ReWild by Claire Carroll

(This story features in Lunate vol. 1)

I think about the woodland. I think about bars of morning sunlight, bobbing with life; aphids and spores. I think about the bulk of the herd moving through the undergrowth, gracefully, like whales through water.

Don’t anthropomorphise, Adam always said. Don’t anthropomorphise and don’t romanticise. Be impassive and logical.

It was his mantra. It was supposed to be our mantra. It was the mantra that we all had to learn. Learning to unlearn. The mornings are the best, when I come out in the dark. In the dark things are different; more intimate somehow. No one is monitoring us out here. We can do what we want.

You don’t have communion with these animals, Adam always said. They are aberrations; freaks that we’ve engineered. You should feel sorrow when you look at them, you should feel great shame.

In the cowshed, their breath billows out before them in the velvet dark. They gather in one corner, where I heap the straw for their beds. The herd shifts for me to walk between them. I like that they look at me but don’t see me. It’s today. This is the final day of the project. The last five. I put the flat of my hand on a shoulder, a shift and scuff forwards, a head turns to scratch against a straw bale, then swings back down again.

I’m to take them out to the moors as if it’s a normal day for grazing. I’m to take them as far as possible—a walk of two hours or more—from the fields and the farm. I’m to leave them there. It’s as simple as that. Adam says they’ll find a way to work it out, and evolution will do the rest. 

The animals bury their heads in the hay, gulping it down as though it were liquid. I go back to the farmhouse to find my coat and my boots and we go, leaving the gate open. The day brightens over the fields as the farmhouse shrinks back behind us. There’s no sun; just low-lying cloud. I walk behind the five of them as they sway in unison out towards the hedgerow.

We move through the woodland in the drizzle. The water forms a glittering sheen on their backs. Trees bend away from us and towards each other. There’s a stream somewhere nearby. There are beavers living there now. There are storks nesting in the canopy. Everything returning to wilderness; to something more natural. Leaves reach for the sky, cupping handfuls of rain and then dripping it onto the earth as we pass. The steam from the herd rises into the morning. It’s spring. It will be warm soon. We walk like this for hours, swaying in and out of the trees, picking our way along paths that meander and dip, widen and then narrow. We are one fluid mass, slowly flowing to our destination.

We reach the moorland. The drizzle stops, and the sun pushes its way through the clouds. I watch them for a while, thinking about what to do. I feel like it should be momentous, but it isn’t. I remember my training. Adam sends me messages every day to remind me of my training.

I know you can do this. I believe in you.

You are strong enough for this.

You need to make sure that you push aside sentiment. You need to push aside your feelings.

I miss you.

You can do this, and then you can come back to me.

Adam was all for us pushing aside our feelings and sentiment. Our feelings aren’t like his feelings.

The herd stand close together, most of them tugging at the grass. Some with their heads raised. I think about their four stomachs. I always think about their four stomachs. Adam says that’s voyeuristic. He says we should stop fixating on their anatomy. He says that we may as well eat them if we do that. Adam says things with great conviction a lot of the time. People get swept away by it.

I edge back towards the treeline that borders the moorland. The herd are oblivious, heads down, mouths to the earth. That’s good. I turn my back and start to pick my way through the woods and start back across the meadow. Eventually I reach the fields that border the farm. It’ll all be used for growing now. All that pasture will have to be turned over for crops. Head Office will be reassigning me soon. As soon as I can get the herd to move on.

Back inside the farmhouse, the clock on the wall says six-thirty. It’s still early. Perhaps I’ll be out of here by lunchtime. I pick up the reporting tablet and it glows blue for a moment before showing the home-screen. I hold up the device so it can recognise my face.

Time: 06:34

Project Phase: Complete / Incomplete

I hover and tap, but instead of turning to green and moving to the next screen, the display freezes. I tap again, but the screen remains fixed. I go over to the power socket next to the electric kettle, plug it in and hold the power button to restart. The screen turns pale blue, then extinguishes itself. I try again, my thumb pushing down hard on the button, the other hand flicking the switch at the plug. The clock ticks. The device is dark and quiet. I can just email head office; tell them I need a replacement. I open my laptop at the kitchen table. One of the table legs is frayed and rough where a cat, now long gone, had used it as a scratching post. I run my hand along the surface and think about the cat, now a ghost. I turn on the computer and connect to the network—just for a moment—before the same pale blue floods the screen and the computer turns itself off.

