George Monbiot - Feral

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep hearts core

William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Every time I lifted off a turf, the same thing appeared: a white comma, curled in the roots of the grass. I picked one up. It had a small ginger head and tiny legs. Its skin was stretched so tight that it seemed about to burst at the segments. In the tail I could see the indigo streak of its digestive tract. I guessed that it was the larva of a cockchafer, a bronze-backed beetle that swarms in early summer. I watched it twitching for a moment, then I put it in my mouth.

As soon as it broke on my tongue, two sensations hit me like bullets. The first was the taste. It was sweet, creamy, faintly smoky, like alpine butter. The second was the memory. I knew immediately why I had guessed it was good to eat. I stood in my garden, sleet drilling into the back of my neck, remembering.

It had taken me a moment, when I woke, to realize where I was. Above my head a blue tarpaulin rippled and snapped in the breeze. I could hear the pumps working, so I must have overslept. I swung my legs over the edge of the hammock and sat blinking in the bright light, gazing across the devastated land. The men were already up to their waists in water, spraying the gravel banks with high-pressure hoses. There had been some shootings in the night, but I could not see any bodies.

The images of the past few weeks crowded my mind. I remembered Z, the serial killer who owned the airstrip at Macaro, taking his gunmen into the bar to liven things up, and the man who had been carried out with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. I thought of Joo, a mestizo from the north-east of Brazil, who had spent ten years crossing the Amazon on foot, walking as far as the mines in Peru and Bolivia, before cutting through the forests for another 2,000 miles to come here. I have killed only three men in my life, he told me, and all the deaths were necessary. But I would kill that many again if I stayed here for a month.

I recalled the man who had shown me the strange swelling on his calf. When I looked closely I saw that the flesh was writhing with long yellow maggots. I remembered the Professor, with his neat black beard, gold-rimmed spectacles and intense, ascetic manner, the cynical genius who managed the biggest claim for its scarcely literate owner. Before he came here he had, he said, been Director of the University of Rondnia.

But above all I thought of the man the other miners called Papillon. Blond, muscular, with an Asterix moustache, he towered over the small dark people who had been driven here by poverty and land-theft. He was one of the few, barring the bosses, the traders, the pimps and the owners of the airstrips, who had come to this hell through choice. Before he joined the goldrush the Frenchman had worked as an agricultural technician in the south of Brazil. Now, having found nothing, he was trapped in the forests of Roraima hundreds of miles from the nearest town, as destitute as the others. Here was a man who had leapt over the edge, who had abandoned comfort and certainty for a life of violent insecurity. His chances of coming out alive, solvent and healthy were slight. But I was not convinced that he had made the wrong choice.