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 moonwalked 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 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.*1 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.
I believe, though I have no means of showing that this proposition is true, that in both cases I was experiencing a genetic memory. Through the greater part of human existence, while we were still subject to natural selection, we were shaped by imperatives–the need to feed, defend and shelter ourselves, to reciprocate and work together, to breed and to care for our children–which ensured that certain suites of behaviour became instinctive. They could be suppressed by thought but, like the innate response which makes a pensioner vault over a five-foot wall just before a truck ploughs into him, they evolved to guide us, alongside the slower processes of the conscious mind (which is shaped by learning and experience). These genetic memories–these unconsidered urges–are printed onto our chromosomes, an irreducible component of our identity.
Some of these stereotyped responses–like the instinctive ways in which we care for our children–are still appropriate and necessary. Others–such as the instincts which once helped us to defend ourselves and our families from both predators and competing clans–can cause disaster, in densely populated, technologically amplified societies, when they are unleashed. We have had to learn techniques of containment, to press our roaring blood into quieter channels. Where these urges are familiar to us, experience has taught us how to suppress or redirect them. But this sensation was new. I could not assimilate it because–until I picked up the deer–I had been unaware of its existence. It was overwhelming, raw, feral. I did not have a place to put it; but I knew that it belonged to me as much as the tendons I use to curl my fingers.
On the Welsh shore of the Severn estuary, archaeologists working with farmyard slurry scrapers have swept away 8,000 years of mud to reveal a fossil saltmarsh platform so well preserved that, when you see photographs of the footprints they have found, you look beyond for the beasts and people that left them. The Goldcliff excavation tells the story of a world before ours, to which we still belong.2
Some of the prints, left in loose mud, are big and sloshy; others clean and crisp. You can see the pads of the toes and the mud that welled up between them: the marks look as fresh as if they had been made on this tide. In some places the people had slipped and skidded, the tracks show how their heels swung round, their toes splayed to 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 associated with neither human marks nor other such clues: the evidence suggests wolves.
But the tracks that made my skin prickle belonged not to the mammals which still howl and bellow through our nightmares, but to quite another creature. Splayed across the lesser impressions of herons, 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 numbers that, when George Neville became Archbishop of York in 1465, he served 204 of them at his inauguration feast.4 This could help to explain why they became extinct here 400 years ago. But in 1979 they began to creep back. Birds migrating from the Continent established a small breeding colony in Norfolk, encouraging conservationists to try to reintroduce them elsewhere. In 2009, a group was released in the
Somerset levels.5 They will, their mentors hope, spread up the Severn valley into the quags and slobs of the rest of Britain. The findings at the Goldcliff dig augur well for the first phase of their expansion.
Among the tracks the archaeologists found the remains of Mesolithic meals. Here were the bones of red and roe deer and wild boar, charred and marked with stone axe cuts, and the colossal ribs and vertebrae of giant aurochs, one of which had been chipped by an arrow head or spear; a few otter and duck bones, charred hazelnut, cockle and crab shells. Two microliths–the small stone blades with which spears and arrows were tipped–have been oxidized by fire, which suggests that they were still lodged in meat that was cooked here. But overwhelmingly the remains are of fish: salmon, pouting, bass, mullet, flatfish and, above all, eels. The number and size suggest that the people trapped them here in shallow water, on moonlit stormy nights around the autumn equinox, when the eels began the migrations that would take them to the far side of the Atlantic. Three pointed stakes uncovered in a fossil channel could once have supported a set of basket traps.
I remember those movements from my own childhood: standing beside clear streams in Norfolk and the southern counties and watching a black chute of eels, which sometimes looked as densely twined as wickerwork, writhing its way downriver. Now you would be fortunate to see half a dozen in a day. The great caravan persisted from the Mesolithic until the 1980s, then collapsed.
Among the stone blades and grinding stones and adzes, the awls and scrapers made of bone, the antler mattocks scattered over the fossil marshes, were artefacts seldom found in sites of this age: tools made from wood. The excavators found a spatula, a wooden pin, a digging stick. But the one that intrigued me was a y-shaped stick, abraded, perhaps by sand, on the inside of the fork. The researchers believe that this might have been used to trap eels hiding in the sediments, pinning them down until they could be grabbed. I thought of those people stalking the channels with their prongs, walking slowly so as not to telegraph their movements through the water, their feet settling into the sand, scanning the bed for the faint trail of mucus or the serpentine mound that marked their quarry; raising the stick, adjusting for refraction, plunging it down. The eel whips and loops, snaking around the hand that seizes it. The fingers bite into the slimy flesh behind the gills, lift it out, thrash the tail against the pole to break the spinal column. The hand then pushes a stripped willow wand through the gills and out through the mouth, and slings the eel, with the rest of the prey, from the leather thong the hunter had tied around her waist.
Remnants in the mud suggest that these people camped on the saltmarsh platform in tipis. A structure nine feet across, with skins or reeds trussed over the poles, would have housed four people. They used the hearth at the centre to keep themselves warm and to roast or smoke their food. Exposed to the wind and rain of the Welsh coast in the bitter climate after the glaciers retreated, they must have been as tough as a lamb chop in a motorway service station.