A problem with the generator, or the circuitry, or both. Nothing charged properly last night and now it’s all dead. My electrical training only covers the basics, and the generator is some obscure model with an unfamiliar circuit board. I find oil lamps in a cupboard, and a plastic crate with oil, boxes of candles, two torches and some batteries. I say: Thank you, under my breath, even though I’m not supposed to think about the farmers any more than I am supposed to think about the feelings of the animals. I take the crate upstairs to the kitchen. On the table my phone buzzes to tell me the battery is low.

I should send him a message, just to let him know.

The clock ticks.

I should really send him a message to let him know.  The phone’s battery dwindles, buzzing softly again, telling me to recharge. I can’t recharge. There’s no power.

If I don’t let him know then he won’t be able to send me any more messages.

But I don’t move. Instead, I watch the screen as it dulls to greyish black and dies.

The room is quiet. Outside a chaffinch chirps again and again and then stops. I wait for the panic to well up in my chest, but it doesn’t. I listen to the sounds; wind rattling the loose windowpanes upstairs, the birds, the drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap. I go to the sink and fill the kettle. I remember that there is no power, so I tip the water away. I find a kettle for the stove. I open it, wash out the husks of dead spiders inside, and fill it with water

When the tea is ready, I stand in the doorway. The garden rolls out ahead of me, bordered by the hedgerow at the end that backs onto the fields. There’s something there, through the drizzle, something near the fence. I pick up my binoculars for a closer look. There, by the fence, is one of the herd. She’s wide and muscular, has her head dipped. She pulls at the grass with her mouth. She’s not supposed to be there.

She moves slightly and I can see that there’s another one, directly behind the first, grazing just at the boundary of the garden. I find my red raincoat and stride out across garden. Before I am even at the gate, I can see them, those five that I took up the hill this morning, somehow all back, assembled and grazing in the fields as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

As I get near to them, the animals raise their heads. I call and they start to move towards each other, making their way, dutifully, towards the gap in the hedgerow. For the second time that morning I move with them. Out of the gate and towards the woods. They form a line in front of me, swaying gently. It makes no sense that they came back.

I sit on some rocks on the edge of the moorland for a long time, watching. The rain stops, and the sun breaks through somewhere over the hills. The land here is velvety soft. I think about Adam’s last message.

It’s not fair of you to shut me out like this. You owe me the decency of a proper hearing. I haven’t done anything wrong. I reject the suggestion that I have wronged you in some way. Problems in a relationship are the result of failings on both parties; you can’t pin all of this on me. You have been increasingly distant recently, cold even, and I wonder why you would do this. I’m sure it’s just the pressures of work, but you once said that you’d do anything for me. Well, this is it, here’s where I need your support most. The project is at its most crucial point. I need you here with me now, doing what you do best and supporting me. Not throwing these, frankly, insulting accusations around which have no basis in reality. I’m very concerned about you, and about that time you are spending with that therapist.  

The light starts to change and I realise that I have been watching the herd for hours. The clouds have parted now, and the noon sun sits over my head. The herd have shrunk away towards the horizon. That must have done it; it must be alright to go back now. I’m hungry and thirsty, and when I stand up my head feels like it will glide away into the clouds. I float back across the moor, the ground springing beneath my feet. I drift through the woodland, my head brushing against the low hanging branches of trees, down towards the house.

Inside, my devices sit—inert—on the wooden table. In the pantry there is bread, rapeseed oil, pesto made from wild garlic and cheese made from hazelnuts. All grown in this country, all death-free. The sandwich I make is dry. Sourdough bread has hard crusts that scratch at the corners of my mouth. I chew and chew and think about our rituals and our habits. I wonder if our habits are only bad if we are hurting someone. What if our habits are harmful to ourselves? Is a symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria an animal? I leave most of the sandwich on the plate.

