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The Man Who Lives with Wolves
Shaun Ellis


To wolf expert, Shaun Ellis, wolves aren’t just his work, they’re also his family. An extraordinary man, Shaun has been fascinated by wolves all his life, living as part of their pack for two years with no human contact. What he gained was a unique and fascinating insight into their world, and that of our very own domestic dogs.Shaun Ellis grew up in the Norfolk countryside with a passion for and understanding with animals from an early age. His early fascination with wolves, and determination to understand them, led to him spending years in the US with the Naz Paz Indian tribe, watching wolves, learning to understand their roles and behaviour in the pack and how to communicate with them. He even lived as part of a wild pack for two years, without any human contact. Bringing his knowledge back to the UK, he astonished wildlife experts with his knowledge and insight. He now lives, eats and sleeps with his two wolf packs at Combe Martin Wildlife Park. This is the story of Shaun’s determination to understand these extraordinary animals and how what he has learned can help others to understand their own domestic dogs.









THE MAN WHO

LIVES WITH

WOLVES







SHAUN ELLIS

WITH PENNY JUNOR






HarperCollins Publishers


I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandfather, Gordon Ellis. Thank you, Old Man, for your patient teaching; your wisdom and knowledge is with me wherever I go. I was once told by my brother Levi’s people, the Nez Percé, that someone only dies if you forget them. You will be in my thoughts forever.




Contents


Cover (#uf2e5031d-9e6c-5ed9-af52-f9df69cdef1f)

Title Page (#uaaa6cba5-efa0-57db-8cd0-c7d4f2449ac9)

Dedication (#u3e48c3f2-e0a6-5aed-ac4c-355189287369)

Author’s Note (#u60825df4-972a-5896-b466-739f5737278a)

Preface—Touching a Nerve (#u9c62a6e3-fd47-543c-a3e3-ede160efc37e)

Chapter One—A Special Relationship (#u381e029c-a63a-5d1a-aad8-e4fdfc4823d2)

Chapter Two—A Childhood in Rural Norfolk (#u16fd034d-3f79-571f-8380-29d475c92006)

Chapter Three—A Wolf at the Window (#ufe230e40-d5e3-5c08-8a8b-85206686e9eb)

Chapter Four—A Misspent Youth (#u213844f3-58f2-59ad-872f-cfdc5650dc89)

Chapter Five—For Queen and Country (#u9127fc38-d3dd-5c54-b68c-6c1f099de167)

Chapter Six—Up Close and Personal (#u41cf645a-d3e0-504c-8446-4d71dd3e8778)

Chapter Seven—A Question of Morality (#u7def7914-3c5f-55c3-8d1d-2d42e142f518)

Chapter Eight—A Ticket to a New Life (#uc1bbde56-e84a-5705-906d-4132696e1895)

Chapter Nine—Found Out (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten—Earning a Crust (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven—The Call of the Wild (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve—A Waiting Game (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen—Worth the Wait (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen—The Patter of Tiny Feet (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen—A Narrow Escape (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen—Another Way (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen—The Proof of the Pudding… (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen—Divided Loyalty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen—Finding a Home (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty—Poland (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-one—Making Contact (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-two—A Harsh Lesson (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-three—We Are What We Eat (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-four—Knowing Your Place (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-five—Back to Basics (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-six—Family Values (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-seven—A Life Apart (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-eight—A Curious Coincidence (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-nine—A Soul Mate (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty—The Miracle That Is the Wolf (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-one—Pushing the Boundaries (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-two—Breakdown (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-three—I Have a Dream (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Author’s Note (#u10581a5d-8ec5-55db-94d3-cda9ce666686)


When you are living with wolves, all that matters is staying alive and protecting the pack; days slip into weeks, weeks into years. Time, as we know it, has no relevance and I want to apologize in advance if I am a little fuzzy about dates and times. I have never kept a diary, never been a letter writer, and have never hung on to anything. For much of my life I have lived out of a rucksack so have very few possessions of any sort. There is very little, therefore, to remind me about when the various events that took place in my life actually happened. If I have attributed something to the wrong year, please bear with me. The events themselves I remember as if they were yesterday.




PREFACE (#u10581a5d-8ec5-55db-94d3-cda9ce666686)

Touching a Nerve (#u10581a5d-8ec5-55db-94d3-cda9ce666686)


I was helping out at a wildlife center in Hertfordshire, one of the home counties, just north of London. A man appeared outside the wolf enclosure one day, pushing a child in an old-fashioned wheelchair that looked almost Victorian, with a large rectangular tray on the front of it. I was immediately struck by how out of place it looked. He told me that he and his son, who may have been thirteen or fourteen and who, I could see at a glance, was severely disabled, had driven all the way from Scotland, a distance of around five hundred miles. He had heard that we allowed members of the public to interact with the wolves and he wanted his son to meet one.

I was surprised that this man had gone to such lengths to show his son a wolf. The child didn’t look as though he would get anything out of the encounter. He sat immobile, silent, staring into space, and I doubted that he would even be able to stroke the animal’s fur. Normally, I loved this part of the job. Children arrived with such preconceptions. They pulled back and screamed when the wolf came near, convinced by all the stories they’d read and the cartoons they’d watched, that wolves were sly, vicious creatures that ate grandmothers, blew down the houses of little pigs, and ripped the throats out of little girls. I had grown up with exactly the same terror. It had taken me many years to discover that wolves are actually shy, intelligent animals with a very sophisticated social structure, whose bloodthirsty reputation is not deserved. I found nothing more gratifying than watching children touch the wolves and listen to what I had to tell them about these animals, and watch their prejudice and ignorance fade away.

I felt almost evangelical about this. I thought that if children could feel their coats and look them in the eye, they could make up their own minds about them so that in time, future generations will perhaps be ready to give back to wolves the place in our world that is rightfully theirs.

Once upon a time wolves and men lived alongside one another, each respecting and benefiting from the other’s way of life. Sadly, those days are gone and I believe that we are the poorer for that. The natural balance in nature that they promoted has been whittled away and several species, including our own, have been allowed to go unchecked and become diseased—in the truest sense of the word.

This may be a little fanciful but I believe that as well as healing the natural world and restoring its balance, human society could benefit from having wolves roaming the forests once more. We could learn a lot from the loyalty they display to family members, the way they educate and discipline their young, the way they look after their own, and the circumstances in which they use their considerable weaponry to kill. The world is not yet ready for that but I like to think that in some small way my work of the last twenty years might have begun the process.

Whenever I introduced a child to the wolves, it was vital that the child did not become frightened. I had to watch their reaction carefully so that I didn’t do more harm with this exercise than good.

This boy didn’t speak. His disabilities were clearly mental as well as physical and I guessed he might have been autistic. I could immediately see there would be a problem and asked the father, as tactfully as I could, whether the child would be able to indicate when he no longer wanted to be near the wolf, explaining how important this was. “He won’t be able to,” said the man, bluntly. “He has never spoken, and never reacted in any way to anything. And he has never expressed an emotion in his life.”

Common sense was screaming at me to tell this man to turn around, to take his poor child all the way back to Scotland, but for reasons I can’t explain, and a few I can, I agreed to go ahead.

There was a young wolf called Zarnesti in the enclosure that had been handled a lot in his first few months of life and was perfect, therefore, for introducing to children. His mother had stood on him or rolled on him soon after birth, crushing his jaw. As a result he had been hand reared and was not as nervous around humans as most wolves. I loved him; he had the most wonderful character, but he looked a bit like Goofy, the dog in the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Questioning my sanity, I went into the enclosure and came out carrying Zarnesti. He was then about three months old, the size of a spaniel and a wriggling, struggling bundle of energy. It was all I could do to hold him; he was almost flying out of my arms as I put him down onto the tray on this old-fashioned wheelchair, in front of the boy. I had the pup in a viselike grip, but something miraculous happened. The moment Zarnesti saw the child he became still. He looked into the boy’s eyes and they stared at each other. Then the pup settled down with his back legs tucked under him and his front legs stretched out in front. I took one hand off him and I realized very quickly that I could take the other hand away, too. After a few moments, still looking into his eyes, the cub reached forward and started to lick the boy’s face. I lunged to intercept him, terrified that Zarnesti would nip the boy’s mouth with his needle-sharp teeth, which is what cubs do to adult wolves when they want them to regurgitate food. But Zarnesti didn’t nip; he just licked, very gently.

The scene was electrifying. As I looked at the boy I saw one single tear welling up in his right eye, then trickle slowly down his cheek. Guessing this had never happened before, I turned to his father. This big, strong, capable Scotsman was standing, watching what was unfolding in front of him, with tears streaming down his face. In a matter of seconds, the wolf cub had gotten through to this boy in a way that no human had managed to do in fourteen years.




CHAPTER ONE (#u10581a5d-8ec5-55db-94d3-cda9ce666686)

A Special Relationship (#u10581a5d-8ec5-55db-94d3-cda9ce666686)


It was early morning. I had crept out of my bed, as I often did as a child, and gone out into the barn where the farm dogs slept, to curl up with them—something to which my kindly grandparents turned a tolerant eye. I was a loner; the dogs were my closest friends and the nearest I had to siblings. I woke up to find the oldest of the dogs standing over me, his head facing the door. When I stirred, he turned to look at me and raised an eyebrow. I could tell immediately that something was wrong. His mouth was open and saliva was dripping from his tongue. The younger dogs were lying curled up by my side, which is where Bess, the oldest, should have been, too. I could hear a great commotion in the yard outside and my grandfather was calling my name. I can’t have been more than six or seven years old, but it’s a memory that has stayed with me, and although I had no notion of it at the time, it was the beginning of a very long journey for me.

Bess had bitten one of the farmhands, whose arm was crudely bandaged with a handkerchief and spots of blood were seeping through the flimsy material. He was complaining bitterly. He had come into the barn to collect a chain saw that was on a shelf above my head, and without warning the dog, who knew him well, had gone for him. Bess wasn’t a vicious dog; he had been on the farm all his life and had never been known to attack before. The man was highly indignant, but my grandfather, a wise and wonderful old man not given to hysteria, soon managed to calm the situation. He had lived in the country alongside animals all his life, as his father had before him, and he knew at once what had happened. My bond with the farm dogs had become so close that Bess, the oldest and most dominant dog, had come to regard me as one of the pack, and a young member at that. When the farmhand burst into the barn, waking Bess and probably the other dogs, too, Bess thought I was in danger and he was protecting me in the only way he knew how, the way that his wild relatives might have protected their young.

My grandfather decided that in the interests of safety it was time to ban my nighttime excursions to the barn, but he recognized that the dogs played such an important part in my well-being that I should be allowed to have one of my own, which could sleep with me in the house.

