Clearly, while this artistic representation is bucolic whimsy, there is in truth nothing whatsoever either fanciful or unreal about it.

Ingrained in your and my Original Wild consciousness are forested places where we had to experience arduous toil, and apprehension of 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 forest seasons 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 courage, for continuity of 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 kept the rise and fall of time, precious know-how was assiduously handed down from one generation to another, long before books, clocks, towns.