By: Adam Weymouth
Location: NF 599.77 WEY
Genre: Travel, Nature, the Wilds
An illuminating account of one wolf's journey across the Alps into Italy, and what the resurgence of wolves says about our connection to nature, immigration, and each other—from an award-winning journalist.
In 2011, a wolf named Slavc left his home territory of Slovenia for a wide-ranging journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he traveled over 1,200 miles, where he would mate with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own—the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles—and start the first pack to call the Italian Alps home in more than a century. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting. Now, journalist Adam Weymouth follows Slavc's path on foot, and in doing so, interrogates the fears and realities of those living on land that is being repopulated by wolves; a metaphor for economic, political, and climate upheaval in a region that is seeing a centuries-old way of life being upended.
Weymouth journeys to understand how wolves—vilified throughout history in literature, art, and folklore—are slowly creeping back into our forests, woods, and sometimes even our towns, and what that deep-rooted terror at the back of our minds really means. Slavc serves as the ultimate symbol for the outsider, journeying through places that are now wrestling with an influx of immigration, a resurgence of the far-right wing, and the steady decline of the environment due to the rapid advance of climate change; the question of how we see the other and treat the earth becomes paramount in everyday lives. Examining the political dimensions that this individual animal's trek brings to light, Lone Wolf tells a newly resonant story—one less about fear and more about the courage required to seek out a new life, as well as the challenge of accepting the changing world around us.
Sharply observed, searching, and written in poetic and precise prose, Lone Wolf explores the thorny connection between humans and nature, and indeed between borders themselves, and presses us to consider this much-discussed creature anew.
Great review by Gopal
Lone Wolf begins with a journey. A single wolf moving across a continent, unaware that a decade later a man will follow in his wake, trying to make sense of it. Adam Weymouth trails this path across Europe, not just tracking an animal, but stepping through a changing landscape where history, politics, and deep seated human fears collide.
This is as much a human story as it is about wolves. We meet the people, farmers and shepherds who see the wolf as a threat to livestock, and not just as a distant abstraction. Some adapt with fences, others reach for guns. It felt uncomfortably similar to debates elsewhere. Same divide, different stakes.
The wolf carries centuries of fear and folklore with it. From tales of Little Red Riding Hood and werewolves to lycanthropy. At the same time, it is bound closely to us through its cousin, Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog. Rabies contracted from wolf bites meant certain death until Louis Pasteur changed that. Historically, we humans have long shaped the wolf to suit our narratives. Even in recent times, it has been used as a symbol of power, of the strong dominating the weak. That dogma lingers in today’s calls for culling. ”It is not hard to turn opinion against something with teeth”.
Weymouth contrasts this with the wolves of Yellowstone National Park, where their return restored balance, reshaping entire ecosystems, thinning elk herds, allowing vegetation to recover, and even altering river paths as willows and aspens took root again. In Europe, the story is messier. Wolves like Slavc move through a landscape reshaped by the fall of communism, opening borders, Covid, and the Ukraine war, reclaiming space, but not without friction.
Wolves and humans have shadowed each other warily for centuries, partly from fear, partly fascination.
Can we live with the wild, or will we always choose to drive it out?
