LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

In Lone Wolf, the award-winning writer Adam Weymouth follows the trail of a young male who travelled thousands of miles to find his ‘Juliet’

Eurasian wolf standing on a log in a forest.
A lone grey wolf uses a fallen tree trunk as a lookout point
PHILIPPE CLEMENT/ARTERRA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

James McConnachie
Saturday May 24 2025,,

In December 2011 a young male wolf left his territory in Slovenia and began an arduous journey of several thousand miles across the Alps. Why he did it is a mystery, but where he went is known very precisely. He was wearing a GPS collar, and had been named Slavc. Swimming rivers and crossing motorways and Alpine passes, he walked across Austria and down into Italy.

In Lessinia, north of Verona, he met a female wolf. By extraordinary chance she was also on walkabout, probably from a pack in the western Alps. Slavc and Juliet, as the press quickly called her, bred. And now, for the first time in more than 100 years, there are wolves in Italy’s eastern Alps. Seventeen packs of them. Across Europe, in fact, wolf populations are rebounding. France, which eradicated wolves in 1927, now has 800. Greece has 1,000. Italy is up from 100 wolves in the 1960s, isolated in Abruzzo, to about 3,300 today. Only Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, Ireland and, inevitably, the UK do not have them.

Adam Weymouth retraces that lone male wolf’s journey on foot. If that sounds like the macho adventurism school of travel writing, it is not. Weymouth won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his 2018 account of a 2,000-mile journey down the Yukon River, in Canada’s far north. There he focused on the relationship between people and salmon. In this thoughtful, nuanced and empathetic book he does the same for wolves.

Wolves populate our fairytales and our nightmares. For the Anglo-Saxons, January was the wulf-monath, when they would even enter villages in desperate search of food. Later there was the werewolf panic — the “little brother to the contemporary witch hysteria”. It began in Switzerland in the 15th century and finished “three centuries and several hundred executions later” with one Simon Wind, the last person executed as a werewolf in Europe.

That was in 1720, and in Austria — “the very last bastion in Europe of this particular manifestation of paranoia and hate”. As he walks through Austria today, Weymouth discovers not dissimilar feelings. In response to simultaneous crises — social, migration, farming, climate — the wolf has become a focal point for a culture war clash between conservationists and conservatives, between urban liberals and rural conservatives, between those who want to let migrants in — migrants of all kinds — and those who want to keep them out.

In rural Austria, a place of “empty trampolines on perfect lawns” — killer line — the attitude to wolves is “see it, shoot it, shovel it, shut up”. Views on immigrants can sometimes be scarcely more welcoming, but Weymouth listens with impressive open-mindedness to the people he meets along the way. They include hunters, anti-wolf campaigners and aggrieved farmers — aggrieved as much by the EU, whose rules stop them defending their flocks and herds, as by wolves themselves.

Weymouth is following Slavc’s trail because “I desperately want to think of him as a beacon of hope in fragile times”. There is a darker story. He traces the many links between wolves and the far right. Hitler loved them, of course. He called the Hitler Youth his “wolf cubs” and, astonishingly, was often heard whistling: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”

Wolf populations are currently rebounding across Europe

Even today wolves attract a certain kind of man. The notion that wolf packs are led by a dominant alpha male, though, turns out to be a myth based on fascist-leaning research into the behaviour of a handful of zoo wolves in 1930s Switzerland.

Of course, myth-making happens in the other camp as well. Weymouth also takes apart the theory, much propagated in the greener corners of YouTube, that the reintroduction of wolves to America’s Yellowstone National Park transformed the park’s landscape for the better. “Once vilified, now deified,” Weymouth warns, “the real challenge remains as difficult as ever, to see the wolf for what it is, which is a wolf.”

Fascinating though the issues are, you read Weymouth for the travel writing. His pen portraits are vivid and acute. There’s the Moroccan shepherd Hassan, who “has a big smile and wrecked teeth”, and the park ranger Luca, who wears “the dark-green fleece and combat trousers of people who are most at ease outside”. A lyrical account of a young Italian couple who have taken up shepherding, in the shadow of the wolves’ territory, makes you long to know them, and maybe to be them.

I longed for the open road too. “The mountain herbs, mint and rosemary and marjoram, shiver out their scent,” Weymouth writes, walking through the Dolomites in a ferociously hot summer and sleeping in abandoned huts. “The wind grows until it is raging and at night my dreams are wild and muddled.” He does not romanticise the world, though, or the wolf — or himself. Among travel and nature writers, that is rare restraint.

Seeing a wolf, inevitably, provides the emotional climax of the book. At the halfway point Weymouth meets a captive one. “He stares out through the wire mesh at us with bright, nicotine eyes.” He even holds its paw. An encounter with a wild wolf, though, is deferred until the end. A spoiler would be unfair, but the moment is handled with extraordinary delicacy, making an utterly fitting conclusion to a very fine book.

Except it isn’t quite the end. A postscript follows, and it tells a bizarre story. In 2022 a pony belonging to Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, was killed by a wolf in Lower Saxony. The desperate appeals of Austrian and Italian farmers fell on deaf ears for years, but an investigation of this single incident led, ultimately, to a downgrading of the European wolf’s status in 2024 — from ‘strictly protected’ to merely ‘protected’. It means that wolves, in Europe, can once again be hunted and killed.

Kings of the Yukon was a fabulous debut. Weymouth’s writing has darkened and matured since. If he keeps going like this, the next book will be extraordinary.

Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth (Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp384) To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk.

I tracked a young wolf across Europe on a journey to find a mate | The Sunday Times