Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 39

the beasts in the forests. The growth patterns of the cockleshells in the
Mesolithic middens of north Wales suggest that they were picked in
spring and early summer, when they were fattest: the Goldcliff people
might have travelled down the estuary to find them. When the cockles
were over, hunting groups moved into the mountains, following the
deer migrating to the greening pastures above the treeline. Then, it
seems, they moved back down to the shore to intercept the fish migra-
tions. There might have been places to which they returned every
year, but they had no home. They moved with their prey, scattering
fragments of their lives as they went: stone tools on the mountaintops,
heaped shells on the seashore, weapons in the woods, chipped bones,
decorated pebbles, an occasional burial. In the fossil marshes at
Lydstep in Pembrokeshire, archaeologists have found the skeleton of
a wild boar in which two microliths were embedded: carrying the
arrow or spear that had wounded it, it plunged into the swamp to die. 7
I looked again at those footprints receding across the marsh and
into time. I heard the noise of the children playing in the mud, saw the
tense, grave faces of the hunting party, watched in my mind's eye the
women and elders wading along the estuary with their spears and
prongs, and I felt I knew better who I was; where I have come from;
what I still am.