If you touch me, I will contract. I will be still and round. And you will think, how clever, how repellent! But that’s not it. For all your heavy-brained skulls, your sciences and learnings, much escapes you. Such as how, when a black summer-heat cloud snags on the mountain and, punctured, spills fat raindrops across our field, we dance for joy. How a bird the colour of burned wheat arises from shorn stubble to snatch a beloved dance partner. You do not know that slugs are poets. You do not know that a slug can die of a broken heart.