The dog of a neighboring farmer had had pups and not long after this incident, my grandfather took me to choose one from the litter. We had no car in those days; my grandparents were simple folk who lived from hand to mouth. A lot of what we ate came from the wild. We would shoot rabbits, hares, pigeons, and pheasants but I was always taught to hunt in moderation, to respect nature and never to take more than we needed or more than the population could sustain. Whenever I made a kill, I knew to cut the animal open lengthways to remove the innards and throw them into the hedgerow for other creatures to scavenge. I had no qualms about killing or skinning rabbits and hares to prepare them for the pot. Life and death were all part of the natural world and on the farm we were very much a part of it.

Although the farmer with the puppies was a neighbor, the definition of neighbor in our world was someone who lived within a day’s walk, and we set off right after an early breakfast, when it was barely light. It was a cold morning; I could see my breath in the frosty air, and I had on a warm coat and boots. Over my shoulder was a poacher’s bag that carried cold tea and thick cheese sandwiches that my grandmother had made for us. I was used to long walks—I often accompanied my grandfather when he went to pay his respects or do business with neighboring farmers—and I used to relish time spent alone with him. There were no other children around the farm for me to play with, no television, no video games or any of the other things that keep children amused these days. We were miles from anywhere; there was just me and my grandparents, the dogs and the farm animals. Occasionally—or so it seemed to me then—my mother would appear, but it was rare and my father was never mentioned.

But I was not unhappy. I adored my grandparents and never thought for a moment that I was missing out. My grandfather and I would take the dogs with us on our walks, and we would never get far before he’d be stopping to point out something of interest. It might be an abandoned nest in the hedgerow—he would tell me all about the birds that had inhabited it, and how many young they would have produced, how far their territory would have extended. He would dissect the nest so I could see the skill with which it had been constructed. He’d spot a broken bird’s egg lying on the ground, and would explain how it might have got there, stolen from the nest by a predator maybe; or he’d pick up an owl’s pellet deposited on a wooden gatepost, and pull it apart, exposing the tiny fragments of bone, all that remained of the rodents the great raptor had feasted on during the night.

He might make me close my eyes and tell him what I could hear; I’d thought it was quiet until my eyes were closed and then there would be such a deafening noise—birds singing and chattering, insects rubbing their legs, small mammals scurrying, even sheep bleating in the distance or a cow coughing three fields away—so many different sounds and songs. Or we’d investigate a rabbit burrow for signs of activity or identify the prints left by deer and other animals on the muddy tracks. He made every outing an adventure, made every discovery exciting. I loved listening to him talk, hearing him explain, in his rich Norfolk accent, which birds preferred which berries, or why foxes killed more than they could eat or carry away; and sometimes, if I asked, he would talk about himself and about his childhood and how different life had been when he was my age, when there were no modern conveniences like refrigerators, tractors, or electricity; when they’d harvested with scythes and milked the cows by hand.

When we’d reach our destination, he would never take me inside with him. He would leave me to wait with the dogs a little way off while he went to see whomever he had come to visit. Sometimes he would be gone for several hours while he and his friend shared a bottle or two of stout, but I had been taught to wait patiently. It would never have crossed my mind to complain; I adored this man and I never questioned his authority, enjoying nothing more than his approval. Besides, I knew that no matter how long he was gone, he would always come back. He would suddenly appear, saying, “Come on then, boy,” and I’d slip my hand into his great rough paw. We’d retrace our steps and find new things to look at and talk about on our way home.

One day we made just such a trip to choose my puppy. My grandfather and the farmer greeted each other warmly, like long-lost friends, and disappeared together into a barn, where mother and pups were kenneled, leaving me alone in the farmyard. “Wait there, boy,” he said. “I won’t be long.” And so without question, despite the excitement and my impatience to see the litter, I found myself a comfortable spot and sat down to wait.

Suddenly I heard the barn door creak as a gust of wind took it, and a large dog escaped through the open gap and came charging toward me, barking ferociously, ears flat against its head. I knew enough to know that this was not a friendly greeting. I sat still, kept my hands by my side, and waited; it didn’t occur to me to be frightened. Bess and the farm dogs had often charged at me and however aggressive they sounded in a pack, I always held my ground and once they had sniffed me, they were never anything but friendly. The dog’s hackles were raised, her tail was erect, and she was growling as she reached me, her teeth bared. I didn’t move. I let her sniff my legs, feet, hands, and head. Soon the growling stopped and I turned my hands over to expose the palms, which smelled of the cheese sandwich I’d eaten during our walk. She licked them and looked up at my face with soft eyes. I started to scratch the long fur under her chin, which she obviously enjoyed because she sat down and leaned her body into mine, allowing me to rub the rest of her silky body.

The barn door creaked again and as my grandfather and the farmer emerged, the dog by my side growled deeply, gave a sharp bark, and charged the two men. I guessed she was the mother of the pups, and from the panic that ensued, I gathered she did not welcome visitors. The farmer shouted angrily at her, “Get in that barn, now!” The dog lowered her body and slunk back toward me. “Keep still, boy,” warned the farmer. “Don’t move and she won’t hurt you.” But as he ran over toward me, yelling at the dog to get back to the barn, it was clear he didn’t trust the animal an inch. By the time he reached me, the dog had tucked her frightened, shaking body into mine and, ignoring his command to stay still, I had started scratching her again while speaking softly to her.

“Well, bless my soul. Come and have a look at this,” said the farmer, cap in his hand as he scratched his head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has ever been able to get near that bitch. The only reason I keep her is because she’s so good with the sheep, but she’s always been a real liability with strangers.”

“Ma always said the boy has some sort of gift with dogs,” said my grandfather, still keeping a safe distance. “She’ll swear he knows what they say.”

Not trusting the dog to remain calm, the farmer shut her up while we went into the barn for me to choose one of the puppies. They were fenced in behind straw bales—five in all, four girls and a boy—curled up in one big bundle of black, brown, and white fur. They were lurchers, a greyhound cross breed, so would be good hunters. I knew I wanted a female; my grandfather had taught me that bitches were far better than dogs at providing for their families, and I wanted this dog to earn her keep.

Tied on the end of a length of bailing twine was a rabbit’s foot that the farmer dangled in front of the bundle while he squeaked as an alarmed rabbit might. Immediately the sleeping pups’ ears went up and they looked around. When they spotted the foot dangling within their reach, they sprang to life and, sure enough, it was the bitches that were there first, two of them ahead of the others. It was one of those two that I chose to take. I picked her up and held her in my arms, and as my grandfather handed over a couple of large bottles of light ale in payment, I could just hear, over the puppy’s frantic licking, the farmer say, “The boy’s right, you know. She’s the one I’d’ve picked.

“Away you go, boy,” said the farmer with a cheery smile. “Take care of her.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” I said, grinning from ear to ear, the puppy warm and wriggly in my arms. “I’ll take care of her.”

I named her Whiskey and in the next thirteen years, she scarcely left my side.




CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e6cac576-5519-5a00-8079-ae2067bbce19)

A Childhood in Rural Norfolk (#ulink_e6cac576-5519-5a00-8079-ae2067bbce19)


The English countryside is not an obvious place for a child to develop a passion for wolves, and it wasn’t immediate, but animals have been in my life for as long as I can remember.

One summer’s evening my mother came home from work. She had been picking carrots or some other vegetable out of the ground all day and was exhausted. “There’s a job waiting for you in there,” said my grandfather. “Shaun’s been busy again.” She opened the door and recoiled in horror. Frogs were hopping, croaking, and climbing over every surface in the room. I had spent my afternoon collecting them from the pond up the road, steadfastly walking back and forth with a bucket, and the room was alive with frogs. And I spent that evening going back and forth with the bucket once again, putting them all back.

Another time she went into the coal shed, after night had fallen, to get some fuel for the fire and screamed as five black chickens started flapping and squawking. I had found them on my travels across the fields—and the very next morning I was dispatched to take them back.

And then there was the time I brought home a Muscovy duck, complete with its nest filled with eggs. My mother was too scared to touch the duck—an ugly brute, she called it—so I carried the duck under my arm while she carried the nest and the eggs back to the pond, where we reinstated the whole lot among the reeds. My poor mother; I was always giving her heart failure, coming home with some creature that I’d find a home for somewhere about the house.

I grew up on the land and I was fascinated by the natural world. There was no money for outings, treats, or toys when I was a child; the hedgerows, fields, and forests were my playground, and the dogs were my companions. I roamed for hours; I explored the thickets for bird nests, I knew when rabbits had young, I watched hares boxing in the springtime, I knew where to look for fox dens and badger setts. I could recognize owls in flight and knew the difference between kestrels and sparrow hawks. I couldn’t have crossed a busy London street or found my way around a subway at the age of ten—and to be honest, I still feel uneasy in big cities in my forties—but there was not a lot I didn’t know about the wildlife on my doorstep.

My home was north Norfolk, a remote part of a remote county on the most eastern coast of England, famed for its fens, its pheasant shoots, and its flat, fertile farmland. Those who own the land are among the richest in the country; those who work it are some of the poorest. My family was the latter. They were farm laborers and we lived from hand to mouth, a very simple life. We caught what we ate and ate what we caught; and my job as the youngest member of the family—when I was too young for gainful employment—was to catch it, with the dogs we had on the farm. They were my friends, but they were working dogs. Apart from Whiskey, they lived outside in the barn, and I was never allowed to be sentimental about them. In our world, every animal had a purpose. We couldn’t afford to feed any creature that didn’t earn its keep—and Whiskey was a skillful courser.

Our neighbors lived in the same way. Country folk were caring but not sentimental. When I was about eight, I remember going with my grandfather to visit a gamekeeper friend of his. This man had the most beautiful black Labrador. He was the gamekeeper’s pride and joy. His coat glistened and he had the softest mouth; he could pick up an egg or anything else he was asked to retrieve without leaving a mark on it. He was immaculately trained; he seemed to know this man’s every thought. One day the man discovered that his two sons had taken the dog ratting in the barn, and all the work and training that he had so patiently done with the dog was lost in less than a morning. The first time the Lab went for a rat, the rat bit him on the muzzle and he was so traumatized he shook from then on. The dog was ruined; so the gamekeeper shot the dog and beat the two boys. He knew that he’d let the dog down, that he’d failed to protect him from his sons, but he couldn’t repair the damage and he couldn’t afford to keep a dog as a pet. I was horrified; the dog’s death seemed so meaningless. But that was the reality of the world in which I grew up.

My grandfather—Gordon Ellis, my mother’s father—taught me everything I knew. He was sixty-seven when I was born, but he and my grandmother, Rose, brought me up, and although my mother lived in the cottage with us, it seemed to me as a child that she was never there. As a result, I felt far closer to my grandparents than I ever did to my mother.

