Unfenced existence

Every way one turned, the tundra was laid out like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt pools and waterways. It was land relishing its brief summer, open and free to breathe. To west, south and north the land seemed unbounded, but eastward, inland, there rose range after range of low, grey-blue mountains, the source of the river, with shadows in their glens and cores. Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. The shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.

From Upriver by Kathleen Jamie