In the final weeks of 2011, a young wolf named Slavc left his pack in Slovenia and travelled for four months across the Alps to reach Verona in northern Italy, his extraordinary journey tracked by his GPS collar. There he met a female wolf, Juliet, and together they brought wolf pups back to that corner of Italy for the first time in more than a century.
More than a decade later, writer Adam Weymouth (a 91av contributor) followed his path, walking the wolf’s 1000-mile route through Slovenia, Austria and Italy and charting the seemingly remarkable conservation success story of European wolves.
Over the past decade, wolf numbers in Europe have increased by almost 60 per cent, the result of strict legal protections, conservation efforts and the wolves’ own natural drive to leave their packs and colonise new territory.
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I thought their success was a triumph for ecology when I first read of it. As an environmentally conscious, left-leaning urbanite, my instinct is to let the wolves run free, convinced by the benefits to the ecosystem of restoring large predators to the European landscape.
I suspect that, deep down, this is also how Weymouth, a travel writer based in the UK, also felt when he started his epic walk. But it is an incredibly unpopular opinion among many of the farmers, hunters, and townsfolk he meets along the way.
Lone Wolf is part travel diary, part conservation report and part exposé of the sharply shifting cultural and social landscape of western Europe. I don’t doubt that living alongside wolves is no mean feat, given their gruesome tendency to disembowel livestock (and even the odd pet horse). But, by Weymouth’s account, these creatures have become a lightning rod for people’s fear and anger at how fast their surroundings are changing – the result largely of migration, climate change, globalisation and urbanisation, those macro forces without an easy face to blame. Plenty of those he meets want to start shooting the wolves on sight, convinced that once the animals leave, their old way of life will return.
Weymouth is a beautiful writer and skilled narrator, capturing the perspectives of those he meets without casting judgement on their anger, fear or prejudices. Lone Wolf has left me with much more sympathy for those campaigning against wolf conservation, even if it ultimately left my pro-wolf instincts intact.
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