When I was a kid of fourteen, I saw a unicorn. I was with my best friend and we were exploring in the forest, far from home. We had muesli cookies and a two litre bottle of water. We had our trusty swords and feathers in our hair. The unicorn was white, of course. It floated through the reeds and disappeared. We turned to each other in wild eyed wonder. Of course unicorns were real.
Of course, it was all proved with this book - Robert Vavra had spend years travelling all over the world photographing unicorns.
He'd found desert unicorns and forest unicorns, unicorns in the flowers and the sea. There was nothing he hadn't recorded about them. If you found yourself wondering anything about these magical creatures, all you had to do is dive deep into this beautiful hard back book.
Not only was there photographs, but pages of field notes. What they ate. Where they slept. Where they hid.
Strong, wild, muscular, mysterious. What a wonderful service he had done for us - forget David Attenborough, this guy had found what no one believed in and brought the magic to us. How lucky we were to grow up in a time of magic. We had a stable upbringing and food on the table and we had the luxury of believing what we wanted. Before long it would be boys and periods and drugs. They loomed around the corner, fantasy killers.
There was poetry too, and exerpts from literature. My best friend and I ran our fingers over the glossy pages. We believed in dragons, and fairies. We saw a dragon once, crossing the sky in front of Halley's Comet. Too big for a bat.
This was a time I was reading 'The Once and Future King' by TH White. IN hindsight, it was apt - innocence destroyed by brutality.
The unicorn can only be caught by a virgin, so Maid Marian volunteers. They follow the traditional method - she stands in the glade as bait. The unicorn appears, horn spiralling, and gallops toward her to place it's horn in her lap, trusting. The others leap out and grab it by the horn, though they feel a bit awful about it. The unicorn is written as shy, pure, and trusting - a woodland creature, caught in the violence of capture. Children expecting adventure, and finding the tragedy of something beautiful senselessly harmed.
It wouldn't be long until we had lost our innocence. It happens. But we had unicorns, for a time.
The real reason that I can't get rid of it, though, is the writing on the inside cover. 'To our daughter - Happy Christmas, 1984'. It's Dad's writing.
With Love,
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