Last summer, on a blue-sky day in Portugal’s Peneda-Gerês National Park, I was lucky enough to sit eating cheese sandwiches on the remains of an old wolf trap. My partner and I had been hiking between two remote villages that seemed to have barely changed for centuries. Wild flowers stretched across the grassy foothills, and a light breeze carried the sound of red kites overhead. And, unless a kind local had told us its origin, we would have had no idea what the towering circular structure we were sitting on was built for.
In times past, a wolf, jumping easily up onto the wall from the outside slope, would have been lured down by a goat left inside as bait. Once at the goat’s level, however, the predator’s escape would be barred: the wall’s top-most slabs overhang just enough to make exit impossible. After that, its fate was sealed. As accounts of the flaying, burning, beating and poisoning of wolves across Europe attest, it wouldn’t have ended well for the wolf.
It was an eerie feeling, resting in such an idyllic landscape, knowing that scenes of intense struggle and slaughter had taken place beneath our feet – and, moreover, that the fear that inspired the trap is still far from gone. The few wolves that have clung on in northern Portugal and Spain are now protected by law, but as the continent’s wolf population rebounds, tensions in rural communities are stirring. Some farmers have demanded the right to shoot them, and the president of the European Commission has labelled them a danger.
Listening to the stillness of the Peneda-Gerês hills, I could almost hear a plaintive, ghostly howl: will we embrace the wolf’s tentative return, or crush it once again? Derek Gow is particularly alert to this lupine call of the wild. In his latest book, Hunt for the Shadow Wolf, the writer and farmer-conservationist explores how much the UK has lost by wiping out this species.
Wolves live on in our place names – from Howl Moor, Scarborough, to Wolfscote Dale, Peak District – in our diseases – lupus – or our sayings – wolf whistle – and our understanding of who we are today, Gow’s research highlights. Yet without their physical presence, our landscape is suffering. The balance of Nature is out of whack: “Many have come to realise that the story of the wolf’s eradication from Britain was simply a curtain-raiser for the sheep and the deer, which, in ever-rising numbers, have flayed our uplands bare.”
A growing number of related books attest to this ecological absence, from Sophie Yeo’s Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back to Chantal Lyons’ recent Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar, which notes the absence of apex predators to keep productive munching in check.
Gow is a prominent rewilding advocate, and the conservation case for reintroducing wolves to Britain lurks beneath each of his pages. And yet, instead of focusing on science to make the argument, he turns to history. Our culture’s instinctive, if unfounded, fear of this creature is inscribed in each of Europe’s disused wolf traps, he suggests. So, to overcome it, we first must understand its roots.
This approach is helped by Gow’s intimate, hands-on experience. Not only has the former wildlife park manager been attacked twice by wolves, but he has also hand-reared two females – Mishka and Nadia – to adulthood. “Unconvinced that you were ever clean enough,” he writes of the latter, “she would stand on her hind legs, place a paw on each of your shoulders and lean down with her great head to ensure your countenance was, by the time she finished licking it, as pristine as possible.”
And what this closeness – both to wolves and to the past – invites is reassurance. “With technology on our side, we know very well that less than nothing remains to fear from the wolf,” Gow writes in the book’s final pages. Few history books I’ve ever read are as visceral. But like all good ones, this one is stubbornly hopeful that our past cruelties can, with greater self-knowledge, be reversed.
Hunt for the Shadow Wolf: The Lost History of Wolves in Britain and the Myths and Stories that Surround them by Derek Gow. Chelsea Green, 2024. ISBN: 9781645020424
