Walking with Wolves
The story of an encounter with the wild
Kinship with beasts is a theme that runs through Dark Mountain like a wolf. Among creatures, this fearless predator haunts our imagination and embodies our fractured relationship with the wild world perhaps more than any other, its return heralded in writing and art, from poetry about the packs changing rivers in Yellowstone Park to a performance of a ‘rewilded’ future in the Scottish Highlands. Today, we welcome an extract from Adam Weymouth’s recently published book Lone Wolf, a extraordinary real-life story about a wolf, which he has tracked over a decade through the mountains of Europe.
Lone Wolf tells the true story of a wolf called Slavc, born in the south of Slovenia in 2010, and collared with a GPS tracker by biologists researching into wolf behaviour. In late 2011, at just 18 months old, he left his pack behind and set out on a 1000-mile walk through the Alps. He crossed Slovenia, and then Austria, where wolves had been extinct for centuries. In spring he came to Italy, and there he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. Incredibly, the only two wolves for thousands of square miles had somehow found each other. When they bred, they became the first pack in these mountains for more than 100 years. A decade on and there are more than 100 wolves back in the area, a result of their epic journeys. Risking everything, finding each other in the immensity of these mountains, bridging two wolf populations that had been separated for centuries – for even the most rational of scientists, it is hard not to see this as a love story.
I followed Slavc's journey a decade later, on foot. I wanted to see how those living alongside the wolf once more, the shepherds and the hunters, were coping with its presence. But of course the wolf is not the only change now happening to Europe. I would follow Slavc during Europe’s hottest summer on record. Young people no longer wanted to farm and their parents were abandoning the land, driven off by the weather and the impacts of war, the rocketing costs of energy and feed. Those same crises – weather and war – were driving migrants to Europe, some of them settling in these remote Alpine towns. And the far right parties that were finding a foothold in this upheaval were endangering the very ideas that held the continent together. I was drawn to Slavc in no small part because he had walked a line through all of this, carving a path through Europe’s mountainous hinterlands, and some of the places that were feeling these changes most acutely. With Europe at a critical point, shedding light on these overlooked realities has never felt more important. When we speak about the wolf, I would learn, we are never only speaking about wolves. Lone Wolf looks at those grappling with the animals' return, as their own worlds shift about them at an ever accelerating rate.
PROLOGUE
Slavnik Mountain, Slovenia, 2011
THE WOLF LEFT in the winter.
The days are short at this time of year and the nights are very long. The wolf makes his way along the shallow gully, moving counter to its gradient, loose-limbed,
his ankles loose and flickering. Were you to balance a glass of water between his shoulder blades, it would not spill a drop. There are no birds, and the bare poles of the beeches recede into the darkening wood, push up into the thin, metallic sky. The snow down here is grey for lack of light. There is nothing moving, no life, except for him.
The wolf moves precisely. Each print that he leaves is the size of a saucer. This wood makes up one stretch of the western boundary of his pack; its other perimeters are many kilometres away. Since dawn he has scarcely broken pace. He is an animal built for motion; this is, perhaps, his supreme quality. He has not killed for eleven days, but he can go for far longer than that. Beneath his fur he is taut and lean, but his coat is as thick as it will get all year and however thin he gets he will not be cold, not yet, not until he begins to metabolise his muscle. For now he is only keen and focused. His coat is tan and steel and crow-black and snow-white, a palette drawn from the colours of the landscape, and he has black markings that accentuate his muzzle as though he has been marked by kohl. It is unimaginable that wolves were once gone from this place because no animal could belong here more completely. His breath clouds in the cold, hard air.
He moves across land that is very old. Beside a trunk he lifts his leg and urinates, and then he paws at the ground to smear the sweat from the apocrine glands between his toes over the snow. This scent narrates his sex and age (a yearling, male); his subspecies (Canis lupus lupus); his social status in his pack (subordinate); his sexual readiness (he is fertile). It gives indications as to his health and diet. To his own pack (which at this moment comprises seven other individuals: his parents, four pups from this year’s litter and another older, unrelated male) it is an olfactory fingerprint unique to him. To other wolves it says keep moving; it says this territory is taken, carry on. If it does not snow again, this marker will last weeks. Soon he stops to mark again, and then he continues, moving upwards, through the naked wood.
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