Moving to a smaller scale (from first Stalking Horse then
Blackbuck and White Hart) I wanted a pair of creatures that had a fiercely
compact density, and I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith. The story’s McGuffin/ plot device is centred in the
illicit trade in Sables which also serve as the emblem of an untameable Russian
nature.

The trade in animal pelts underpinned the colonization
and spread west and north of what became British North America under the aegis
of the Hudson Bay Company. The Tsarist
Russian Empire advanced east, reaching the Pacific in 1639 and as it did so it
exhausted the ‘soft gold’ of prime sables. In the nineteenth century Russia
expanded still further to Alaska in search of more.

The pelt of the Ermine’s status as symbol of purity and
wealth and thus Royalty has its’ roots in the medieval period, indeed its’
extreme rarity and cost lead to its’ use being formally reserved for the
highest nobility throughout Europe through various Sumptuary Laws and Act of
Apparel (several of these acts also forbade the use of Sable)

‘Sable’ as I have considered and presented it thus a
depiction of it a specific emblem of the East and ‘Ermine’ particularly that of
the West.

Expansionist policies were driven East and West in search
of this ‘soft gold’ and it functioned a key driver of and precurser to resource
driven conflicts, leading to definitions of boundaries, and a long history of
an arms race resulting in the Cold War – the repercussion of which we still
live with.

As Maxim Gorky’s famous aphorism states, ‘Man, in
changing nature, changes himself’