Lone Wolf
Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
