The Nomadic Alternative – Page 240

Own living space around him. Bushmen children play with beetles and twigs, and when the boys get older their fathers make them miniature bows and arrows. Dedicated to hunting from birth, they learn to shoot as soon as they can walk. The Aleut kayak hunters teach their children the art of paddling and harpooning even before they can walk. A European can learn to paddle a kayak, but cannot learn to harpoon from it. Only the miraculous sense of balance learned in infancy can achieve that. The Seneca Indians of New York State are the world's most accomplished steeple-jacks, and like the future trapeze artist, acquire their sense of balance in very early childhood.

Between the ages of three and four, a sense of the passage of time dawns on a child's horizon. It ceases to live in a perpetual present. Before, isolated events and misty recollections of faces, textures, smells and sounds may filter through our consciousness. But only after three do events, people, places and things arrange themselves as a coherent sequence in our memories. The child suddenly acquires insight into the future motives of others and looks for an eventual rather than an immediate reward. A mother can now explain her absence to her child and it will look forward to her return without anxiety. She can, for example, send it out to school. The process is now complete whereby it has gradually widened its options and transferred its attachment behaviour from the mother - and mother alone - onto friends or relations of the same age, its father, and its territory or home.

So pervasive is the bond between the mother and her child that a son often marries a mirror image of his mother. The same certainly holds true for landscape. The scene of a child's first explorations binds him in a way no subsequent experience can. An exploring child sees his territory as a complex network of paths linking his observations and experiences. These combine to form the raw material of his intelligence, and we have learned with horror, but no surprise, of a generation of mentally retarded children, cooped up in high-rise apartment blocks, unable to explore. When, in later life, he