Читать книгу The Wild in You - Lorna Crozier - Страница 6

Introduction

A GRIZZLY HUNCHES by the berry bushes on the other side of the estuary, so close he can hear the rain pound on my jacket. My rubber boots slip on the rotting bodies of salmon tossed from the water by claws uniquely curved to grip a fish thrashing against the current.

This is the heart of the rainforest but it’s also a charnel house without walls or ceiling, the stench of decay brushing my face like the wings of mortuary moths. Gulls scream and dive with remarkable precision into the spawning beds. Their beaks pluck a single orange salmon egg, no bigger than a pea. The return of the salmon to the rivers of their birth, the new life spilling from the mothers’ torn bodies, is one of the most poignant of the earth’s miracles.

The grizzly raises his blunt head and courses the air. Stares at me and sniffs. He is huge. Above the reek of fish, my smell is drawn into his body through the nasal passages in his long snout. Part of me now lives inside the mind of an omnivorous animal whose Latin name ends with horribilis.

I know in my gut, in the place where you know the deepest things, that I am changed. On the far west coast of North America, I’m vulnerable and naked, though I’m clad from head to foot in rain gear. I struggle to name what I’m feeling. It’s like trying to label that spot on the back of the neck where fine, invisible hairs, sensitive to fear and exaltation, rise. Suddenly, I get it—I’m wilder, yes wilder, than I was before.