The truth, I discovered when I went back to Norfolk very recently, after years of being away, is that she was simply always out earning our keep. She was up and out of the house in the mornings, often before dawn, to work in the fields—long hard days of back-breaking drudgery for very little money. She would be collected by a gangmaster who drove her and the other women of the village to whatever farm had need of labor. Sometimes they might drive for an hour or two to the other side of the county to harvest peas or potatoes or soft fruit, whichever the season dictated, and be delivered home at the end of the day, exhausted. After a meal she would go straight to bed. If she didn’t work, she didn’t get paid and we struggled. As a single mother, she had no alternative.

I didn’t realize as a child just how unremittingly hard her life was; I didn’t appreciate what she did for me—and how I wish I had. All I knew was she wasn’t there and my grandparents were. My grandfather was my hero. He was gentle, wise, and wonderful, and if he had asked me to walk over hot coals, I would have done it for him without even asking why. He was a thin, wiry man, his face weather-beaten. His hands were gnarled and leathery from decades of hard, manual work, but inside he was a true gentleman and I reveled in every moment spent by his side.

He and my grandmother had had eleven children, six girls and five boys. Most of them had left the village by the time I was born, on October 12, 1964, and I never met them. A few stayed, but apart from one sister, Leenie, who was very close to my mother, I don’t remember seeing any of them. I think my arrival, out of wedlock, caused a rift in the family.

The cottage we lived in felt huge to me as a small boy, but in reality it was very modest, with low ceilings that I hit my head on whenever I tried to bounce on my bed. It was a typical tied workman’s cottage made of the local red brick, set back from a narrow lane and looking on to a meadow at the back, with dense forest beyond. At night I would lie in bed with the window wide open and listen to the noises of the night—scarcely any of them man-made. There were no major roads or motorways and no railway lines within miles. The only thing that sometimes broke the silence was the noise of jets screaming overhead from one of the many air bases in the county. The air bases are still there, but Norfolk is still, forty years later, one of the least populated counties in England, and is still one of the most inaccessible corners of the country.

In the 1960s, it was like a place that time forgot. While the rest of the country was enjoying postwar prosperity, people in the village of Great Massingham were living as they had lived centuries ago. There were several farms in the locality, most of them mixed: they had dairy herds, sheep, pigs, and beef cattle as well as cereal crops, vegetables, and fruit. The land was broken up at that time into small parcels divided by tall, thick hedges and forestry that kept the worst of the Arctic weather at bay—and provided perfect cover for wildlife. And almost all of the farmers laid down pheasant chicks in the spring and ran shoots during the winter months.

Winters were harsh. The cold blew in from the Urals to the east and the Arctic to the north, bringing huge quantities of snow and ice. The hedges stopped most of the snow from drifting, but at times the roads were completely impassable and the landscape was white for weeks and the ponds in the village turned into skating rinks.

At that time there was very little machinery, although that changed as I grew older. Tractors had already taken over from the heavy shire horses—but it hadn’t been so long ago. The old horses from our farm lived in happy retirement in the meadow at the back of our cottage. There were no combine harvesters, no chemicals. The work was done by hand. Each farmer had his own workers, most of them living in simple cottages like ours, on the farms, and during the harvest, gangs of laborers were driven from farm to farm to weed and pick and bale.

My grandfather worked at Ward’s farm. Ward was one of the biggest landowners in the village, and my grandfather had had the cottage for as long as he’d had the job. There was no inside sanitation, no hot water and no heating, and the old iron window frames were rusty and ill fitting. The privy was in the garden and I remember Sunday nights were bath nights when the old copper bath tub would be brought into the living room in front of the fire and filled with water heated in a big copper pan that hung over the coals. We took turns bathing, and being the youngest, I was last.

There were people living in our village who had never left it. And they had no reason to. The village was self-sufficient. There was a butcher, where my grandparents traded vegetables from the garden for meat; a baker with delicious fresh bread at any time of the day; a dairy; a shop that sold general provisions; a hairdresser; a primary school; a fire engine; five pubs; and a blacksmith who shod horses and fixed machinery. It was a farming community through and through. And the sort of community in which everyone knew everyone else—and knew everything about everyone else.

There were no tourists in those days, no strangers wandering about the village, except when the circus came. Even the gypsies who came at harvesttime were the same ones who made the journey year after year. And there was no crime. We all left our houses open, and people would come in without knocking and put the kettle on while they were passing through to say hello. It was a genuine community. The worst that might happen was when someone had a chicken go missing and would report it to Phil, the village policeman. He knew everything; he knew exactly where to find the culprit and would pay a quiet visit. The next day two chickens would mysteriously be delivered to the aggrieved party.

Shirley, my mother, had given birth to me at the age of twenty-four, knowing that she would have to bring me up alone and unsupported. At that time and in that sort of tight-knit community, to have a child out of wedlock was extraordinarily brave, but her parents were apparently very supportive. Sadly, I don’t know the story; I don’t know whether she was in love with someone who was unattainable for some reason. I don’t even know whether my father knew I existed. All I know is that she never had or wanted another partner. So I don’t know who my father was. Even now, forty-five years later, my mother won’t talk about it.

My guess is he was a Romany—not to be confused with the tinkers and travelers who have given gypsies such a bad name over the years. The gypsies we knew were wonderful people, scrupulously clean and honest, with a very strong sense of family and strict codes of morality. They used to travel about the countryside in their traditional prettily painted wooden wagons, drawn by horses, going wherever there was work. They would pick hops and fruit in Kent and vegetables and soft fruit in Norfolk. Occasionally they would graze their horses on the village green, but they had a permanent site on a piece of common land just outside the village, next to an old Roman road called Peddars Way.

Every summer I used to go and play with them. We would go out with the dogs and catch rabbits while the farm workers were combining. They had lots of dogs, big lurchers. One in particular, I remember, was called Scruff; he was crossed with a wolfhound, so huge, and he would chase rabbits until he dropped.

A little farther up the Way was a wagon set on its own that belonged to an old gypsy woman who, it was said, bought illnesses. She was very old and wizened, with long gray hair and gold hoop earrings, and looked like the old-fashioned gypsies you see in picture books. People who were ill used to go to see her. I don’t know whether she made them better, but I don’t imagine anyone would have dared say if she hadn’t because it was said she would put a curse on anyone who spoke ill of her.

I felt very much at home with the gypsies, and although she never said anything, I have a strong feeling that my mother was pleased. I think, in retrospect, that she may have been trying to introduce me to my father’s family. It was unusual for village children to mix with gypsies. They were never liked by the village people and were made to feel distinctly unwelcome in the shops and pubs. I knew how it felt to be treated like an outcast.

I was a solitary child. I attended the little primary school in Great Massingham until the age of eleven, but I don’t remember many friends from that time although I must have had the odd one because I do remember throwing sticks into the horse chestnut tree in the churchyard to get conkers and being told off by the vicar—and I don’t imagine I’d have been doing that alone. But with no father, I think I may have been viewed as a bit of an outcast myself. Maybe I felt I didn’t need friends; I had Whiskey and the farm dogs and they were much easier than my peers. Dogs don’t pick fights or bully or make unkind remarks.

Not that I had much time for friends. I always had to hurry home after school to chop wood for the fires or bring in coal or feed the animals, and I was often taken out of school for several weeks at a time to help with the harvest or whatever farmwork needed to be done. The school never seemed to mind my absence—I was never going to be top of the class, and I wasn’t the only child at the school who was taken out to work on the land at busy times. The teachers seemed to focus on those children who obviously had an academic future and didn’t pay too much attention to the rest of us. And so I worked hard at the subjects I enjoyed, which apart from art were animal related—biology and other sciences—and sports. Those were things I really could do and I was in all the teams for soccer and rugby and cricket. I loved anything played with a ball or anything athletic.

I also loved fishing. In the village there were three big ponds we used to fish. One of them dried out one summer and we rescued the fish in buckets and ran to put them into the other ponds before they died. North Norfolk has dozens of little ponds, or “pits,” as they were called, often in the middle of fields, with tall trees surrounding them. It was a curious feature of the landscape in that part of the county. There were all sorts of theories about how they came to be there. Some people said they were craters caused by German bombs dropped during the Second World War; others said they were left over from some sort of mineral excavation. Whatever caused them, they were full of fish, such as carp, roach, pike, and bream, and provided hours of entertainment for children like me.

Sometimes we would fish farther afield. One pit we were particularly fond of was in a field by the side of the road about four miles from Great Massingham. It was full of gold-colored fish, but every time we got ourselves set up, the farmer would come running out of the farmyard across the field, shouting angrily and waving a stick at us, and we would leap on our bicycles and race away.

I had a green Chopper, which was just the coolest bike at that time. I think my grandfather must have found it on some rubbish pile. It looked as though it had been run over by a steamroller and was all rusty but he restored it for me, painted it, found it a new seat, and it became my prize possession.

A doctor’s surgery was the only facility missing from the village. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk away, in the village of Harpley, where Dr. Bowden had his practice. It was a route I knew well. I was seldom ill but I was accident prone and often needed to be stitched up after bad falls or being bashed during soccer and rugby games.

I didn’t care for doctors much, but dentists I loathed with a passion. I have only been to a dentist once in my life, for a checkup when I was about eleven at a practice in Fakenham, a town about twelve miles away. The dentist said I needed a back tooth removed and although he gave me a local anesthetic, I have never felt pain like it. He had his knee on my chest as he wrestled to pull out that tooth. It was the most horrific experience. I couldn’t bear it. I hated the smell, I hated the noise, I hated the injection, and I couldn’t stand the pain. I vowed I would never go near a dentist again, and I haven’t. On the positive side, it did make me clean my teeth properly and the only teeth I’ve lost since then have been knocked out by overboisterous wolves.

Hospitals have been less easy to avoid. I fell through a roof in my late teens and broke a wrist, and I went through a car windshield soon after I learned to drive, but my first hospital stay was at the age of nine. I lost my grip on the school climbing frame and fell onto the hard ground beneath, shattering an elbow. I was rushed to the hospital in King’s Lynn, where I languished in the children’s ward with my arm suspended above my head for three weeks. There was a boy in the next bed who had slipped and fallen under the wheels of a double-decker bus.

I have no memory of my mother’s visiting, but she tells me that she gave up work for those three weeks and took the bus early every morning into King’s Lynn, which was fifteen miles away, to sit by my bedside until early evening, when she took the bus home again.

One day the sister in charge of the ward came up to her and said, “You’ve been coming here every day for nearly three weeks and I have never seen you have anything to eat. Today you are going to have some lunch. I have organized it with the kitchen.” The sister had rightly surmised that having been off work all that time, with no wage coming in, my mother couldn’t afford to feed herself.

