water it contaminates. Two streams
meet in a village close to where I live. One bustles with trout and bull-
heads, the other is dead. One day, a friend who lives in the village tells
me, the ducks kept there strayed from their usual haunts in the living
stream and dabbled for a while in the other. They were all found
belly up.
I slid down the stream and back into the estuary. As I rounded the
last bend in the river, the wind buffeted me. I could see, across miles
of water, all the way to the sea. Here, within the fortress of cloud that
guarded the hills, the land was ochre, olive, viridian. Beyond the wea-
ther curtain, in the coastal sunshine, the fields, brightened by fertilizer,
seemed almost to fluoresce. At the mouth of the estuary, the dunes
appeared to float free of their surroundings. Separated from the fore-
ground by a shimmering silver line, they hovered like Laputa over the
mudflats.
A flock of Canada geese that had been bobbing and craning their
necks on the bank took off, leaving a mess of moulted feathers tum-
bling over the mud. Merganser fledglings pounded the water as they
flapped after their mother, who ungallantly abandoned them and cir-
cled the estuary. The tide was now roaring out. As it met the wind, it
rose into standing waves, in which the boat seemed to be glued to the
water: I had to lean forward and place the paddle almost beside the
bows to make any progress. I travelled up creeks so narrow that when
I met an obstruction I had to reverse out. I rode down the banks of the
main channel, peering into the water, and saw nothing but mud and
broken branches.
Before long the current pulled me past the mudbanks and into the
empty quarter, the wide tract of sand I had explored before. But this