Lone Wolf
Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION • A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2025 • One of The Telegraph’s Best Nature Books of 2025
An intimate account of an epic walking journey through a tense and shifting Europe in the footsteps of one extraordinary wolf.
In the winter of 2011, a young wolf, named Slavc by the scientists who collared him, left his natal pack's territory in Slovenia, embarking on what would become a two thousand kilometre trek to northern Italy. There, he found a mate—named Juliet—and they produced the first pack in the region in a hundred years. A decade later, captivated by Slavc's journey, Adam Weymouth set out to walk the same route. As he made his way through mountainous terrain, villages and farmland, he bore witness to the fears and harsh realities of those living on the margins of rural society at a time of deep political and social flux, for whom the surging wolf population posed an existential threat. In Lone Wolf, Weymouth interrogates how the wolf—loved and loathed, vilified and romanticized throughout history—is re-emerging in wild and cultivated landscapes; how the borders between us and them are slipping away; and what our deep-rooted fear of the mysterious creature really means.
Sharply observed, searching, poetic and revealing, Lone Wolf is a story of wildness and of the human desire for order in an ever-evolving world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scintillating travelogue, journalist Weymouth (Kings of the Yukon) reflects on humanity's relationship with wolves by retracing one canine's circuitous thousand-mile trek from Slovenia to Italy. He recounts how in 2011, biologists at the University of Ljubljana outfitted the yearling wolf Slavc with a GPS collar that tracked his movements as he struck out from his ancestral territory, found a mate, and sired one of the first wolf packs in Italy in over a century. In following Slavc's trail, Weymouth threaded snow-packed Alpine peaks, camped under the stars, and traipsed through the edges of countless towns. Speaking with locals along the way, he found ambivalence about rebounding wolf populations. On the one hand, he describes meeting Slovenian farmers who feel that legal prohibitions against harming the endangered canines make it difficult to protect livestock. On the other, Weymouth visited such conservationists as Kurt Kotrschal, whose Wolf Science Center outside Vienna hand-raises wolf pups to understand how dogs became domesticated. Weymouth is an ace travel writer whose immersive prose brings to vivid life the characters and settings he encounters ("There are drifts of chestnuts, and the beech leaves are blazing yellow in the late autumn, early afternoon light," he writes of a northern Italian forest). It adds up to a penetrating analysis of wolves' contested place in a human-dominated world.
