Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 33

among the shifting harmonics of wind and water. My concentration
intensified until I became hyper-aware, sensing each grain beneath my
bare toes, every ripple round my waist, every movement, however
infinitesimal, among the benthos. Suddenly I was gone.
It is hard to explain what happened. Perhaps it was the mesmeric
repetition of the ripples in the sand, perhaps an escalating pitch of
attention that thrust me through the barrier of the present, but I was
at that moment transported by the thought - the knowledge - that I
had done this before.
Except for the two forays I have mentioned already, I had not. I do
not believe in reincarnation, or in the persistence of a soul after the
death of the body. Yet I felt that I was walking through something
I had done a thousand times, that I knew this work as surely as I knew
my way home.
I had experienced a similar flush of feeling once before. Foraging
for herbs and fungi in a wood in southern England, I had pushed
through a screen of branches and seen, beside a small stream, a
ginger-brown mound. It was a muntjac, one of the Chinese barking
deer that have proliferated here since they were released by the Duke
of Bedford in the early twentieth century. It must have died a few
minutes before I arrived. Its eyes were bright, the body warm. There
was no wound, no trace of blood. Its fangs, the great hooked canines
with which the bucks fight each other and rip dogs apart, protruded
past the lower jaw.
This was forage on a different scale from that I had set out to find,
and I hesitated for a moment, surveying the sleek tube of its body, the
small coralline antlers, the tiny hooves. Then I gathered up the ankles
and heaved it onto my shoulders.* The deer wrapped around my neck
and back as if it had been tailored for me; the weight seemed to settle
perfectly across my joints. The effect was remarkable. As soon as I felt
its warmth on my back, I wanted to roar. My skin flushed, my lungs
filled with air. This, my body told me, was why I was here. This was
what I was for. Civilization slid off as easily as a bathrobe.
* Picking up an animal that has died of natural causes and taking it home is a foolish
thing to do: when I phoned a veterinary surgeon I know to ask if I could eat the deer,
he told me to bury it.