Lone Wolf

An illuminating account of a lone wolf journeying across the Alps into Italy, and what the resurgence of wolves says about our connection to nature, immigration, and one another—from an award-winning journalist.

“Lone Wolf is a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told.”—Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of Underland

FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

In 2011, a lone wolf named Slavc set out from his home territory of Slovenia on an epic journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he walked over a thousand miles. In Italy he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own—the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles—and when they mated, they formed the first pack to call these mountains home in over a century. Today there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.

In Lone Wolf, writer Adam Weymouth walks the same path through the mountains of Central Europe, interrogating the fears and realities of those living on land that is being repopulated by wolves and exploring the economic, political, and climate upheavals that are seeing a centuries-old way of life being upended.

Weymouth endeavors to understand how wolves—vilified throughout history and folklore—are recolonizing lands where they have been unknown for centuries and how, as the wolf has returned, the fear and hatred have come back, too. Slavc is one more outsider in a region now wrestling with an influx of immigration and a resurgence of the far right, alongside impacts of climate change that are already very real. It is here that questions of how we see the other and treat the Earth cannot be ignored. Examining the political dimensions brought to light by this individual animal’s trek, Lone Wolf tells a newly resonant story—one about the courage required to seek out a new life and the challenge of accepting the changing world around us.

Sharply observed, searching, and written in precise, poetic 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.“Weymouth is an uncommon brand of travel writer, weaving natural history with culture and politics. . . . [Lone Wolf] is a vehicle for Weymouth to trace the fault lines splintering Europe and to examine how people respond when confronted by unwelcome change. . . . To observe and absorb the natural-human interface, as Weymouth does, is an art.”—The Atlantic

“Thoughtful, empathetic . . . If he keeps going like this, the next book will be extraordinary.”—The Sunday Times

“Superb . . . Weymouth’s prose is crisp and lyrical.”—Sunday Telegraph

“Lone Wolf explains deep time Old World prejudices that still hold an ocean away and across centuries. This book is a mirror that reflects wolf eyes in multiple directions.”—Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of Coyote America and Wild New World

“Adam Weymouth guides us alongside melting glaciers and into Austrian farm towns, writing with tremendous curiosity and compassion about the challenges of being an animal . . . in a rapidly changing environment.”—Erica Berry, award-winning author of Wolfish

“The wolf’s resurgence across Europe is a story that will be new to most American readers, and there is nobody better to tell it than Adam Weymouth. Highly recommended!”—Nate Blakeslee, New York Times bestselling author of American Wolf

“Adam Weymouth has made a formidable, thousand-mile foot-journey, both in the tracks of a wolf and into the heart of human-animal relations in contemporary Europe . . . His prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it.”—Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of Underland

“Exceptional . . . Weymouth engages us in an existential journey that we cannot read about without being deeply touched . . . We vicariously experience the magic of a life in direct contact with nature—interrogating us with its most majestic presence . . . A powerful example of empathy and interspecies solidarity that we need to take with us as we aspire to build a society, one where the value of living things is at the center.”—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch

“Scintillating . . . Weymouth is an ace travel writer whose immersive prose brings to vivid life the characters and settings he encounters.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“With clear, engrossing prose [Weymouth] illuminates the plight of the wolf in the modern era— A fascinating, powerfully rendered portrait that extends beyond wolves to human nature.”—Kirkus Reviews

“At once a gripping animal adventure story and a thoughtful meditation on history, wanderlust, and belonging in a globalized world.”—Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Crossings and Eager

“A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers.”—Ben Rawlence, award-winning author of The Treeline

“A book about a wolf, about love and hate, and our conflicted relationship with nature and our fellow human beings. A timely and fascinating read.”—Isabella Tree, bestselling author of Wilding

