Wild Swimming E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the summer of 2015 a great slaughter of pilot whales took place on the Faroe Islands. About 150 of the sea mammals were trapped and killed in a shallow bay. This is a story arising from that event.

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

Wild Swimming

To a world where we respect other creatures All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Wild Swimming

Orkney 2015

They were swimming; we are here together in the liquid, the cold water rippling over our bodies, touching our nerves, spurring on our muscles. As we swim we are joined by fish all moving with us, moving forwards.

He could hear the thrumming of their tails, see their rippling sides; they were free entities, this was their living, no fixed place, no houses, no city, this body was a shoal, moving together, curling and swirling, pressing against him.

He fountained to the surface for air.

He could feel Orkney all around him. Physically the islands were all about the weather, flow of the wind, rain, seasons, and the tides; it was all elemental flow. But these flows were so huge they suppressed, diminished the human emotional flow.

Einar struck out of the shoal for the shore.

The silver fish scattered as he beat the water.

He crawled up the beach through rubbery slippery weed and met the sand with his feet, water cascading from his wet suit.

As he left the strand his land life re-cloaked him.

She had left him. She had said he had a failure to develop emotional bonds, that he was emotionally stunted, like an Orkney tree upon the landscape.

Things had been under control he thought; there had been Maat, order.

But she felt blocked.

She needed to flow. He was too set - his emotions were too controlled.

If he had stopped flowing it was because he thought this was what she wanted - stability, a house.

But now she was suggesting that was a blockage, she wanted to flow into a different stream.

He watched the migrant skeins of geese heading south.

Could he feel the flow here now, out of the sea?

If so what was it? The flow to procreate? To nest? To have a family? The flow to escape, to renew?

These birds had it built in - an annual migration - an urge to flow, the wind flowing across their wings.

He stripped off the suit and towelled himself; his naked body showed the cold; goose pimples rose on his skin.

“Changing streams can help,” said his dad when he told him she had ended it.

Another “friend” said “get a project, a master game you can devote yourself to.”

A master game? Was it not enough just to work and live; must we all have an all embracing ambition or goal? Wasn’t this very Calvinistic - a work ethic, a passion to divert from feelings.

He watched the retreating geese. What was it like to be a migrant bird?

She had caught him unawares, it was true. He hadn’t seen it coming. She had provided the rapids, the coursing, the heaving, the rushing; now there was a void.

He had begun to invest, to nest, was thinking of having a family.

He flung his wet suit into the back of the pickup. Part of him was angry - to have that removed so suddenly like a seabird pair where one bird has been snatched by a skua - only in his case there was no egg.