I only brought one book with me to the farmhouse; the user manual that the company gave to all of the ReWilding Agents. I have read it all. I know it inside out. I know it because I would sit up late at night, proofreading it for Adam. I liked doing things like that for him. He liked me doing things for him. He said it empowered us both. He said he liked to be able to go to bed early and know his work was in capable hands. I liked being called capable. I know all about what I have to do and how this works. I scour the rooms in the house for books to read. Nothing on the bookshelves, everything cleared out with the farmers. I run my hands along the high shelves in the kitchen and there, covered in dust is a thin book, is an exercise book. The pages are frail and have been written on in blue ink. Farmhouse recipes. I sit at the table, trace my fingers over the letters.

The rain starts again and the garden blurs to grey. When I get up to clear away the uneaten sandwich, I catch sight of something at the end of the garden. They look different this time. They’re not grazing, and instead are clumped all together beyond the gate. It’s not just the five cows that I led back up the hill. They are with the five that I took last week, and the five the week before that, and more and more. The rain falls harder and I do a head count: Forty-three head of cattle.  Forty-three individual cows, all now supposedly wild, are watching me with dark smooth eyes. Eighty-six eyes. I don’t know why the numbers are important. They probably aren’t.

I shout and wave as I open the gate, but the herd doesn’t move. I shove at flanks and shoulders gently at first, but then harder, pushing from my own shoulders, putting all my weight into it. They don’t move. I try the herding calls, I try moving around the side of the outer edge of the group, but there are too many of them. I take a run-up from the edge of the field, making my frame as big as possible in the raincoat, its sides flapping erratically in the wind like unhitched sails. A few of the herd shuffle and turn, but as one body they stay, spreading out across the field, all the way back to the woodland path. I stop. I lean against the gate, panting. The rain is light and fine; that kind of rain that washes everything clean.

If you ever leave me, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. It was a joke, obviously. Adam had thrown his head back and laughed when he had said it. That’s how I knew it was a joke.

There’s nothing in the manual about this. Nothing to suggest that the cows might try to come back.

What did we expect of them?

I say it out loud as I flip through the thin pages of the manual with such force that some of them fray and rip. My fingers are still wet. The power is still out.

The light goes. I give up and leave the herd where they are at the end of the garden. I come inside and build a fire in the grate. It lurches and ripples, then settles to a glow. Before I was stationed here, Adam took me with him to the simulation, so that he and I could walk the perimeter of the farm hand in hand before I went there for real. The settings for the walk were adjusted to Mid-Summer, so there was birdsong and the rush of water as we went through the woodland, even though we couldn’t see the stream. Adam seemed to think it would enhance my appreciation for the woodland and the moors. When we climbed out of the shade of the trees and onto the land that stretched itself out before us, he swept his arm over the horizon, pointing out how the landscape would change—for the better—once the programme was complete. 

I take the exercise book upstairs and get into bed. The writing slants forwards and tells me how to rub butter into pasty to make breadcrumbs, take the fat from the chicken and save it for later, peel and core the apples, top and tail the peas, skim the fat off the surface of the stew, warm the plates in the oven, warm your legs in the bed—

I’m walking hand in hand with the moorland. It’s late summer and the light is orange. The moorland speaks to me softly, tucks my arm into hers. The cows are there, behind us, one body and many bodies all at once.

I open my eyes. The oil in the lamp has burned away and the room is dark.  There’s someone here. There’s someone here in the house. Adam is in the house. He’s sitting on the end of the bed. No, he isn’t. Yes, he is, or at least he was. There’s an imprint of him, hanging in the air; a shadowy ghost. The room smells of the oil from the lamp. Someone has moved the recipe book and put it neatly on the bedside table. I can’t move. Slowly, slowly, I sit up and listen. Everything is quiet, but it’s that soft sort of quiet that fills your ears as if someone’s stuffed them in your sleep.

Something creaks downstairs. A floorboard. An animal outside. Nothing at all.

