Maybe I never did set foot on the ground before the day he caught me, my life consisting of swinging or jumping from branches, eating and listening to the Stories that sprang up out of the ground, choked with loud vines. When the Boy Catcher came up the River in his boat, in order to make forays into the woods, maybe I (like Ave) barely noticed. Maybe he did use elaborate nets and devices, that strange man who did not seem to exist, trapping me with an ease that demonstrated the eerie ingenuity and power of his arts. And yes, maybe this was a part of the overall plan.

That desire in men to hold down or cut back women, flowers or roots – that pregnant denial of death, girdled with invisible threats and strong motion, sadder than a solitary child on a beach, though far more dangerous. That inevitable clash between order and random assignation, execution and life, bones and bread. Each line of a frozen prayer on a branch, each cobblestone set down in a street, a word on an earthen page. How else to describe it, except as layer upon layer of hate.

Ah, how quickly they succeeded in convincing me of the existence of that fine (but still invisible) City, L–!

Of course, L– was not yet even a thing in name then, merely a ramshackle assortment of lean-tos, sails and huts on the Island. Still, after a youth spent fossicking for food, hunting pheasants and sleeping in trees, I too came quickly to believe in both my new home (a ruddy wooden hut on the one street in town), and my new soul. For by entering L– and divesting myself of the Forest and its ways, I had automatically become a member of the Cuckoo religion. Ahem!

I look back on that day of my capture now and I can think only of the ropes that were wound around my body, from head to foot. Each day since, then, has been a case of unravelling these ropes, stained with river mud, and the chafed and bloodied papers of my own skin. It was as if I had lost my sight and was being nursed back to health and vision by an invisible administrator of soft cloths and poultices. With each revolution of the earth, a new kind of eerie realisation soaked me, as I became entangled in the growing city’s grim logic, L-’s at first feeble yet somehow striking powers.

From river to canoe; from wharf to cellar; from mine to showroom - these dim points plotted on the spiral of my return. These sad pressure points revealed beneath the slowly rotting but still clinging cords. The earth to which the cord, just like me, must some day return.