Beast (13 page)

itting calmly, as if it were waiting for me, which I suppose it was, all this time. I won’t pretend that everything is clear. Nothing is really clear, but this no longer seems to matter. I once thought that my challenge was to understand everything, to build a structure in my mind that would support all that I experienced in the world. But there is no structure that will not fall in the end and crush you under it.

The cloud is thinning by the minute. The cat is sitting on its haunches on the other side of the gate, facing down the track, away from me. It curls its tail slightly as it sits, and occasionally inclines its head to left or right. Its stillness always captivated me.

I don’t want to follow it. I am very clear in my mind about that. I do not want to see it again, and I do not want to go any further with it. But now the cat rises and stands and begins to walk steadily down the track and I begin to walk after it. The cloud comes in and down, it thickens again and then empties itself. I see snatches of moorland as it drifts; the sides of hills,
crests and slopes. I maintain a steady pace as I follow the cat. The animal walks off the track now and begins to incline up the slope of the moor. I keep following it. As I walk, something occurs to me: I can hear birdsong again. Somewhere up in the cloud hangs a single skylark, its notes rising and falling with the cloud and the wind. It keeps singing.

We keep walking, and the cloud parts on my left to reveal the wood with the pool at its centre. I can see where the cat is heading now. Soon the climb becomes steep and rocks begin to jut out from the sides of the hill. The higher we climb, the thinner the cloud gets. I pull myself up the granite outcrops, carefully and steadily, until I reach the uppermost rock of the tor, which lies flat like a tabletop on the granite stack at the highest point of the moor. The cloud is almost gone now, but drifts of it still blow around the outcrop of rocks. I look out in all directions at the great purple and green back of the moor rolling away towards the sea.

The cat is sitting again on its haunches a few feet away from me. It is even blacker than it appeared from a distance. It is huge. It doesn’t seem especially interested in me. I wonder if I could touch it. After all this time, this thought is less of a strain to me. I walk gingerly over to the cat in my bare feet and slowly lay
the palm of my right hand on its head, just between its ears. The flat of its head is wider than my hand. Its ears roll back slightly when I touch it. It is warm beneath my hands, but its coat feels rougher than I imagined it would. The cat turns its head back and regards me steadily. It has beautiful eyes. Beautiful, magnetic yellow eyes. Still, it is just a cat. I can hear the skylark again, below me now. I think the wind is getting up.

My editor at Faber & Faber, Lee Brackstone, believed in this book before I had written a word of it, which was a great privilege. After I had written the words, he pointed out all the unnecessary ones, and it is a much better book as a result.

My excellent agent Jessica Woollard has done so much over the last year to shape my writer’s life into some kind of sustainable enterprise that I must owe her a good bottle of something.

My friends Jay Griffiths, Em Strang and Dougie Strang commented on this book in earlier drafts, and helped make it what it has become. Martin Shaw, friend and inspiration, has taught me much over the past five years about how the land tells stories and how to listen, and his work has influenced this book. Nina Lyon and George Monbiot pointed my research in revealing directions. My fellow editors and collectivees at the Dark Mountain Project, along with the many writers whose work I have read there over the past half decade, continue to inspire and provoke.

Finally, at the root of it all, my family are the soil
from which everything grows. I am steadily and happily grateful for my two brilliant children, my mum, and above all my wife, Jyoti, who welcomes the stories across the threshold, however disruptive they may sometimes be.

Paul Kingsnorth’s debut novel,
The Wake
won the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Folio Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize. He is also the author of two non-fiction books,
One No, Many Yeses
and
Real England,
and a poetry collection,
Kidland
. He is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, a global network of writers, artists and thinkers in search of new stories for a world on the brink.