“Essential reading for armchair adventurers and for those who wish to explore the sometimes uncomfortable complexities of rewilding on a thoroughly humanized continent.”—Emma Marris, award-winning author of Wild SoulsAdam Weymouth is an author and journalist who has written for a wide range of publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, and Granta. Weymouth won The Sunday Times/PFD 2018 Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Kings of the Yukon, which was published to great acclaim, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, named the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year, and chosen as a notable title for the 2018 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He was named one of ten writers shaping the UK’s future by the National Centre for Writing, and lives on the southeast coast of England.I

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. —Chinua Achebe in The Paris Review

Last autumn was a poor one for beech mast. Some years there is a carpet of nuts so thick that the forest crackles underfoot; other years scarcely any. The beeches coincide their mast years, so that during seasons of abundance the animals cannot possibly eat them all, and at least some will germinate. But the lean years are hard on the bears, which must double their weight before they den. In the middle of winter, in early 2022, I can see their restless tracks, and wolf tracks too, crisscrossing the forest floor. Hungry bears did more damage than the full ones. There had been two attacks this winter already, on a hunter and a jogger. This is what Hubert Potočnik tells me as we walk side by side, through the silent wood.

I had arrived in Slovenia five days before. I had cleared customs clutching sheaves of pandemic documentation, anxious to have remembered everything, and had taken a late-night taxi into Ljubljana. I was uncomfortably hot beneath my mask. People had begun to travel once again. It was my first time leaving home since the beginning of the pandemic two years before, and all at once I was back in a foreign country, dropped within its foreign sounds and rhythms. I was giddy with excitement, despite the lingering, amorphous threat. During the past two years of strangeness everything around me had become terribly familiar. Now, stepping from the taxi into the city’s chill night air and pulling off my mask, I felt shocked just that I was allowed to be here.

The following morning, outside my room on Vodnik Square, the market stalls are piled with Sicilian lemons and persimmons, with oranges and blood oranges and tangerines, with dozens of varieties of apple. Bottles of freshly pressed apple juice, of raw milk, of rakia. There are pickled walnuts and pickled beets, crocks of sauerkraut shredded thick or medium or thin, heaps of parsnips, carrots, squashes, cheap clothes made in Bangladesh. Hooded crows sit in the bare acacia trees, black against the nothing of the sky. The whole city smells of snow and cigarettes.

Ljubljana has just experienced a second winter with no tourists and it has not been entirely unpleasant. Without the coachloads, the city’s residents have been free to notice the beauty of their streets, instead of fleeing them for the summertime and Christmas. The famous spots—Prešeren Square, the Dragon Bridge—are still deserted. When I buy a postcard to send home, the vendor in his booth congratulates me on my visit as though I am the advance guard of a liberating army, but for myself I feel like a harbinger, the demise of this new normal in favor of the normal.

For now it is still quiet. A busker opposite the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, dressed in a black leather waistcoat and knee-high boots, plays the accordion for no one. At night the streets are empty, my footsteps magnified by the icy air. I stop to drink cheap, local IPAs in the sort of bars you only find in Eastern Europe, in concrete rooms playing severe techno with graffiti scrawled across the walls. Occasionally, on street corners, I come upon small groups of kurenti, carnival performers dressed in shaggy costumes like bears conceived in the minds of small children, their red tongues lolling, festooned with cowbells and ribbons. They are all men, and there is something of the stag party about them, clutching large lagers and smoking through their masks, drunk and snug. In a month or so it will be Carnival, and they are making their first forays into the streets. In warm restaurants of varnished wood I eat heavy dinners of stew and dumplings, lining my stomach against the cold.

One day I catch a bus to the University of Ljubljana on the outskirts of the city. I am wrapped up and red-faced. Hubert Potočnik greets me in the parking lot, and after two years of speaking on our computers it is a little bewildering to be in front of him at last. He is in his late forties but he looks not unlike the students that he teaches, his face boyish, a neat thatch of curly, sandy hair, and he is dressed in the sort of greens and khakis favored by outdoorsy, animal types. As though he could blend into his background at any moment, if his background was the Slovenian bush and not the campus parking lot. He walks me past the hothouses and into the Biotechnical Faculty and up two flights of stairs to his office.

