Simon Barnes - How to Be Wild

I had seventeen hours in Eden. Then, of course, the angel came to cast me out, but what do you expect? Lucky to get that much. But let us, at least, start there: for all the best books begin in Eden, even if they end in apocalypse. And Eden was all the better for being unexpected. Shuffling into a plane for a business trip, the phone: the voice of my old friend Chris Breen: Fixed. Youre going to the Valley. Youll be met off the plane. And not many hours later, I was present at the first morning of the world.

Luangwa mornings often, and for no very good reason, have a recurring theme. This was an elephant morning: to be more precise, an elephant-and-calf morning. The first tentative rains had greened the savannah after the long, hard, hot dry season, but had done so without filling the rivers and the dry lagoons. Still, there was at least a lessening of the ferocity of the sun and with it, a re-kindling of life. And as we drove at an easy pace, we saw elephants and we saw elephants and then again, we saw elephants, and always with calves. I know this place well, I am deeply at home here: these were not elephants as revelation, but elephants as old friends: elephants as reassurance. No, the world is not yet mad: for there are still elephants, and their calves. And elephants bring a very special joy. How can something so big still exist in a world that has got so small? How can something so slow exist in a world that has got so fast? Other places, other paces: the elephant mostly moves at the speed of her appetite: slow, unurgent, unending.

I sat at my ease, then, with Levy Banda, funny and knowledgeable, as we motored through this just-born land, admiring an elephant small enough to run beneath its mother and knowing that this meant it had yet to complete its first year: the mother feeding with quiet concentration, mild-eyed, with great breasts behind her forelegs elephants really dont have teats, but grey and wrinkled, oddly disturbing breasts. In this long-familiar place, I was naturally showing off to Levy by telling him all the birdcalls he knew perfectly well already: the woodland kingfisher, which is Luangwas rainbird; a pearl-spotted owlet still awake; a red-eyed dove saying three cheers for the BBC and thats a cuckoo, its a Klaass, surely and then, absurdly sweet, a willow warbler.

A willow warbler: like me, flown down from the far north. A little scrap of feathers and a scant mouthful of flesh: and he did all the flying himself, and now, from a patch of combretum scrub, he was singing the same song he sang in the hawthorn trees of northern Europe: a bird simultaneously homely and exotic.

The Luangwa Valley lies in Zambia, a southern extension of the Great Rift. It was here I first saw lion and elephant and zebra: it was here I spent two months on a mad, all- but-ruinous unilateral sabbatical: it was here I set my first novel. There was a time when I could recognise every Luangwa birdcall and I was on first-name terms with a pride of lion. I have seen leopard kill on three occasions here, in wild, lamp-lit expeditions, bucketing about the bush in a doorless Land cruiser. I have added grass owl to the Zambian Ornithological Societys list of Luangwa birds (resoundingly misidentifying it as barn owl, but my friend Bob Stjernstedt at least knew what we were about). I have seen crocodile strike from the water. I have seen the air turn cerise as a carmine bee-eater colony took fright. I have been charged by an elephant. I have stared down a furious male lion from twenty yards, learning in the process that the paralysis of fear is a survival instinct. I have known, then, what it is to be prey. I have seen wonders: better, I have lived with wonders, eaten with wonders, slept with wonders, woken with wonders, sometimes long before dawn and in a sudden funk: not at the lions roar but at the sound of the lions breath.

I was returning, then, to an idealised past as well as a beautiful present. A double Eden: one that exists in my mind: and which also, unlike most Edens, exists in the flesh. Unspoiled.

Lets dwell on that word for just a moment. These days, we use unspoiled to mean pretty. It is an admission that a pretty place is exceptional. It is a recognition of the fact that in the normal run of things, most of the stuff we look at is spoiled. As a result, we need the mental Edens: but even more, we need the solid ones, the flesh-and-blood ones, the wood-and-sap ones. An old family story: an old family friend, in his cups, telling the French au pair: You remember, Domi? When the garden was beautiful? We can all remember those times, even if we have never lived them, for they come from deep in our human natures.

The lost garden is part of us. Eden is something we have lost: Eden is something we long for: Eden is something we hope for: but most important of all, Eden is something we need to touch. We need time in Eden, when the garden was beautiful, and Domi perhaps there too, as lovely and as naked as you would expect on this first of all mornings.

We need Eden in our minds; we need Eden in the special places; but more even that that, we need Eden everywhere . Little touches of Eden, little hints at Eden, brief vistas of Eden: in a rose, in the patting of a dog, the stroking of a cat, in the sound of a bird.

And there in Luangwa, there was for me, for anyone, an extreme sense of Eden: a near-total exclusion of the man-made , a place where a straight line comes as a visual shock. A place where almost nothing has been spoiled. A place where you can go and, in this unending abundance of the non-human, know what it is like to be properly human. Not a species alone and ever lonely: but one among many.

For three strange weeks that winter, I had felt like the human race. Id become nature-deprived. It had happened a couple of months after I got back from Africa. Nature-deprivation is a hard thing to achieve when you live on the edge of a village in Suffolk. I have seen kingfisher, barn owl, marsh harrier, and whooper swan at my place; my wife has seen little egret. But I became cut off from all that. I woke, turned over in bed, and the world performed a triple salchow . Oh God, I thought at once, I know what that is. I was right, too: a problem with the inner ear; the balancing mechanism, the semi-circular canals, affected by a virus. The result is to make you seasick on dry land. I walked clutching walls: I sat with a Zenlike stillness. I ceased to turn my head to acknowledge my family. I learned to move like an adept of tai-chi. But mostly, I stayed in bed, re-reading favourite thrillers, my head carefully arranged on a pagoda of pillows; or I watched the Winter Olympics with my head jammed into the corner of a wingchair. I did not go out: did not dare. Car journeys filled me with nausea ; walking required me to sink to my knees every twenty yards.

Absurd. I didnt feel too bad: unless I moved. So I accepted stillness as my lot. Housebound. Barred from Eden. The odd thing was that I didnt feel nature-deprived unless things broke through my imposed stillness. A sharp drum-roll from the little copse behind the house, and I was startled: good God, great spotted woodpecker. Something must be happening out there. It seemed that spring was starting without me. I was watching the Nordic skiing on television, still mired in winter, reading about Modesty Blaise. Then through the curtain, the sound of great tit: that strong, defiant call: teacher, teacher, teacher. Great tits are brave birds, and like to see the winter off good and early. And I remember the sudden wild skirl of mistle thrush, perhaps my favourite song of them all, whistling the winter away with a witchs spell of spiralling defiance. But me, I had lost my balance.