Walking barefoot through a field of long grass, I poked into a molehill with my big toe. Its summit was like toasted breadcrumbs and the dislodged granules rolled down the slopes as loose scree.
My rotating foot waggled deeper, finding darker, damp, earth that held firm. The moisture suggested that this molehill was an eruption from the night before; the toes told what the eyes could only surmise.
I had shed my footwear only minutes before, upon reaching a ford at a stream. There was aerial traffic here, a never-ending straggle of banded demoiselle damselflies engaged in barrel-roll tussles a metre or so above the water.
The disputatious damsels were all flying upstream, perhaps catching the same breeze that just now rippled the water’s surface and broke the sun’s reflection into hundreds of stars.
The stream ran pleasingly clear over a bed of gravel, and it was alive with shoals of minnows darting this way and that. One shoal flocked to the shallowest of shallows at the water’s edge, the fish taking turns to purse their lips and kiss the shoreline pebbles.
All at once, they packed into a tight bunch at the very edge and I saw the cause – a small perch four times their size, with tiger stripes on its back. It was no danger though, for it shot across into deeper water downstream where even bigger fish with black-tipped tails toyed with the current.
I felt the heat of the day, imagined the cool of the water and wanted to wade with the fishes. Taking shoes and socks off seemed like a release, a liberation even. It was almost a strip down to primal essentials.
A refreshing chill lapped at my bare ankles, gravel squirmed underfoot, straggles of waterweed were like slippery strands of seaweed. Beneath the dry grass on the other side, I experienced every uneven bobble, each tilt of the ground, Neolithic man reborn with tracker feet.
But I was a soft-soled individual and after a few hundred metres I came again to harder, stony, unyielding ground and slipped back into contemporary size 10s.
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