But at home we ate well. My grandmother was a good cook. Sundays were her baking days and wonderful smells would waft into the yard. In preparation she would buy eggs to supplement those our chickens laid. One Sunday she couldn’t find the eggs she had bought, and after looking all over, she had to abandon her baking. That evening my grandfather came into the house and said, “I’ve found your eggs, Ma. They’re under the chicken at the top of the garden.” I had taken them and put them under a broody hen to see if she would hatch them.

My grandmother used to sing as she baked, and I will always remember her wearing a blue floral dress. There was always a big stew or a casserole on the stove, made with vegetables that my grandfather grew in the garden and game of one sort or another that we had shot or coursed on the land. I learned to shoot at a very early age, and could always use a knife. I was never squeamish about killing and could skin and gut.

By the age of eight or nine my job was to bring home our meals. My grandmother would make me coarsely cut cheese sandwiches and some cold tea—we never had hot drinks for some reason—and send me out with a penknife, a piece of string, a ten-pence piece—what that was for I have no idea—and tell me I was equipped to conquer the world. And off I would go with the dogs and not come back until I had plenty for everyone to eat.

I didn’t kill indiscriminately. My grandfather had taught me which animals to take and which ones to leave. I knew to leave female rabbits that were nursing their young. From fifty yards, he could spot “milky does,” as he called them, by their lack of condition and the absence of fur on their underbellies. He knew they had young underground that would die if their mother was killed. Instead I learned to go for the young bucks that would otherwise overpopulate the area.

My grandfather’s whole philosophy was about sustainability and about maintaining a balance in nature. Younger farmers wanted to kill off the rabbits because they were so destructive to the crops, but he wanted to protect them, knowing that if you drastically reduced one species, another would take over. He would say that problems arose only when human beings interfered.




CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_7bff8a5b-5312-5470-8f93-e96d98f5dd02)

A Wolf at the Window (#ulink_7bff8a5b-5312-5470-8f93-e96d98f5dd02)


In bed at night, when I was small and the lights were out, I was convinced I could see a wolf outside my bedroom window. I suppose it must have been the way the branches of a tree fell. As an adult, of course, the idea of a wolf being tall enough to look in through a second-floor window is patently ridiculous, but as a young child, I was convinced. And I was terrified. Every night, to escape, I hid my head under the coarse black blanket that covered me, but then I couldn’t resist peeping to see if it had gone, and would scare myself all over again. It was just the wolf’s head, ears erect, looking to its left; but by morning, in the daylight, there was no sign of it.

I knew a lot about the wild animals around my home when I was small—probably much more than most children of my age—but I knew nothing about those in the wider world. I didn’t see wildlife programs because we had no television, and I didn’t visit a zoo until I was in my late teens because there was no money for that kind of thing. So the only knowledge I had of big and dangerous wild animals was from books and fairy stories. And all I knew about wolves was that they were sly, sinister, fierce, and deadly; and the images of the stories my grandmother told me preyed on my imagination. It was a long, long time before I confronted my fear.

Foxes, on the other hand, were familiar and although they also had a fearsome reputation, I was not scared of them. One night I was startled from sleep by the noise of the old shire horses thundering back and forth across the meadow behind the cottage. There was a full moon, as bright as I’d seen. It was almost like daylight outside, so I pulled on some clothes, told Whiskey to stay under my bed, and crept out of the house. I quietly made my way down toward the edge of the forest to see what was agitating the horses.

What I saw was pure magic. By the time I reached them, the horses had begun to settle and playing among their giant hooves was the most beautiful vixen with four young kits. They were so busy leaping on one another and tearing around that they seemed quite unaware of my presence, so I sat down a short distance away and watched their game unfold.

It was the most exciting sight. I had never watched a fox at close quarters before. All I had seen were glimpses of reddish brown from afar or a tail, with its distinctive white tip, disappearing into the hedge as the animal ran for safety when I was out with the dogs. Out there in the dark—in their environment, not mine—I felt as though I were witnessing another world.

I went home and told no one what I’d seen, but the next night I went back and there they were again. I can only assume that their den was just inside the forest and this was their playground. Once again I sat a short distance away and watched, and once again they ignored me, but allowed me to be there. This went on for several months as the kits grew bigger and stronger preparing to take their part in the world.

Every night I went out for my secret rendezvous—it was intoxicating to find myself welcome among creatures that were instinctively so afraid of man. In time, they were playing in a small semicircle in front of where I sat, but although they showed no hint of nervousness, they never seemed to pay me any attention. Until one night there was a rustling behind me and one of the boldest of the four kits had started to play in the bush behind where I sat. He burst out into the open and raced around me and playfully ambushed one of his siblings. I was no longer an observer; I had become part of their game.

I learned so much about foxes in that time. I watched the vixen bring food for the kits. It is a myth that foxes kill for fun, that they go into a henhouse and kill far more than they can eat. We think that only because they are usually caught in the act and frightened away. If left undetected, the fox will take one hen from the coop, which is all they can carry at a time, and then go back again and again until they have collected everything they killed. They will eat as much as their family needs that day and bury the remainder in the ground, where it keeps. Nothing is wasted. I know because I saw what they did and saw how well this mother looked after her young and taught them how to take care of themselves.

Six months later I saw a sight that filled me with grief and horror. Walking in the woods with the dogs I came across the limp and lifeless body of this boldest fox kit swinging from a tree. It was held by the leg in a crude trap, having died a painful and lingering death. The fact that this creature that I had come to know so well over the months, which had been so majestic, so beautiful, so full of energy, could have been deprived of life in this vile and cowardly way made me embarrassed for my species. I felt sick. I was so angry that some ignorant human being had taken this vibrant young life for no better reason than because he could.

Native Americans would say that that was the moment when my fate was sealed. They say that you sign nature’s unwritten contract to work with animals at a very young age as a result of some experience, either good or bad, that happens in early childhood. Looking back, there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox—my friend—hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.

My concern for foxes put me at odds with the rest of the community. The farmers hated them because in extremis a fox will take a newborn lamb, and the gamekeepers hated them because they took pheasants. So the local hunt was given a free rein to go wherever the scent took them, and it was a popular sport. The results were sickening.

Many were the times I came across a den where the vixen had gone to ground and the huntsmen had dug her out and gassed and killed the kits. The deadly smell of poison would still be lingering in the air. Sometimes it was a family I had watched for weeks, seeing the kits grow stronger and more adventurous. All of them gone, wiped out, given no chance of escape—all because of a reputation that the fox didn’t deserve and a few people’s desire for sport.

My gran used to tell a story about how she had been spring cleaning the cottage one day with both the front and back doors open, and a fox ran through the yard and straight in one door, through the house and out of the other. Moments later the entire pack of thirty-odd foxhounds followed. They were like a tidal wave sweeping through, jumping up and over tables and chairs as they followed the scent, and they wrecked the place. She had all her best china out of the cupboard and the whole lot was smashed. Shortly afterward the huntsmen came past on their horses, all dressed up in their pink coats, and when she asked what they were going to do about it, they simply doffed their hats and galloped off.

No one would listen to me when I tried to protest that foxhunting was cruel. And as a young boy it was hard to argue with my elders without being disrespectful, but it seemed to me that if you didn’t want foxes to get into your henhouse, then you needed to build an enclosure that was foxproof. It seemed totally unjust to set foxhounds to kill foxes because human beings were too lazy to take proper care of their chickens. Whenever I tried to speak to anyone about it, I was told to mind my manners, what did I know? I was just a child.

It was years before I was vindicated and foxhunting was banned in England and Wales. During the debate that raged beforehand, I was involved in researching the effects hunting had on the fox. The prohunting lobby said that they only caught old and sick animals, but that was simply not true. I examined foxes that had been caught and among them were carcasses of eighteen-month-old foxes—animals in the prime of life—too young to know how to save themselves.

Another myth was that the lead dog brought down the fox and it was all over in seconds with a single bite. The truth was they ran the fox to exhaustion until its brain boiled and swelled, its lungs bled, and the fox drowned in its own blood. They were often dead before the hounds even touched them. It was the most horrific death.

But back in the sixties, as a child no one would listen to, I very quickly grew to be deceitful. I went out with the dogs and as long as I came home with a couple of rabbits or pigeons, I could be gone from very early morning until after dark and no one asked any questions. I spent my days studying foxes, sitting for hours and hours watching and waiting; and all the wonderful things I saw and experienced and learned about foxes and their world I kept to myself. I knew that no human could be trusted, that if I told anyone where I had been watching families at play, they would go straight to the den and kill every creature inside it. Without knowing it, I became what the Native Americans call a keeper of the wild.

It was the beginning of a bad time for me. My world that had seemed so safe and secure, so happy and so loving, began to fall apart. I came home from school one day to discover that my grandfather had had a stroke that left him paralyzed down one side. I had not prepared myself in any way; it had never crossed my mind that he might ever be anything other than fit and strong, teaching me about the lore of the countryside and making the decisions for the family. I couldn’t imagine him any other way and didn’t want him any other way. But suddenly he looked old and frail and could no longer do all the things we used to do together. His mind seemed to have gone. Sometimes he remembered who I was; sometimes he seemed to have forgotten. And where once I had depended on him, he now depended upon others.

It wasn’t long before he had a second, massive stroke and died where he lay on the settee at home. My gran covered him with a jacket and sat with him, refusing to move, until the undertakers came to take him away. They must have been married for more than sixty years and had been so close and loved each other so dearly that I think his death broke her heart. They’d gone everywhere together, done everything together, and I had never once heard them argue or say a cross word to each other. If Gran went down to the shops, he would always go to meet her and they’d walk home together or he’d take his bicycle.

I remember them laughing. On washday she would always take the wet sheets up to the garden to squeeze them in the mangle. She would put them in and my grandfather would turn the handle and one day he said something to her that made her laugh so much she couldn’t get the sheets into the rollers.

I was just thirteen when he died. He was eighty and had lived and worked in Great Massingham all his life. He had been a popular man, and St. Mary’s Church, where the funeral was held, was packed, but among the familiar faces was a family of strangers sitting at the back. When the service was over, they came up to my grandmother and the stranger explained why they had come. He said that many, many years earlier he and his sister, as children, had been hungry, starving, and my grandfather had taken a loaf of bread for each of them from the back of the baker’s cart and told them to stuff it inside their jackets. The man no longer lived in the area but said he had never forgotten the kindness and had wanted to come and pay his last respects.

My grandfather was buried in the churchyard under the shade of the horse chestnut tree where I used to collect conkers.

His death changed everything. We had to leave the cottage because it was tied to my grandfather’s job, and for some reason that was never explained, we split up as a family. My grandmother, whom I looked upon as a mother, went to live on her own in a council house on Jubilee Terrace, where she was near her oldest son and his family, and my mother and I went to a tiny new bungalow, owned by the council in Summerwood Estate at the end of a cul-de-sac. I was miserable and angry, and I was grief stricken. I felt as though I had lost everything. My mother had never been the one who cared for me or cooked for me; she hadn’t been the one who spent time with me, who’d taken me for walks, or who’d taught me what I needed to get through life. It had been my grandparents and they were both gone. I didn’t want to be with my mother and I blamed my grandfather for dying and leaving me when I needed him most. I was terrified; I didn’t know how I was going to cope without him.

