A hike across Europe, guided by wolves

Using Slavc’s recorded 635 coordinates, the journey – pictured with hand-drawn maps – looks like another river. Weymouth wants to see the world from behind the wolf’s eyes: “What would it be like,” he asks, “to be guided across my continent by the choices that an animal had made?”

The wolf has always been hated by man: blamed in stories and songs for tricking granddaughters and slaying livestock. In the past, humans thought to be helping the enemy were executed as traitors. Beggars used to sell trinkets to ward off wolves, but when those trinkets failed, the outsiders were considered wolf-whisperers, responsible for the animals’ incursions and killings. These “werewolves” were the male equivalent of witches, tried and executed for absurd ideas about their otherworldly powers.

Now wolf numbers are rising exponentially throughout Europe. They can travel as far and as fast as those stories and songs (one, in Mongolia, covered 7,245km in a single year). Their howl alone can travel 16km. Italy now has around 3,300 wolves and farmers are shooting them as fast as possible. Around 300 are killed illegally in Italy each year.

Weymouth quickly learns that “when we speak about the wolf… we are never speaking only about a wolf”. The wolf’s return is a theme that ricochets through debates about migration, war and weather. “What’s clear is that the wolf has concentrated the entirety of [Italian farmers’] frustration and their fear, like the sun through a magnifying glass…” The wolf – despite being a cherished image for both Hitler and Mussolini – is also the migrant: a perfect metaphor for the foreigner endangering our way of life.

Shooting the wolf is an easy way to take aim at city-dwellers with their poncey notions about rewilding. “It is easier to shoot a wolf,” writes Weymouth, “than take on late-stage capitalism or the common agricultural policy.”

Lone Wolf is an astonishing book because the author, a rough-sleeping wolf-tracker, has the humility to listen to all sides of the debate. He’s constantly ribbed by the Austrian and Italian farmers who assume he’s another idealist who knows nothing about farming or economics (“Do you make a living from this?” one asks). He granulates fraught positions, and spends enough time with farmers to confess to confusion: “It is easy to root for the wolf, but it’s less clear, standing here, who exactly the underdog is… It’s hard to find such simple truths in something as messy as an ecosystem.”

Some of the finest passages are the attempts to interrogate how we ended up having wolf descendants in one in three UK homes. The genetic emergence of canines is a mystery: did we domesticate wolves to prey on larger mammals? Did women breastfeed them from birth? Science and anthropology have been unable to explain how our most hated animal has morphed into our most loved one.

Since the author rolls up, like Slavc, in remote places, he picks up on fringe voices: the cowherd, the far-right mayor, the grandmother who tells him folk tales. It’s deeply political but also idyllically different. The debates are emotive and the solutions never easy. The EU has subsidised fencing but that’s impractical for transhumance (seasonal droving) and some who have erected fencing have been scapegoated themselves as becoming part of the wolf lobby.

In gathering all the hearsay, fantasies and fears around wolves, the book becomes about much deeper aches: depopulation, melting glaciers and dying forests. The wolf provokes deep questions about the climate emergency: “Can we cede space? Can we sanction risk? Can we cope with change?”

The writing is crisp but calm. Weymouth lets the birds adjust to his presence: “jays bark”, “a blackbird clatters”. You hear a lynx (“throaty, raven-like, but with a tropical lilt”) and see distant sheep “like maggots on a wound”. You feel the needs of his primitive journey. At one point, the lack of water is serious: “The karst is as thirsty as I am, the brush tinder dry and rasping to the touch.”

His own fear is the devastation we are wreaking on the planet and our inability to be honest about it. He points up hypocrisy wherever he sees it: we fret about Europe’s 21,500 wolves but think it’s environmentally fine to be feeding 92 million dogs in Europe, even though dogs kill an estimated 15,000 sheep in the UK a year, and in 2023 there were 16 human fatalities from dog attacks.

The book is free of rhetoric, but it’s still punchy. One young Italian shepherd is derisive of the wolf hatred (“We cannot survive by killing everything”). The position is endorsed by the author: “We cannot efface anything from the webs that bind us all without wider consequence. Ecosystems unravel, societies falter, imaginations become bland…”

The wistfulness isn’t only provoked by ecological concerns, but also by a nostalgia for harder but simpler times. He listens to one woman describe how wanting to acquire things immediately rather than make them slowly has dissolved our humanity: “Then, [it] was heavy on the body. Today, it is heavy on the mind.” There aren’t any answers, but it’s almost as if we need the wolf to pose, at least, the right questions.