On the landing and then the stairs, I feel my way down, oozing through the dark. No more noises, nothing but my own breaths. They’re as shallow and as tiny as I can make them. When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I see light coming from somewhere. The kitchen door is ajar. A slice of light, thin and white like a surgical scalpel, stretches across the flagstone floor in the hallway. On the kitchen table, my computer and phone are alight with bright screens.

I stop. I hold very still. I pick up the phone.

You should really have let us know what was going on.

The message was sent five minutes ago. How would he know? How could he know.

Adam is typing.

We have trackers, it shows that you haven’t moved the herd.

He can see that I have read these two messages. I have to reply, but he’s typing again.

Can you call me. We’ve sent some additional surge to your devices. We have about half an hour to fix this.

I don’t want to call him. I don’t want to see his face.

There was a problem, I type.

What do you mean?

They don’t want to go. They won’t stay out there.

That’s impossible. They don’t do that.

Sorry. Looks like these ones do. They all came back yesterday and wouldn’t move.

Why wouldn’t you tell me?

Sorry. Everything died.

They never do this. They’ve never done this before. You must have done something wrong.

I followed the manual. I did everything right. They just came back.

They don’t come back. They don’t know how to. They won’t come back if you follow the fucking manual.

Ok. I’m sorry.

Are they still out there?

I don’t know. It’s dark.

I’m going to call you now. Please make sure you’re at your computer.

I look at the computer. I press the power button, but it doesn’t switch off. I press it again and again. But they’ve overridden it somehow. How can you send extra power to a device in the middle of nowhere? Adam’s avatar flashes up on the screen, an outline of a telephone receiver underneath it. It rings, like an old-fashioned telephone, the kind no one uses any more. I let it ring and ring. A moment of silence, and then he’s typing again.

Ok. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m going to leave here now. I’ll have to drive up there, to you, and sort this out.

No. No it’s fine.

I’m going to leave now and will keep trying you on the way. Traffic won’t be too bad at this time, so I should be there by the time it gets light. We’ll sort this out.

I don’t reply. The ringing starts up again. I fold the computer closed. Then, I pick it up and drop it onto the flagstones. It skitters across the smooth, cold floor and springs open. There’s a crack across the screen, but it’s still ringing. I pick it up again and open the door. The rain has stopped but it’s still wet outside. I raise the computer high above my head and hurl it onto the ground. It smashes—the screen wrenching away from the keyboard—and goes dark.

The phone on the kitchen table shows that I have eleven messages. I turn on the kitchen tap and fill the sink. I think about not reading them. I shouldn’t read them. I read them.

You need to call me now.

I don’t understand why you’re doing this. It’s going to damage the project if you don’t rectify this. Not just the project but us too.

Please don’t do this. Seriously, you need to think about how this will affect me. You need to think about the work.

I need you to call me.

The sink is full. I stop reading and drop in the device. I watch as the screen dims to grey and then black. I should have done that with the computer too.  

*** 

Dawn creeps in, and I come downstairs. I open the back door; the air is warm and alive. Shards of glass and plastic from the broken computer stretch out over the lawn. The fragments glitter in the rising sun. I put the rest of the bread and a bottle of water from the fridge into my backpack. I put in the binoculars. I put on my boots and the red raincoat. Before I leave, I sweep up the remains of the computer and lock the back door. I post the key through the letterbox.

I can see the herd from halfway down the garden. They’re not grazing, but standing alert, heads up and facing me. I swing open the gate and the herd parts for me, scuffing their hooves in the grass here and there. The bank of warmth from their bodies buffers me from the wind. I watch as raindrops quiver and then melt into the fur on one animal’s spine. The centre of the herd is cosy; luxuriant. We all walk together through the gap in the hedgerow and out towards the moorland, and the sun finally emerges—fully—above the trees.

(Photograph: Claire Carroll)

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Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is also an AHRC funded PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental writing – particularly short stories and prose-poetry – can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world.

Claire’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story My Brain is Boiling with Ideas was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story Cephalopod was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize.

Twitter:  @C_CRRLL