It was only when I went back, at the age of forty-four, and looked at the headstone on my grandfather’s grave that I discovered my grandmother had lived for another thirteen years after his death. I thought she had died within months of him. I have no memory of seeing her again after we moved. All I remember was the need to get away from anything that reminded me of what I’d lost.

I must have been very difficult for my mother. I took out my anger and my grief on her. I was at a secondary school in Litcham by then, which was about seven miles from Great Massingham, and she was out at work every day, working long hours as usual. I became very independent and shut her out of my life. I traveled back and forth on the school bus, which was a big blue double-decker run by Carter’s of Litcham. It was the oldest bus in the company’s fleet and the only double-decker. The kids from all the other villages came on single-deckers, and whenever there was snow, which could be five feet deep or more, there was just one bus that managed to struggle through, bypassing stranded cars and lorries along the way. To our annoyance, it was ours.

I seldom saw my mother. When I came home from school and on weekends, if there was work going, I went harvesting, baling, driving tractors, plucking turkeys, castrating pigs, helping cows give birth—anything and everything. And if there was no work, I would go off with Whiskey, my dog. I would go off for days sometimes, sleeping in barns, not thinking about how worried my mother might be. I became a bit of a recluse, a bit feral, wandering in the woods, being at one with the wildlife in a world where, increasingly, I felt I belonged—the only place where I was able to cry.




CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_489ceb70-01d5-5fb2-831f-cfd56d2d61ff)

A Misspent Youth (#ulink_489ceb70-01d5-5fb2-831f-cfd56d2d61ff)


A part from playing on the school sports teams, which I loved, my time at Litcham Secondary School was undistinguished. I had friends, but my best friend died of an asthma attack. I remember the headmaster calling the whole class together one morning and breaking the news. I felt at that moment as though I were destined to lose everything.

I was a regular visitor to the headmaster’s office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen. I needed to get out and earn a living and I wanted to get away from home. I was still angry and hurting and wanting to forget. So rather than look for jobs on the land, I joined a roofing company called Western and Bolton Roofing. It was hard work, carrying tiles and running up and down ladders all day, but it made me strong and fit and it took me to building sites all over the county. Sometimes we would be on a job for weeks if not months and I’d stay in a bed-and-breakfast or in hostels, only going back at weekends, and then I wouldn’t necessarily go home but often would stay with friends.

It was through work that I began to make my first friends and develop a social life, which largely revolved around pubs. There were a lot of good pubs in the area and once every three months, on a Saturday night, there was a disco in the little community center in Fakenham. It was the place to go. All the top DJs in Norfolk played there and people came from miles around to hear them. There was great music, drink, pretty girls that we’d take outside and kiss against the wall, and plenty of fights—all the good things in life. Then we’d make our way haphazardly home.

I remember one night the fog was so thick you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face and one of my mates said he knew the road so well, he could do it blindfolded. We all followed him on our little 150 cc motorbikes—I was on the back of one, as I usually was—and he missed a bend. He drove straight into a deep ditch and we all followed him into it one after another, no one noticing until we were up to our axles in water.

Fakenham was the fashion capital of Norfolk. On disco days, we would go into town in the morning and buy all the gear we needed, have a few pints, go home, play soccer for a couple of hours, change into the new clothes, go back to Fakenham, have some fish and chips in the early evening, then move on to The Crown for some beers, then to the Rampant Horse, which was as rough as hell—anytime you wanted a fight, you’d go there—before hitting the disco later.

One of my best friends was a tiler named Benny Elson, who lived in Weasenham, a neighboring village, and through him I met my first girlfriend, Michelle Pearce. Benny was older than I was, as most of the guys I worked with were, and Michelle was his wife Jac’s niece. She was visiting their house one day when he and I were getting ready to go out and asked who I was.

I started frequenting the Fox and Hounds in Weasenham, where she lived, and she would come in after school and hide behind the bar, and Skiffy, the landlord, would signal to me and we’d go off into the woods together and sit and talk for hours. We wrote each other little notes and I used to walk her dogs for her. She said all the things I needed to hear, and life didn’t get much better. Her father was one of the Queen’s pigeon keepers—I built him a pigeon loft in their garden—and I remember arriving at their house one day to collect Michelle and finding everyone in a state of great excitement because the Queen had just been to visit.

I fell madly in love with her, but she was too pretty for me and in the end she left me for someone else and broke my heart. We were both very young, but there was definitely something there and I often wonder how things might have been if I’d pushed a little harder or been less of a prat.

Skiffy’s real name was Freddy Scarf and he was a character. He didn’t turn a hair when I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the pub—after years of illegal underage drinking—but then he had been regularly paying me in beer for the game he had on the menu that I and a couple of mates had brought in through the back door in sacks! I had been taught to poach by Pete, someone I knew from working on the land. He was married with a family—I never really knew much about him except that he was an expert on pheasants and how to get them illegally, which he had learned from his grandfather.

Pete had a brother and the three of us used to go out with an old 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, a genuine poacher’s gun that broke apart so you could conceal it. It had been handed down in his family from one generation to another. It went off with a terrible crack and smoked like mad, so the safest night of the year to fire it was November 5, Bonfire Night, when everyone was setting off fireworks.

Pete tried to make a silencer for the gun but the first attempt, out of copper pipe and baffling, was too heavy to lift. The modified version was much more successful until one day Pete was shooting a bird directly above him. The silencer must have become misaligned as we climbed through a hedge and ended up right in the line of fire. So when Pete pulled the trigger, flames shot out of the barrel and the burning silencer shot into the air and came straight down on his forehead, almost knocking him out.

It was dangerous business—and not just because of flying silencers. If we had been caught, we could have gone to prison—and we came close time and time again. One night I felt a massive hand in the small of my back push me down into the hedge. I knew better than to yell. Pete and his brother were lying flat on the ground beside me, facedown, and I lay there not moving a muscle for several minutes. There was not a sound to be heard; then I saw the outline of two pairs of water boots walk past on the track less than five feet from my face—gamekeepers patrolling their patch. My heart was pounding; I was convinced they’d hear it. It must have been four or five minutes before we dared move again. I asked how on earth they had known the gamekeepers were coming. They knew all the tricks; Pete’s brother had smelled the gamekeepers’ cigarette smoke.

We always tried to avoid the areas where the birds were released because that was where the gamekeepers expected poachers—they put down traps and they patrolled. And Pete taught me never to shoot a white pheasant, although they were obviously easier to see in the dark. Gamekeepers bred them specially, he said, because they were easy to count and if one was missing, they’d know a poacher was in the area and would intensify their patrols.

So we walked for miles across fields, heading for pits, then we’d crawl through the undergrowth to the bottom, which was usually filled with water, and lie there out of sight. You could look up through the trees above you, where roosting pheasants were perfectly silhouetted against the sky and shoot them straight off the branches. As the youngest, it was my job to pick them up from wherever they fell, which was usually in the water, and put them into the bag. Pete did the shooting and his brother held the torch and did the spotting.

I was enjoying my new life, but there was always something missing. I was one of the lads and I liked getting dressed up to go out and having a good time—they used to say I looked like George Michael in my white jeans—but I never lost the need to go off on my own with the dog and roam the countryside, watching foxes, spotting birds, looking for signs of other wildlife. There was always a part of me that remained separate from my mates.

One day I took the bus and went to visit the local zoo, just outside Thetford. I saw animals I had never seen before. I was so excited I felt like a child—and then I came to the wolf enclosure, and standing less than ten feet away were the creatures that had filled me with such terror night after night.

There was one in particular, a beautiful creamy-colored male with lovely golden-yellow eyes that immediately locked onto mine. We stared at each other, and in those few seconds I felt that he touched my soul. I felt as though this magnificent creature understood everything about me, knew my secrets, could read my deepest thoughts and fears, and could see all the hurt and pain. I felt he had the power to heal those wounds and make me whole again. It was an extraordinary connection and I knew that what I was looking for in life was right there in front of me.

He probably looked at every member of the public in that way in the hope that they might throw him a piece of food, but I don’t imagine that everyone would have felt what I felt, or have seen what I saw. Maybe it was all those years spent with dogs and with foxes, living with one foot in their world, always being slightly at odds with the human world. Or maybe it was something deeper. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of a lifelong contract. I knew that everything I had been told about this creature was a lie and that he and I had a lot in common and were both living out of our time.

I felt I needed to get back to the land, so I gave up the roofing business and applied for a part-time job as a gamekeeper’s assistant on an estate that ran a big commercial shoot. It was good to be back among the hedgerows, but the work flew in the face of everything my grandfather had taught me. He had ingrained in me that you kill to eat; you don’t kill for fun. On this estate, so many birds were laid down, you could scarcely put your foot on the ground without treading on a chick; and when it came to the shoots, there was no skill involved—it was slaughter. It was harder not to hit a bird than to hit one. They didn’t want to fly; you had to throw them in the air to get them to go anywhere.

I stuck it out for about sixteen months, but when I heard on the grapevine that Morton’s farm estate, a much smaller enterprise, was looking for an assistant gamekeeper, I went there. It was one of the farms in the village where I’d worked many times over the years, and the job came with a little one-room cottage, which was perfect. Monty, the head gamekeeper, was a craftsman of the old school, and I knew I would learn a lot from him. He trained me and was very good to me; he put a lot of trust in me, which to my shame I abused. But I was in the wrong job.

He wanted me to kill the foxes to stop them taking the young birds. Instead, I killed pheasants and the rabbits and fed them to the foxes. There was a particular vixen I had watched over for months. She had built a den on the tree line where she raised a litter, and I watched her move the entire litter to another den she built on another tree line in a different field, across a road about five hundred yards away. For some reason she must have decided they were no longer safe at the first site, and so carried them one by one, holding them by the scruff of the neck in her mouth, across the fields under cover of darkness.

It was four months before I was caught. Monty found the evidence one day and confronted me. I felt I had let him down badly. When I told the story to Pete, my poacher friend, he said, “You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.” He was right, and the episode did nothing to improve my popularity among the locals. To them, foxes were vermin and I was despised for my views.

I was out of a job and a house, but very quickly found work in the building trade again and rented a little cottage in the village, which I moved into with Sue, a girl I’d been seeing for some time. I don’t think it was a passionate love affair for either of us, but we got on well for a while and we married, without a great deal of ceremony, and had a little girl together, Gemma.

During that time I started studying foxes in earnest. I knew I wanted to work with animals, not bricks and tiles, but I couldn’t see how I was going to do it, and the laboring jobs paid the rent. So I read books and went into the forest at night and on weekends.

