The Hairy Man

The Hairy Man in the cave was the first human I ever met who didn’t eat meat. He had a lot of extremely dishevelled, tatty, knotted hair, and didn’t wear many clothes, but he didn’t need them because it was warm in the cave where he lived.

I suppose in the winter he has clothes, or second skins as I used to call them when I was a small calf. All he wore was a loin cloth, a scrappy piece of material about his bottom and private parts. He had tattoos all over his body, with the word E A R T H tattooed across his chest. He had leaf tattoos on his back and a plant tattoo growing up his leg. Later, I found out that this plant tattoo wasn’t exactly that.

He lived happily with the French auroch cows in their big secret cave, which is in the area that is called The Dordogne in southwestern France. He communicated with the the cave cows and respected their intelligence.

He was very intelligent himself – a scientist from California in America who had come on a holiday to see the caves in Lascaux that have ancient wall paintings in them done by early human beings. When he discovered the secret cave where the French auroch live he didn’t go back to America. Instead he stayed and lived in the cave with them. He was obsessed by mushrooms and grew them in different places in the cave. Mycology, he told us was the study of mushrooms. (There is another part of this website here that talks about mushrooms because they are really cool).

Anyway this man loved mushrooms and grew all sorts. Lion’s Mane helped him think he said, because Lion’s Mane mushrooms are a food that helps the brain. Lion’s Mane mushrooms are white, shaggy mushrooms. He grew Cordyceps that looked like thin orange tongues coming out of the ground, and ordinary brown Chaga and Turkeytail mushrooms that he grew outside in the wood and said made him very healthy. He talked about how all fungi – some big, some microscopic – rotted things and so helped other things grow too. He said that fungi were the oldest organisms on the planet, that they covered the earth, growing under the ground so that everywhere was connected. I really love the idea of this.
The man said that sometimes he dreamt that the mushrooms were speaking to him, encouraging him.

He was very kind to us when we stayed in the cave.

He told us more about what human beings are doing that is destroying our beautiful world and making climate change happen. And about the things human beings could do to fix things. He was an optimist. And believed that humans would be able to fix things. I liked his energy and positivity a lot. None of us ever found out his name. So we just called him The Hairy Man.