The Wilding, page 24
But he still couldn’t drive Quadzilla.
They led the convoy of ATVs and quads. All Lough Carrow’s fleet had arrived for the rescue. Saoirse, Erin and the dog rode in the flatbed of the big ex-Mountain Rescue John Deere. Ryan rode pillion with The Plucky Dane on one of the Quad Bike Safari machines. Artem sat behind Inge on another. The rest had no passengers. The Lough Carrow staff carried the survivors’ backpacks, to show they were doing something.
No answers, no explanations. Not now. Not that the answers would mean anything, or the explanations explain. Just get out, get back. Get to the world beyond. There would be doctors – Pádraig had told her he’d called in help. There would be parents and counsellors and debriefings. There would be gardaí.
There would be nothing that made any sense to any of them.
Aftermath.
‘We saw the smoke,’ Pádraig said after they stumbled one at a time out of the green vulva of the boreen to meet the waiting rescue team. He didn’t ask where the others were. ‘We didn’t know anything was wrong until Nature Boy brought Ciara and the kid in. He actually talked to us.’
Lisa hadn’t laughed.
Pádraig took a right and the universe fell into place around Lisa. They were at Kiltyclogher car park, where they had met the elk-thing. Adharcach amháin, Dom Purvis had called it. An eternity of wet and rot and wood and treacherous footing and bog and dread and death ago. A day and half ago. Six cars were parked there.
‘Stop the quad, P.’
‘What?’
‘You can’t fucking drive it, is what.’
‘FF, you’ve had a—’
‘I want to drive.’
Pádraig signalled a stop and the convoy pulled in behind him. A couple in North Face Gore-Tex sat in the hatch of their SUV lacing up their walking boots. They looked surprised at the squad of vehicles, the tattered, filthy, scratched, wounded kids that emerged from the Wilding. They watched Pádraig and Lisa swap places, Lisa raise a hand and the Lough Carrow convoy move off behind her.
‘Walk’s closed,’ Lisa said. Pádraig frowned. Lisa cut off his question. ‘There’s a big fire.’ The couple bundled their bounding cockapoo back into the car.
The Great Bog
43
Along the metalled road, right again across the Carrow Bog. To Lisa’s left the grey and dun and sepia of the bog, the heathers and the sedges and the gibbets of the dead tree; the black wounds of old cuttings slowly growing wild. To her right beyond the green fringe of reeds and grasses, the pewter plate of Carrow Beg, the golden strokes of the birch woods and the low rises of the Silvermine mountains the colour of storm. A sky of high, clearing cloud. A day in mid-September, a grand day altogether. In two turns they were back into the tamed world. Signposts to the Carrow Beg hides, the reed-bed walks, the woodland way. The outdoors teaching centre; there was the bog train forever paralysed on its scrap of rail.
‘You’re going to need me, P.’
Pádraig clung with one hand to the roll cage, the other to the bucket seat.
‘This is not the time, Lisa.’
She looked over at him.
‘No, it’s not. But you are going to need me. Everything is going to need me. So, I’m going to defer. Uni. For a time.’
‘Don’t make any decisions …’
‘I’m decided.’
Yeats was gone. Lost deep in the Wilding. She missed him. She felt naked, inarticulate, stripped of words. The poems endured, the poems were eternal, but not her poems. Not her Crazy Jane. Crazy Jane lay buried in whatever remained of Castlepurvis.
No. She was Crazy Jane. Always would be. Crazy Jane, come back from the water and the wild.
Crazy Jane, at the wheel.
She glanced back the Wilding. Smoke still rose from her battle with the Fiáin Mór. But she also saw the grass growing in the centre of the track, and the brambles coiling around the rusted ochre hulk of the old bog train and the lichen and moss scabbing the wood of the Ghraonlainn pillar.
The wild is not beaten, they said. The wild is never beaten. The wild will always win because it is life, true life. Individual lives – plant, animal, human – were moments, but the great life was centuries. Aeons. As she looked she thought she glimpsed tines raised above a tree-line, horns, antlers, a crown of life. The border between wild and world was everywhere and nowhere. Then the birds rose up, calling, in a widening gyre.
Acknowledgements
I’ve been fortunate to have been welcomed, informed and amazed by many people working in rewilding in Ireland and Great Britain. Your help and generosity with your time has been very very much appreciated.
Alec Birkbeck and Fraser Bradbury at the West Acre project in Norfolk.
Alan Kell at the National Trust’s Wicken Fen.
Bord na Móna, and the staff at Lough Boora in Co. Offaly.
The Peatlands Park in Co. Tyrone for being forty minutes away when I needed to reconnect with the water and the wild.
Credits
Ian McDonald and Gollancz would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of The Wilding in the UK.
Agent
John Berlyne
Editorial
Marcus Gipps
Claire Ormsby-Potter
Millie Prestidge
Zakirah Alam
Copy-editor
Colin Murray
Proofreader
Emily-Fay Lunn
Production
Paul Hussey
Editorial Management
Jane Hughes
Charlie Panayiotou
Tamara Morriss
Claire Boyle
Contracts
Anne Goddard
Ellie Bowker
Design
Nick Shah
Tómas Almeida
Joanna Ridley
Helen Ewing
Rachael Lancaster
Marketing & Publicity
Jenna Petts
Finance
Nick Gibson
Jasdip Nandra
Elizabeth Beaumont
Ibukun Ademefun
Sue Baker
Tom Costello
Sales
Jen Wilson
Victoria Laws
Esther Waters
Frances Doyle
Ben Goddard
Jack Hallam
Anna Egelstaff
Audio
Paul Stark
Jake Alderson
Georgina Cutler
Inventory
Jo Jacobs
Dan Stevens
Operations
Sharon Willis
Jo Jacobs
Rights
Susan Howe
Krystyna Kujawinska
Jessica Purdue
Ayesha Kinley
Louise Henderson
By Ian McDonald:
Out on Blue Six
King of Morning, Queen of Day
Hearts, Hands and Voices
Necroville
Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone
Sacrifice of Fools
Brasyl
The Dervish House
Time Was
Hopeland
The Wilding
DESOLATION ROAD
Desolation Road
Ares Express
CHAGA
Chaga
Kirinya
INDIA IN 2047
River of Gods
The Djinn’s Wife
EVERNESS
Planesrunner
Be My Enemy
Empress of the Sun
LUNA
Luna: New Moon
Luna: Wolf Moon
Luna: Moon Rising
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Ian McDonald 2024
The moral right of Ian McDonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 9781 3996 1150 3
www.gollancz.co.uk
Ian McDonald, The Wilding