One evening there was a knock at the door and I discovered that not everyone in the village was against me. A woman stood there with a young fox kit hidden under her coat that she presented to me. The kit couldn’t have been more than two weeks old and she had found him starving, cold, and close to death. His mother had presumably been killed. I told her I would keep him until he was old enough to fend for himself and then release him into the wild.

I named him Barney and made a little den for him in the barn out of a large drainage pipe lined with straw and set about teaching him what I’d observed vixens teaching their young. When he was old enough for solid food, I fed him on rats, mice, and rabbits, which I skinned and minced, making the meat as much like the nourishment his mother would have regurgitated, and gradually introduced him to fur and whole animals. I then showed him how to defend his food—I opened my mouth wide and made a fast cacking sound, which is what I had seen wild foxes do. He picked it up quickly and was soon defending his food from me. I played with him as I had seen so many kits do with one another: chasing him, rolling him over, and having mock fights.

Eventually I decided he was ready to be released, but first I spent several nights out in the woods with him so he could listen to the sounds and get his bearings before I left him to fend for himself. When the moment came to release him, I had no idea whether my training would be of any use to him. He made a dash for the trees, turned for an instant to look back at me, and was gone.

Imagine my joy when I spotted him again many times in the next few years and knew that all those hours as a child spent sitting, listening, watching, and learning had saved this young creature’s life.




CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_8eeba2ce-903f-5103-a659-782d82d11d71)

For Queen and Country (#ulink_8eeba2ce-903f-5103-a659-782d82d11d71)


Looking back, it seems that everything about my early life was preparing me for my future with wolves, though at the time there didn’t seem to be the slightest connection. Not long afterward, I was in King’s Lynn with three mates. One of them needed some money in a hurry, so we were in a backstreet stealing car radios—not something I am hugely proud of—when someone spotted a couple of policemen heading our way. We ran off into the High Street with two policemen in pursuit, desperately looking for a busy shop to disappear into. It must have been an early closing day because nothing was open except for the army recruitment office, which had a welcoming light inside. We dived in breathless and panting, and announced that we had come to sign up. I don’t imagine they had seen so many people all week; they welcomed us with open arms and ushered us swiftly into a back room to see a video about life in the army. Perfect.

We were all impressed by what we saw, and it became my life for the next seven years. We signed up that afternoon, but I was the only one who went the whole way. I had never considered joining the army and, had I not been dodging the police, probably never would have done so, but the more I learned about it, the more it seemed the perfect career for me.

My relationship with Sue was at an end. I was too wild, too angry, too disconnected. I was twenty-two and I wanted to get away from Norfolk; I didn’t feel there was anything left for me there. I liked the outdoor life, I enjoyed physical exertion, I had been used to discipline from an early age, and I was good at taking orders without question. These were all qualities I had learned from my grandfather and all were essential components of a successful soldier. In one of the interviews, I was asked why I wanted to join the army and I told them about the car radios. I think they probably thought I was joking.

I was sent for about eight weeks of basic training at the Woolwich Arsenal, where two of the three trainers were from the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. The one in charge was a man named John Morgan, who had been through the Special Forces selection but had been injured in the last lap. He was a strong man, fair and balanced, never ruffled, able to deal with whatever life threw at him, but he was someone you didn’t mess with. If I had to name the role models in my life, and the men I’ve looked up to—heroes in the mold of my grandfather—he would be one of them.

His colleagues were Lugsy Williams, so called because of his big ears, and a very short man named Corbet, known as Ronnie, after the comedian. Corbet was a human dynamo. The man never stopped—I’m sure he did cartwheels and push-ups in his sleep. They used to take turns taking us out on what we called Bergen runs of four, five, or six miles, wearing boots and all the gear, carrying anything up to sixty pounds in a backpack. These were in addition to the normal training and were designed to get our fitness up. It was crippling and I used to pray for John Morgan’s turn because he was slow and steady, as I was. The others ran us all into the ground.

I did sufficiently well in my written tests to be given a choice of which service I wanted to join. Having seen photographs of people rappelling out of helicopters and walking through snow and skiing, and having spoken to John Morgan and Lugsy Williams, I opted for the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. It was based at that time at HMS Drake, naval barracks on the south coast about three miles south of Plymouth. The regiment’s usual home was in the Royal Citadel, a beautiful seventeenth-century building in the center of Plymouth, with seventy-foot walls designed to fend off the Dutch in the wars of that century. It had provided England’s most important defense for the following hundred years, but when I arrived in 1986 the building was being renovated and all 29 personnel had moved to the modern facility (built in the 1880s) down the road.

The 29 Commando was a close support artillery regiment, part of the heavy-weapons division that supported the 3 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines. In laymen’s terms, when the marines took the beaches, we were there to draw fire; but it felt as though we lived in no-man’s-land, between two worlds. We weren’t quite the navy and we weren’t quite army and neither seemed particularly fond of us. We went anywhere and everywhere the marines went, and since 3 Commando specialized in operating in extreme temperatures and conditions—in frozen wastes, jungles, and deserts—those were the places and conditions in which we trained.

The initial training took place at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines near Lympstone in Devon. It was the toughest thing I had experienced—this from someone who had spent years as a roofer, running up and down ladders carrying stacks of tiles. We didn’t stop; we were running or doing push-ups, sit-ups, or pull-ups—strength and stamina training—all day. It made runs with Lugsy and Ronnie feel like child’s play.

It was relentless; day after day after day our bodies were pushed to the limit. We had tests sometimes as often as three times a day. We were worn down, exhausted, beyond exhaustion physically and mentally. I would get into a bath at night and feel as though I’d never be able to walk again—tomorrow couldn’t come slowly enough. But it was all done with a purpose. As commandos, we needed not only the physical fitness to get through hostile terrain, we also had to have the mental stamina to be able to fight and defend ourselves once we got there. If we weren’t up to it, we were no use to the unit.

And when we weren’t pushing our bodies to the limit, we were map reading, doing survival training in extreme weather conditions, taking military tactical awareness courses, learning to look after our kit, taking bearings, and preparing to be dropped into an enemy zone at night “by sea, by air and by land”—the force’s motto.

During the training we were known as hats, which was short for crap hats because we wore undistinguished black berets. The final test to win the coveted green beret was a thirty-mile trek across Dartmoor that had to be completed in eight hours. It was a combination of running and walking in full gear. The dropout rate at this stage was between 40 and 45 percent. It was as tough as anything we had done, but our team came in on time. There was no heroes’ fanfare, no ceremony. The instructors were at the finishing point waiting for us, and as we limped in on the verge of collapse, they flung our green berets at us. I can still remember the feel of the material, the excitement of holding it tightly in my hands as we returned to base in the back of an open truck, tired and freezing cold—and the feeling of incredible pride. It was a sense of achievement unlike any I had ever had.

There was no resting on our laurels. That was just the beginning. We were away from base for eight and a half to nine months a year, and the training we were given in that time and the places we went to were phenomenal. I had thought I knew about outdoor living, but being out in the wild in Norfolk was a far cry from the frozen wastes of Norway in midwinter, when it can be minus twenty degrees centigrade. That place will kill you if you don’t know how to take care of yourself. I learned all about survival. I learned how to keep myself warm, how to be healthy by eating the sort of food that the body could use rather than food that simply satisfied hunger or was comforting. I learned how and where to cross frozen lakes, and how to use the environment to my advantage. In those conditions it’s possible to go from subzero temperatures to plus two degrees by something as simple as digging a hole in the snow for shelter. I learned where and how to make those holes in the quickest time and using a minimum amount of energy.

If we were traveling long distances on foot in those temperatures and that terrain, the leading person would never break trail for very long. He would lead for about five hundred meters, then taper off and go to the back and the next person in line would lead for another five hundred meters and so it would go on. The logic was that forging a path through deep snow is more tiring than following in someone else’s footprints, and on the presumption we would have to fight once we had arrived at our destination, every soldier needed to be as fit as the next.

I always used to wonder how people discovered this, but it wasn’t until I was out on the mountains with wild wolves in central Idaho years later that I noticed they used exactly the same technique in snow. After a while the leader would break off and join the back of the line, ensuring that when they came to make the kill, every animal had conserved enough energy to be effective. My guess is that the Inuit, the indigenous people of North America and Greenland, learned from the wolves, and passed on their techniques to our specialized troops when they arrived to train in those areas.

There was nothing I learned during my time in the army that wasn’t invaluable in my work with wolves, and many of the survival techniques the wolves also used. In combat I was taught to go for the element of surprise, to fight the enemy in a known environment, where the odds for keeping control are in my favor. One person alone against twelve on enemy turf doesn’t stand a chance, but by taking on those twelve in a familiar environment, the chances of survival go up considerably.

Wolves, I discovered, do exactly that. They will always make sure they change the environment to bring the odds into their favor before taking on an opponent. I’ve seen three wolves successfully take on a seven-hundred- to eight-hundred-pound bear and remain in control throughout just by waiting until it was pitch dark for the final assault. Being nocturnal animals, the wolves could still see clearly, but the bear, which is fundamentally a daytime creature, was at a disadvantage.

My unit didn’t go to Afghanistan or Iraq; the only active duty we did was in Northern Ireland, but we did a number of “hearts and minds” tours with the United Nations. I remember in particular being in Cyprus, where the UN was maintaining a buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish parts of the island. I went to the Turkish side one day to deliver food. I was the driver and I had a mate with me, but once we arrived, we were redundant. Local henchmen stepped in and started handing out the food—and violence if there was any trouble. I felt cynical about the whole exercise; it seemed to me that all we were doing was helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

As I was standing around waiting, I noticed an old lady struggling to wheel a wooden cart down a cobbled alleyway toward the lorry. She had a lined and weathered face and was dressed in black, as so many of the women were. The henchmen didn’t seem to be paying her any attention, so I quietly loaded her cart with food and while she followed, muttering, I pushed it back up the hill to her cottage, which must have been six or seven hundred meters away. I didn’t speak a word of Turkish and she didn’t speak a word of English, but when we reached her door, she thanked me by holding my hand in hers. Then she did the most incredible thing: She reached into the cart and took out a precious apple, which she insisted I take. I tried to explain that I didn’t need it, that I had plenty of food, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I was so moved; this old woman had nothing and I had three square meals a day. Her generosity of spirit was humbling. Her culture and upbringing made it impossible for her not to repay an act of kindness, and much as I admire the billionaires who give millions to charity, there’s nothing quite like the gesture of someone giving away a piece of fruit that could mean the difference between life and death to her.