We know little about British life in the Mesolithic: the near 6,000 years (between 11,600 and 6,000 years ago) after the retreat of the ice sheets, partly because much of the land over which those people roamed is now under water. At the end of the last glacial period, the sea level was 30 fathoms*2 lower than today’s.6 When the Mesolithic began, some 4,000 years before the camps discovered at Goldcliff were pitched, there was no Bristol Channel, no Cardigan Bay, no Liverpool Bay. Even Lundy Island, which marks the western end of the Bristol Channel, belonged to the mainland. But the sea rose with great speed. Evidence of human occupation at the Goldcliff site begins (about 7,800 years ago) when the sea first reaches it. By that time most of Cardigan Bay was under water, and the seas were still rising, about one and a half times as fast as they are today.
Like most coastal places, mid-Wales has its Atlantis myth, which might, though it was doubtless updated with the telling until it was finally fixed in the written record, have originated in the drowning of settlements as the seas expanded after the Ice Age. The Welsh story tells of the Cantre’r Gwaelod–the Lowland Hundred–ruled by a chieftain called Gwyddno Garanhir. It was defended from the sea by a series of dykes. Gwyddno’s nobles were in charge of maintaining the dykes and their gates and hatches. Among them was the notorious drunkard Seithenyn. He was on duty on the night of a terrible storm surge, with predictable consequences. The legend insists that the submerged bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod ring out when someone is in trouble at sea. I can testify that this story is untrue: I would have heard them often enough.
The evidence at Goldcliff suggests that the people who left their traces there hunted and foraged on the marshes only periodically, mostly in the summer and early autumn. Like the other predators, they followed the great herds of deer and aurochs, the sounders of boar and the boom-and-bust abundance of the rest of the natural system. They appear to have set up camp on the saltmarsh for a few weeks at a time, when the game filled the coastal forests and fish thronged the water. Emerging from the buried soil are great stumps and fallen oak trunks: some of which have no branches for forty feet. This suggests a closed canopy forest, rising from just above the high-tide mark. The mud contains the pollen of oak, birch, pine, hazel, elm, lime, alder, ash and willow. Along the shore were reedbeds, raised bogs and alder carr (swamp forest). Around the roots of the trees, the archaeologists found stores of hazelnuts, buried by Mesolithic red squirrels.
These people, they speculate, as well as hunting fish and game, would have eaten the roots and shoots of the reeds, the sweet gum oozing from the rushes, the seeds of grass and orache, barkbread from the birch trees, nuts, acorns, leaves and wild fruit. Evidence from other parts of Britain and Europe suggests that they are likely to have used dug-out canoes to hunt and gather in the estuary and to travel to hunting grounds further along the coast.
In late autumn they might have migrated to beaches where seals heaved themselves out of the water to breed: easy prey for anyone who could reach them before they flopped into the water. In winter, they moved inland, hunting migratory birds in the upper estuary and 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 migrations. 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.
4
Elopement
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
T. S. Eliot
‘The Waste Land’
I turned away, trying to disguise my delight. At last, and quite by accident, I had found something he was afraid of.
‘George, please, I am asking you, do not touch that thing.’
‘It’s harmless.’
‘No! Very very harmful. Very poison.’
He backed away, shaking his head. Six months had passed since I had first met him,
six months in which nothing and no one had ruffled his smooth humour, in which his feats of daring had left me–though I prided myself on plunging headfirst into danger–feeling like a chicken. With a sense of cruel triumph, I put my hand into the bush.
‘George, I am asking you . . .’
The chameleon swivelled a turret eye to study my hand and flushed faintly russet. I gently pushed a finger under one of its feet, and the pincer toes clamped round it. I lifted the rest of my hand under the creature. It clung on, and I slowly raised it out of the bush. It turned a pale brick colour.
Toronkei had backed off to five yards away. I could see the sweat starting up on his forehead. His lips were working, but no sound emerged.
‘You see, harmless. It’s a myth.’
He edged forward. This time his pride was piqued. The chameleon sat quietly on my hand, rotating its eyes. It wound its tail around my little finger.
‘You can touch it if you want. It won’t hurt you.’
Clutching his spear so tightly that his knuckles shone, Toronkei advanced towards me. His mouth hung open. Trembling with self-control, he stretched out a hand and pushed the tip of his finger forward until it touched the chameleon’s flank. It reared up, opened its pink mouth and hissed. He leapt backwards, stumbled, almost fell. Now it was my turn to struggle to control myself. I turned away and returned the chameleon to the bush, desperately trying not to laugh. I pretended to watch it settle in for a moment while I rearranged my face, then turned back. Toronkei stared at me with what I chose to believe was new respect. It is more likely to have been a conviction that I had gone mad.
Setting off at dawn, we had already run and walked twenty miles, describing a wide loop across Kajiado District, in the northern part of the Maasai’s territory. At midday we had stopped at his uncle’s house for milk, and spent two hours sitting in the shade, talking and swatting away flies. Now, with fifteen miles to go, we were travelling home to Toronkei’s manyatta. We stood on a low escarpment, looking across the plains, spotted with shrubs and thundercloud acacias, that rose, through sage to grey to blue, towards an invisible Kilimanjaro, shrouded, as it so often was, by cloud or the mere thickness of the sky. Wavering through the heat haze beneath us were herds of multi-coloured cattle, dun eland, impala.
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