The room is full of jackal skulls and telemetric equipment. Skis hang from hooks; binoculars; camouflage jackets and caps—all the paraphernalia of fieldwork. Shelves of box files and folders stuffed with papers. Posters of snakes, posters of bats, posters of fish. There is some kind of lizard in a vivarium to brighten the place up a bit, and the office resounds with the chirping of the crickets that it eats, so that the room has the feel of some jungle outpost. Fridges hum. A red deer skull takes up much of the back wall, a single paper snowflake dangling from one tine of an antler, the last remnant of last Christmas.

Hubert pours me a coffee from the pot. He asks me about my flight; I ask him about the current pandemic regulations, the small talk of modern travel. There is an intense, peculiar smell in the room, which no one mentions, so neither do I. There is a young man at a monitor in one corner, going through videos from his camera traps. Another man is bent over his desk, sorting something unidentifiable. I have always found it intoxicating to be around scientists who are doing what they love, their measured passion quite contagious. Mammals have been Hubert’s love since he was young. After high school, after the war, he earned his degree at this university, and he has made a home in its halls ever since. He had thought at first that he might specialize in wildcats. But that was before he saw his first wolf.

He was on a field trip. He had woken at dawn and gone for a walk, as was his habit. “I had walked maybe two kilometers,” he says. “And then suddenly I saw them. Sixty meters away. Three wolves.”

He leans forward, hands cupped around his mug. “I had good weather and a good wind. I had a chance to stay there for twenty, thirty seconds. It was really a long time. They were marking in one place near the forest road. They were marking with urine on a rock on the road. And then they just disappeared. I could hear my heartbeat. You know this vein, here in the neck?” He places a finger to show me where. “I had such adrenaline. Not because of the fear, you understand. Because of the excitement. Because I was able to see a wolf.”

Since then he has seen a wolf in the wild perhaps fifteen times, in the twenty years that he has worked with them (not counting those that he has trapped for research). This is someone who is out in the field every day for several months each year, and he is one of the lucky ones. No, it is not easy to see a wolf.

A woman sticks her head around the door, asking for some research paper. “I’m going to leave this door open,” she says on her way out, “because it smells really, really bad in here.”

The lab technician grins and looks up from his desk, where he is examining samples of what transpires to be wolf shit. The smell is wild and earthy, unpleasant in a dark, licentious way. Prodded at in a petri dish, they can make out what the wolves have been eating. In the lab, it is possible to extract the DNA to build the genotype to identify a specific individual, and from that they can reconstruct its pedigree and figure out the constitution of its pack, the entire family tree. They collect hundreds of these samples in the field: scat, saliva, urine, hair. The bank of fridges is stuffed with them. The science is not far off being able to scrape a footprint to gather enough genetic material for identification—we are shedding DNA all the time. This data gives a pretty good idea about how Slovenia’s wolves are doing. At their most recent estimate there were 137 wolves in the country, spread across seventeen packs (although five of these packs straddle the border with Croatia). In 2010 there were just 34 individuals.

The other tool at their disposal is the GPS tracker. The back wall is taken up with a vast map of Slovenia, a stepladder propped beside it to better reach the north. The map is cobwebbed with threads and pins like a police incident board, each thread a different color, and each bobbin of thread is inked with a name: Bine. Luka. Jasna. Mala. Each thread, point by point by point, delineates the movement of a wolf that they have collared.

Some wolves stay local. Their clusters demonstrate the rigid territoriality of their packs. The red and the blue and the cream crisscross so tightly as to almost weave a blanket, never leaving the confines of a vicinity that lies between two massifs to the east. The brown does the same, ranging around an area to the south of the capital like a ping-pong ball set loose within a space. But other threads do not behave like this at all. There is a white that commences on the Croatian border and sets off in a line resolutely west-northwest, marching across the country, before pausing somewhere to the north of Monfalcone in Italy, zigzagging about a bit, and then coming to a halt. A green starts in the west, in Triglav National Park, before making for the mountains to the north of Ljubljana.