There were many reasons why I loved the Forces, and moments like that were certainly among them. Having been a solitary child, I also enjoyed the sense of camaraderie. I loved the outdoor Action Man lifestyle and I believed in everything the military stood for. It suited me down to the ground. I felt secure in the routine and discipline. I felt a sense of family among my colleagues in the ranks. I imagined I would be there for a very long stint. I even tried to get into the notoriously difficult Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS).

Normally you could only apply for the SAS if you were in the army, and the SBS if you were in the navy, but the government had begun a trial to allow crossover. I volunteered to take part in the trial. The SBS training was tough but then I went up to Wales for the SAS training and that was carnage. I got through the first stage, but I didn’t get to Hereford, where the unit is based. It was disappointing, but I was comforted to have made it past the first day. Out of 150 people who started, 40 had fallen by the wayside before nightfall. Their exhausted bodies were lying over the Brecon Beacons like sheep dung.

I obviously wasn’t destined to join the Special Forces but it turned out that I was not destined to make a long-term career of the army either. Instead, it proved to be a valuable apprenticeship for the real job I was going to do in life.




CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_528dd39f-4471-5108-bcb4-77559598ceec)

Up Close and Personal (#ulink_528dd39f-4471-5108-bcb4-77559598ceec)


Ever since my extraordinary encounter with that big cream-colored wolf in the zoo near Thetford, I had wanted to see and know more about these creatures that had so preyed on my imagination as a child. I began reading natural history books, and a lot of what I had learned about foxes from years of watching them seemed applicable to what I was reading about wolves. Foxes were being cruelly and systematically persecuted because of a reputation I knew they didn’t deserve; mankind had gone one further with wolves and exterminated them from most parts of the world. I began to wonder whether all the negative stories I had heard about wolves as I was growing up were any more reliable than the falsehoods I had been told about their small, red cousins.

Wolves used to be everywhere. Once upon a time they were second only to humans in the breadth of their distribution across the globe, and when humans were hunter-gatherers, they hunted the same prey as wolves and successfully lived alongside each other, to mutual benefit. They were respected as powerful fellow hunters and given mystical and magical properties. Native North Americans still believe that the spirits of their ancestors live on in the guise of wolves. They won’t sign a treaty unless a wolf, or these days a dog, is present. There were countless legends through the centuries about wolves suckling human children. Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome, were supposedly rescued and nursed by a she-wolf who found them in a basket floating down the river Tiber.

But when man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and wolves started preying on his livestock, the wolf swiftly turned from hero to villain. They were demonized, persecuted, and hunted, in many places to extinction. Despite being endangered, they are still hunted in some parts of the world and still widely feared as savage creatures that hunt by the light of the moon, snatch babies from cradles, and tear Russian peasants from the backs of sleighs.

I had felt such intense and curious empathy with that wolf in the zoo that on the basis of nothing more than instinct, and a habit of identifying with the underdog, I felt an overwhelming need to find out the truth and do whatever I could to help and stand up for these creatures.

It quickly became an obsession. I discovered the Dartmoor Wildlife Park near Plymouth in the village of Sparkwell, which had a pack of wolves, and at the first opportunity I made my way there and got chatting with the keepers. I went there repeatedly on any free days I had from the regiment, and offered to lend a hand at times when they were short staffed. I came to know the owner of the park, Ellis Daw, who lived in an imposing house in its midst, and was soon volunteering to work over Christmas and during other holiday periods when the regular keepers wanted time off. There was a flat in one wing of the house that the keepers lived in and I was able to stay there. Whenever we had leave, and my friends and colleagues went off home to see their families, I went to Sparkwell. I didn’t go back to Norfolk for more than ten years. I felt the wolves were my family.

The park was on a hillside, about thirty acres in all, backing on to Dartmoor National Park. The wolf enclosure was at the top of the hill, running alongside the perimeter fence. It was a small enclosure, not much more than an acre for six wolves, and was fenced with heavy-duty six-foot-high link wire with a double gate to prevent a wolf accidentally escaping when the keepers came and went. Although the area was small, it was quite heavily wooded, and there was a bank toward the back under the shade of the densest trees where the wolves had dug an underground den. Otherwise there was a low rectangular hut by the gate that looked like an air-raid shelter and another smaller structure with a flat roof that the wolves seemed to enjoy lying on during the day. The keepers took carcasses to the animals every few days. Otherwise, their only human contact was when one of the animals needed veterinary attention. The keepers certainly didn’t make a habit of being on the wrong side of the wire for any length of time and no one ever went near the wolves at night. The park closed before dusk and the keepers all went off duty.

It was common practice for everyone going into the enclosure to be armed with a broom handle. It was routine with all of the big predators in case anything went wrong, but the wolves were never threatening. On the contrary, they seemed to feel threatened by us. They panicked when anyone went near them; they tore off to the far end of the enclosure or disappeared underground and only came to their food when we were well away. These didn’t look to me like vicious creatures that would attack as soon as look at you.

Curiosity soon got the better of me. I wanted to get close to those animals and to know more about them and so I started sitting quietly inside the enclosure. I sat there for hour after hour, for several weeks, hoping that the wolves might start to take an interest, as the foxes had done, and come and investigate me. They didn’t. Then I realized what I was doing wrong. I was invading their territory in daylight, when I felt comfortable. What would happen, I wondered, if I switched the odds and approached them, as I had the foxes, at night when they had the upper hand? Might I then get a truer understanding of what those creatures were really about? I applied the psychology I had learned in the army in reverse. I wanted the wolves to feel that they had the advantage and I did not. My colleagues had been astonished by my desire to sit in the enclosure during the day and when I told them that I wanted to go in at night, they thought I was certifiable. But to his credit, Ellis Daw, the owner, whom I had come to know quite well by then, let me experiment.

Even now I have no idea what I wanted from those wolves or why I felt so compelled to get to know them in that way. Maybe it was a voyage of self-discovery, to lay the ghosts of my childhood to rest. Maybe it was because they reminded me of the dogs I had grown up with and I was hoping that I would find some of the comfort and security with the wolves that I had felt with the dogs—and not experienced fully since my grandfather died. Or maybe I was just plain nuts. What I do know is that it upset me that those beautiful creatures found contact with humans so stressful, and I hoped that if they got to know me, I might in some way be able to make their lives in captivity a little better.

One night, when there was a new moon in the sky, I put on an old tracksuit and, taking my courage in both hands, went into the enclosure and locked the doors behind me. I was terrified, absolutely terrified; to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever done this before—and there had been plenty of accidents with captive wolves. There was no way of knowing how these wolves might react, whether they would hide away or tear me to pieces. But I had to know. Enveloped by darkness and stumbling over fallen branches and protruding tree roots, I made my way to the bank at the top and sat down to wait for I wasn’t sure what. It was hard to see and the night was full of strange noises as the nocturnal animals in the park limbered up. But I soon began to relax. The wolves remained hidden in the shadows and gave me no cause for concern. I began to feel comforted by the darkness. As a child I had loved the dark and the noises of the forest; they had made me feel safe as I lay in my bed under the coarse black blanket in Norfolk, and they began to make me feel safe here, too.

Every night for a week and a half I went into the enclosure. I wore the same clothes, knowing the importance of scent from my experience of the wild, although I didn’t know at that time that diet was also important. I was eating normal human food, but as I learned more, I discovered that I had to change. For the first three nights I sat in the same spot; although the wolves kept their distance, I could see that they were beginning to be a little curious. The next night I got up and moved to another part of the enclosure during the night. They immediately scattered, as though frightened, but I could see that a couple of the wolves went over to where I had been sitting to investigate my smell and to urinate, or scent, over it. They then resettled a safe distance away, but I was aware that they were watching me. That went on for a few more nights. They were interested but they just didn’t have the courage to come up and face me.

The next night one of the wolves, Reuben, which I now know to have been the beta animal, walked boldly up to me and started to sniff me all over and sniff the air. He didn’t touch—he was just checking me out; and he did this for a couple of nights. The next night I was sitting up on the bank at the highest point in the enclosure with my legs out in front of me, knees in the air. The same wolf came over to me and did exactly what he had done the previous two nights: sniffed me, sniffed the air, sniffed down my legs, and then suddenly without warning he lunged forward and in a split second his incisors had taken a hard, very painful nip out of the fleshy bit of my knee.

I sat frozen to the spot. I didn’t know what to do. If I got up and ran, would he run after me with the pack and bring me down? If I lashed out at him, would I make him more aggressive? So out of sheer ignorance, I sat there thinking, Christ, this is it, game over.

But he backed off, and stood looking at me quizzically as if gauging my reaction. Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness and I didn’t see him again until the following night, when he came and did exactly the same thing. He repeated the behavior every night for about two weeks, by which time my knees were black-and-blue. He might bite a different knee or nip my shin, but it was always the same procedure; he would come close, sniff, then lash out and disappear into the night. Sometimes he did it two or three times a night.

I had no idea what he was doing, but I knew that he couldn’t have meant me any real harm because he never followed it up with any sign of aggression and he never called over another wolf to join him—and with jaws that are capable of exerting fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, he could have had my kneecap off in seconds. But he chose not to and that’s what kept me going back for more. All I had to show for his assaults were thin lines of bruising on my knees and legs, like little wolf love bites. I didn’t react on any of those occasions, which I later discovered is what saved me.

The first thing a wolf will do, I came to realize, is find out whether a newcomer is trustworthy; the way he does that is by seeing how the stranger reacts to a bite. The incoming wolf immediately exposes his vulnerable throat area to signify that he has come in peace and the established wolf will dominate him until he is satisfied there is no threat. If I had pulled away or screamed, it could have been all over very quickly.

After two weeks of nips, Reuben started rolling his scent over me. He started with my feet, rubbing them with the side of his face, his teeth, the back of his ears, his hackles, and his tail. He then did the same to my legs, never biting, just rolling on me. If I got up and moved during this process, he’d nip me, back off, and if I didn’t react—which I didn’t—he’d come and start rolling on me again. What he was doing, I realized, was testing me. That is the beta’s role in the pack: to protect the others and to act like a bouncer at the door, making sure that no undesirable or threatening individual gets through. I must have satisfied him that I was acceptable because after four or five weeks he started bringing other members of the pack over.

This was the process that happens in the wild when a lone wolf attempts to join an established pack, as I later discovered. The ones that came to meet me were all high ranking and they didn’t touch me initially; they just stood behind Reuben and watched and sniffed, as he moved slowly around my body, nipping. He nipped the back of my head, not quite as roughly as he’d bitten other parts, but enough to produce blood spots that turned into scabs. Once or twice I tried moving back to try to rub against him, but any movement, whether subtle or sudden, got me another nip. He was biting me to keep me in place—and establishing that I could cope with their world, in which nips and bites are an important part of their communication.

