Clearly, while this artistic representation is bucolic whimsy, there is in truth nothing whatsoever either fanciful or unreal about it.
Ingrained in our Original Wild consciousness are forested places where it was our lot to experience arduous toil, and apprehension of mortal dangers, ranging from being injured, and losing our way in the dark, to attack by strangers or wild beasts.
In these same places there thrived entire populations of those non-human companions, who lived in and shared the seasons of the forest with us.
These wild spirits, with whose survival our own was bound together, soon became these same tamed and familiar furry and feathery creatures that we were given to anthropomorphise for the increase of courage, for the continuity of precious knowledge and out of a deep pagan respect for the wildness which their small warm bodies seemed to incarnate alongside our own.
The picture I look at speaks to me about the continuity of millenia of human settlement, when word of mouth rose and set the rise and fall of time in the stars and the planets, and in human hearts long before books, clocks, towns.
The View at 72+ 