Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 32

time, riding the main channel, I found myself colliding with geysers,
thick with sand and dead leaves, that rose unexpectedly in the middle
of the river, sometimes with such force that I felt them thump and lift
the boat as I passed over. A buoy buried in this boiling water seemed
to plough away upstream, like a great fishing float pulled by a shark.
I drifted past the bank of a sandbar, my spear raised, scanning the
clear water in the margins. The ubiquitous, uncatchable mullet
exploded away. I startled two large flounders, but both ribboned off
before I had a chance to thrust the harpoon. A platoon of oystercatch-
ers in black and white uniforms, wings clamped smartly to their sides,
turned as one body and marched across the sand as I approached. I
saw the reflection of the spear on the water, and I was struck by a
thought that had not occurred to me before: I was restoring the kayak
to its original function. Both the technology and the name have been -
like anorak and parka - borrowed from Arctic peoples. Just as I
stalked the edges of the sandbanks with my harpoon, they patrolled
the margins of the ice-loes. Here, however, they would have starved.
Local people had told me that flounder once swarmed the estuary
in such numbers that they would push wheelbarrows down to the
water and impale the fish with garden forks until the barrows were
full. But after my last attempt, too late, I heard that the crab boats had
recently begun netting flounder just beyond the mouth of the estuary, to
use as bait. They had more or less cleaned them out. This practice, if
the story is true, is so wasteful and (given the quantities of dead fish,
as well as heads and bones, that the fishing industry discards) so
unnecessary that it seems we have hardly moved on from the days
when the English colonists in North America prised giant lobsters out
of rockpools to feed to their pigs. 1 The least we should expect, in these
lean times, is that any fish caught should be eaten by people.
I left the boat on a sandbank and waded for a mile or so over the
ridged and furrowed bed of an emptying channel. The water had
cleared: now I could see the bottom when I stood waist-deep. I moon-
walked over the riverbed, almost weightless. Small flatfish catapaulted
out of the sand.
As I stalked up the channel, my spear poised above the water, I felt
as flexed and focused as a heron. Every cell seemed stretched, tuned
like a string to the world through which I moved, straining for a note