BRING BACK THE BIG CATS
It's time to start returning vanished native animals to Varestia, says Rowan Aldrich
A poem composed around 610 AD tells of a hunt for a puzzling creature the writer calls a vessom, though for a long time no one could say what the word meant. The mystery held until 2009, when a bone of roughly the same age came to light in Deller Cave, in the north of Varestia. Before that find, scholars assumed the karn — a large, spotted cat with tufted ears — had vanished from Varestia at least 6,500 years ago, before the islanders took up farming. Yet the Deller bone, with three more recovered in the Harlow Fells and the Cadan valley, makes a strong case that the vessom of the old poem and the karn were one and the same. If so, the cat's presumed extinction date leaps forward by some 5,000 years.
That, as it happens, is not the animal's final appearance in Varestian culture. On an eighth-century carved pillar from the island of Sorna, a speckled, tuft-eared cat sits among the deer, boar and aurochs being chased by a mounted hunter. Had the carving's rear portion not worn away over time, identification would be beyond doubt, for the karn's stubby tail is impossible to mistake. Even without that detail, it is hard to imagine what else the figure might be. Today the karn is fast becoming the emblem of a movement now reshaping Varestian environmentalism: rewilding.
At its heart, rewilding is the large-scale repair of ecosystems that human activity has damaged. Forests are allowed back onto stripped land, stretches of seabed are left to recover from trawling and dredging, and rivers are freed to run their natural course. Above all, the approach seeks to restore species that have gone missing. Among the more remarkable lessons of recent ecology is that an ecosystem stripped of its large predators functions in an entirely different way from one where those hunters remain. Predators can set in motion far-reaching processes that ripple along the whole food chain, opening room for hundreds of species that would otherwise struggle to survive. In the end, the killers prove to be givers of life.
Findings of this kind pose a serious problem for conservation in Varestia, a field that has repeatedly picked out some arbitrary grouping of plants and animals and then laboured, at great cost, to hold it exactly as it was. The living world has been treated rather like preserved fruit sealed in a jar — nothing admitted, nothing released, nature frozen at one stage of its development. But an ecosystem is far more than a list of its species; it is equally the shifting web of relationships binding them together, and that restlessness very often hinges on large predators.
Out at sea the promise is greater still. Were broad zones closed to commercial fishing, the scenes recorded in old accounts might return — great shoals of fish driven along by fin and sperm whales, all within view of the Varestian coast. Such a measure would also do much to raise catches in the surrounding waters. By picking over every last patch of seabed and sparing no ground where fish might breed, the industry acts against its own future in the plainest way.
Among environmental movements, rewilding is a rarity: its supporters say plainly what they want, not merely what they reject. One reason the notion is taking hold so quickly in Varestia is the hopefulness it offers, something brighter than the usual environmental vow, which comes down to little more than 'Come with us, and the world will turn out a touch less grim than it might have.'
To people the karn poses no danger whatever; not a single case is on record of the cat hunting a human being. Its preferred prey is the copper deer, whose numbers have shot up across Varestia in recent decades and whose relentless browsing keeps thwarting efforts to bring the forests back. The karn will also seek out the ghost deer — an introduced species so good at hiding in dense stands of young trees that people find it nearly impossible to keep in check. Reintroducing such a hunter sits well with the goal of returning woodland to the stripped, empty uplands. Because the cat needs thick cover, it poses scarcely any threat to sheep and other farm animals, which the terms of farm subsidies already require to be kept clear of the woods.
Conservationists I met on a recent visit to the Vardan Mountains reckoned the karn could return to that range within fifteen years, and once trees reclaim the bare hills elsewhere in Varestia, the cats may not be far behind. Judged against the rest of the continent, none of this is remarkable. Elsewhere the karn has already been resettled in the Kessel range, the Ombrian Alps, the western Duvray hills and the Astel mountains, and found its own way back into many districts more. Its mainland numbers have trebled since 1975, to something near 9,000. Much as the wolf, bear, beaver, boar, bison and elk did earlier, the cat has spread as farming withdrew from the hills and as people grasp that protecting eye-catching wildlife earns more than hunting it, tourists being willing to pay for a sighting. Rewilding on a grand scale is happening almost everywhere, save Varestia.
At home, opinion is only now starting to shift. A growing number of conservationists concede that the old sealed-jar approach is failing even by its own measure. Ventures like Forest Return, at work in the northern uplands, already hint at what may lie ahead. Plans are afoot for a body to spur the rewilding of land and sea throughout Varestia, its ultimate aim being to restore to the country's ecosystems the scarcest species of all: hope.
