The best-written recent nonfiction: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

Read the opening pages below

Prologue

The Springs

Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born.

In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk – and flows away. Rises and flows, rises and flows: for days, then years, then decades, then centuries, watched by a midsummer day-moon and a berry-red winter sun, watched in all weathers, watched by deer who stand six feet tall at the withers, watched by the sentries of hawk and fox, watched in sleet and hail, watched by aurochs eleven feet long from muzzle to tail.

This spring-water fell first as snow. It settled, melted, seeped slow through the bedrock, then surfaced here as a spring – a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with its whispers and mutters.

The years below ground have clarified this water. It is transparent as glass and there is a blueness to it. North of here, the glaciers are in grudging retreat: vast crystal lobes and prows of ice, creaking as the warming climate hauls them back towards their last stand in the high places. The great ice-sheet leaves behind it scoured ground, scarred plains of bedrock, meltwater lakes and moraine. An immense weight has been lifted – and the land itself rises in relief. Trees stalk the glaciers northwards: first birch and hazel, then grey willow follows, filling the hollows. Down in the south, the frost has at last yielded its iron grip: water can soak deep into the earth, sate the aquifer – and cause this spring to flow at the foot of the hill.

Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea.

Now it is eight thousand years ago – the time of the linden tree. A wildwood of lime thrives, thronging right to the coasts and tight to the pool where the spring emerges. Rain-fed, the spring’s stream surges seawards: gravity at work, or something like longing. The stream joins the river who winds in fat meanders to its mouth where at last – between bronze beaches – it reaches the ocean, and is havocked into waves by tide and wind’s commotion.

Shadows shift between the trees around the spring: here are people for the first time, drawn to this place where water is born. The spring becomes a fixed point in their wanderings; a strange attractor in the loops and curls of their seasonal movements. Here they drink, eat, sleep, and use deer antlers to knap tools from knuckles of flint which are white without and dusky blue within. They haft blades to wooden shafts, craft awls and adzes, sharpen burins with which to engrave bone. They make cooking hearths from stones, leave them charred on the chalk. Their night-fires blaze in the great loneliness of this scarcely populated land, in the greater loneliness of the universe. One winter night, the aurora flickers across the heavens: shifting, radiant sky-rivers that flow and twine in currents, and pink-green light falls on the people’s upturned, astonished faces – before all is once more swallowed in the immense dark.

History runs both fleet and slow, eddying back upon itself to shape spirals where flow meets counterflow. Life and death rise and fall – and the spring, as it has always done, organizes existence around itself, exerting something like will upon the land. Settlement begins: a causewayed enclosure is dug and fortified atop a hill overlooking the spring, big enough for ten families or so. Centuries pass. The enclosure is abandoned, overgrown, absorbed by green. New dead are buried in the old chalk, and grave goods with them: pots, beads, and the sweeping horns of an aurochs killed with a poleaxe that punched a hole in its skull right between its brimming eyes.

The magic lantern flickers fast and faster. Two thousand years pass: the chalk hills are a stronghold again – the site of a huge ring-fort, ditched and palisaded. In the little wood, more springs have risen: nine of them, filling two pools. Water carriers beat a path into the earth, treading back and forth from fort to springs to fort, over and over. Water-worship floods the wider land. Springs and streams become sacred places, where water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied. In this age, rivers are seen and named plainly as gods: Dana (later the Danube); Deva (the Dee); Tamesa (the Thames); Sinnann (the Shannon). But if the stream who flows from the springs who pulse at the white hill’s foot is ever named, that name is lost to time.

From the best-selling author of Underland and "the great nature writer…of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), a revelatory book that transforms how we imagine rivers―and life itself.

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