Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 35

retain their balance. One set of prints trails a small hunting party of
teenaged boys. They pause, turn, change pace together. The layer of
mud over which they run is pitted with the tracks of red deer.
Another set reveals a group of young children larking in the mud:
running in circles, skidding, kicking. But elsewhere the children - our
great-grandparents to the power of 300 - moved more systematically.
Even those as young as four appeared to have been foraging. 'It may be
difficult for us to understand,' the archaeologists tell us, that children
this small were happily gathering food, 'because of the western world's
predisposition to over-protect the young.' 3 The pattern of adult tracks
suggests that they might have been hunting birds or emptying traps.
Cutting across or skirting round the human prints are others: red
and roe deer and the monstrous puddled spoor of giant aurochs. Two
trails are immediately recognizable: dog. But they are not. Mesolithic
dogs were about the size of a collie. Where they were kept, the sites
are cluttered with chewed bones. These prints are too large, and asso-
ciated with neither human marks nor other such clues: the evidence
suggests wolves.
But the tracks that made my skin prickle belonged not to the mam-
mals which still howl and bellow through our nightmares, but to
quite another creature. Splayed across the lesser impressions of her-
ons, oystercatchers, gulls and terns were caltrop prints six inches
across, cut in the fossil mud like masons' marks. The tracks show, the
researchers tell us, that the beast which left them was 'a very common
breeding bird in the Mesolithic estuary'. Cranes. When I read that, I
sat back and closed my eyes. I could almost hear their cornet cries
echoing over the flats, and see them drifting in their hundreds down
to the marshes on cloaked wings, hanging like paragliders as they
tilted to land.
These beasts - four feet high, eight feet between the wingtips, the
highest flying birds on earth, cruising at 32,000 feet - which hang in
the air as if suspended on strings and fill the sky with sound as crisp
and ethereal as the realms through which they travel, which, with
dagger bills and cockaded tails, throw back their heads and dance in
the courting season, springing from the ground on extended wings
and descending so slowly that they seem to be as light as air, once
thronged the estuaries and wetlands. They lived in Britain in such