I knew scent was important and I discovered that if I put on different clothes or washed or ate different food, the beta male would start nipping me again until he was satisfied that the new smell didn’t mean I was going to react differently to his approach or that my mood had changed. The other high-ranking wolves did the same thing, but he didn’t involve every wolf in the enclosure. The lower-ranking members of the pack, I was to learn, don’t question what the higher-ranking members decide; they are foot soldiers—they have an important job to do, but it is not to think for themselves.




CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_9b8b9092-43f5-5ae9-b351-97deb4ca50d4)

A Question of Morality (#ulink_9b8b9092-43f5-5ae9-b351-97deb4ca50d4)


I felt deeply flattered to have these creatures trust me so much that they were prepared to rub themselves against me, and an incredible sense of achievement to be tolerated in this way. It meant more to me than any human relationship I had established. I found myself looking forward to the end of each day when I could go and be with them again, and I stayed longer and longer during the nights. It was such a privilege to be allowed to sit among this family group and to feel that in some small way I was becoming a part of it. I was beginning to need these creatures that I had been frightened of for so long; I wanted to be with them. But what did they think of me? What did they think I was? They were always curious when I arrived, but what did they think when I left them? Did they miss me? I was attributing human values to them, and human emotions, which I came to realize are not part of their world. I had to learn to turn off my own.

After a while, they started greeting me when I went into the enclosure during the daytime and testing me in the same way as they did at night, a sure sign that they recognized and accepted me. There would be some nips and a bit of interaction that the other keepers began to notice. It felt good to see their reaction, to watch the surprise on their faces and to see them revising their view about these creatures that they fended off with broom handles. Little by little the days and nights merged and I found a week had gone by, and the only times that I had been away from the wolves was when I’d slipped out for some food. I once took a sleeping bag in with me but that was a mistake. The wolves tore it to shreds. They accepted my clothing but nothing else; and the truth was I needed nothing else. When I lay down to sleep, they settled down with me and the warmth of their bodies kept me warm. My excitement at what I had achieved with them was hard to contain.

I never allowed myself to feel complacent, however. I knew that anything could happen and there was no guarantee that because my last interaction had been good, the next one would be also. Every time I went into the enclosure I was full of apprehension, wondering what would happen next. I watched the way they behaved with one another—the way they wrestled and played, and snarled and snapped—and knew that if they started to treat me the same way, I wasn’t going to be able to cope. My skin wasn’t as tough as theirs. I wasn’t covered in thick fur and if they were as rough with me as I’d seen them be with one another, it would not only hurt, but I could sustain serious injuries. Would they recognize that my body was completely different from theirs? Their necks and throats, two of the areas they used most frequently to communicate, were also the best-protected parts of their bodies. My throat was one of the most vulnerable. One bite like the ones I had seen them give their fellow wolves would have been it for me.

But that sense of danger was as appealing as it was appalling. It was like watching a horror movie from behind a pillow, not wanting to see, not wanting to turn it off, and not being able to resist peeping. The excitement and the pleasure I derived from being with the wolves outweighed the danger. I felt comfortable with them; I admired the respectful way they interacted with one another, the hierarchy that obviously governed the pack, the discipline they meted out to members who stepped out of line or pushed in to feed before their elders and betters had eaten. I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time, but what I felt most of all was a sense of belonging. Here was a group of some of the most feared and revered creatures on earth, and they had accepted me into that group. I had taken a rigorous entry exam and been tested within an inch of my life, and by a mixture of luck and intuition, I had passed.

But I wasn’t allowed to bask in self-satisfaction for long. I went into the enclosure one evening, exhausted after a long day, and fell asleep. I was lying flat out, snoring my head off, and without warning Reuben ran over and bounced onto my chest, landing on all four feet. More than 120 pounds of wolf on your chest is quite a wake-up call. As soon as he’d landed, he bounced off again and stood looking at me quizzically before setting off around the boundary, scent marking. He kept looking back, as if wanting me to follow, and I made the mistake of ignoring him and going back to sleep. What I didn’t realize until it was too late was that he was trying to teach me to identify his scent, and it was an important lesson because his job was to look after the alpha pair, which included disciplining around the kill. Any food that had his scent on it was reserved for them.

The alphas are the most important members because they are the decision makers and without them the pack is leaderless. So their survival is paramount. If food is scarce, they will eat first and they may be the only ones who do eat. Other members of the pack will go hungry, even the pups, and starve if necessary. And the rest of the pack knows better than to touch something that has the beta’s scent on it. As it was, I learned the hard way.

It was customary for the local shoot to drop off birds during the season and one day they delivered three ducks to the enclosure. At that time I didn’t know much about the different foods wolves eat or the value they place on them. During the winter months, when it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground, fatty, greasy ducks are a valuable food source for the high-ranking animals. The alpha pair took the first two ducks and although I didn’t want to eat it, I thought I had better protect my share, so I picked up the third, unaware that the beta wolf had laid an arc of scent around it.

Within a split second I was on the ground. Reuben had come at me from about ten meters away with such force I felt as if I had been hit by a train. The duck went up in the air, and I fell onto my back and lay there, completely winded while he took my face in his jaws and squeezed. He was growling all the while, a deep menacing growl, and saliva was collecting around his lips. I could feel the bones in my cheeks bending under the pressure. It sounded like a handful of dry twigs being crushed. I thought, this is it—no question. He’s going to kill me, and I fleetingly wondered what I could do, but I was being pinned to the ground with such force that my options were limited. So I decided to do what he’d already taught me: show him respect and trust, knowing that if he had wanted to kill me, with the amount of weaponry he had, I’d have been dead by now. He was teaching me a lesson. So I tried to tilt my head to display my throat, which I’d been taught was the vulnerable trust area, and as I did so, he moved his grip from my face to my throat, still growling. He held me in a viselike grip for a few seconds longer and then he let go and backed off, still growling, his teeth bared.

If I had read the signs properly, and known what to look for, I would never have taken that duck in the first place. I would have noticed the progression in his behavior to that high-energy snapping and snarling, which should have drawn my attention to his weaponry, as it’s designed to do. He was warning me off and I would have seen his ear posture telling me that he was protecting the duck from afar. They would have been flat, going out like airplane wings, to indicate that he was covering something that belonged to him.

It was an experience that changed my entire perspective. I came out of that enclosure wondering just who the monsters on our planet really are. Humans have branded wolves as ruthless killers, but real strength comes in having the weaponry and not using it. How many humans, with that kind of killing power at their disposal, would have had the restraint not to use it?

I had spent seven years in the army being a part of man’s brutality to man and becoming increasingly sickened by it. If I had been a religious man, I might have turned to the church for forgiveness for my sins and for the sins of my species, as many army veterans do. Instead I looked to these creatures and I felt what I can only describe as a spiritual bond with them. That wolf in the zoo had looked into my soul and seen the grief that had marked my childhood. These wolves seemed to sense my anguish and my shame and in some way I felt they were the key to my redemption.

There were so many things I loved about the army; it had taken me all over the world. I loved the challenges, loved being part of a crack team. It was exciting to be in control of heavy weaponry, but modern warfare is so removed from reality that much of the time I didn’t know what I was fighting for. I became more and more disillusioned. I had been brought up to kill for the right reason and to respect the animal I killed and to respect its place in the world. As a soldier I was part of an organization that killed for other reasons and I didn’t have an appetite for them.

The final straw for me was in Northern Ireland, where I did several tours of duty. The province was like a war zone. I remember walking down a street one day in uniform and having to defend myself from a group of children, no more than six or seven years old. They were screaming abuse and hurling broken bricks and anything else they could get hold of. I am sure the only reason they were doing it was because they had seen their parents and grandparents do the same, but there was so much hatred in their eyes. Those children should have been at home playing with LEGO, dressing dolls, or watching Sesame Street; they should have been anywhere but out there on those streets, because today’s bricks will be tomorrow’s bombs.

I don’t know whether I killed people in Northern Ireland. I fired in the course of battle and people died, but I’ll never know whether it was my bullets that killed them, and I don’t want to know. It was sickening enough to have been part of it. It was not the right battle to have been fighting and I found that very difficult to cope with. The people who wanted the army there didn’t appreciate us, and the people who didn’t want us hated us with such passion that all we did was fuel the situation. There had to be a better way and in the end, years later, they found it: they talked.

In the short time I had spent watching wolves I could see a stark difference between their aggression and ours, and I suspect that at one time, hundreds of years ago, there had been very little difference. Wolves have the power to kill and threaten to use that power all the time, but they only use it when they must. They will fight to the death to save their family and to preserve the food sources that will get their family through the winter, and they will be archrivals with other wolf packs, but they also respect their rivals and value them for what they do. We don’t value our enemies; in modern warfare, we don’t even have to see our enemies—we can kill them at the push of a button and most of us who are engaged in the fighting don’t even know why they are our enemies. The killing is pointless and needless—and the morality highly questionable. I had had enough.




CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_a1c6f8e9-3d27-5658-b5c1-bf562e61cc75)

A Ticket to a New Life (#ulink_a1c6f8e9-3d27-5658-b5c1-bf562e61cc75)


Wolves had got under my skin and my mind was in turmoil. I felt nothing but contempt for my fellow man and nothing but admiration for these creatures that had admitted me into their world. Theirs was the world I wanted to stay in. It was safer than mine, more disciplined, and I had a greater sense of belonging.

So shortly after I left the army I found myself on a plane to America. It was insanity by any standard. I was going to meet a man I had never met, to work on a program for which I was not qualified, in a country where I knew no one, and I had sold every possession I owned to buy the ticket. The man was a Native American I had heard about, a member of the Nez Percé tribe named Levi Holt. He ran the Wolf Education and Research Center on tribal lands near Winchester, in Idaho, with a captive pack designed to teach people about wolves and give tribal members a chance to connect with their culture. He was also managing a controversial reintroduction program of wild wolves into the Rocky Mountains. It was run by a team of highly qualified biologists, and I didn’t have so much as an O level in woodworking.

It all began when I saw a documentary on television called Livingwith Wolves, which featured an American couple named Jim and Jamie Dutcher. They spent six years living with a captive pack in Idaho. The film was riveting; this couple had done everything I had done and had drawn all the same conclusions about pack structure, hierarchy, and the importance of family to these creatures. It was as though we had been living parallel lives. After six years their permit to house the animals had expired and they needed to find a new home for the wolves. The Nez Percé tribe had come to their rescue and in particular, Levi Holt.

I had never met Levi, but I had spoken to him on the telephone and told him I would like to go across to Idaho and study. He said that was fine but since it was a scientific program and I had no qualifications, I would have to do an internship so they could be sure I knew how to record data correctly and be able to support the biologists in the field. Then he told me what it would cost and mentioned a figure that audibly took my breath away. It was several thousands of dollars, and Levi picked up my reaction down the line.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’ve sold everything,” I said. “I barely have enough money for the airfare.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I hear you have a captive pack that you use as ambassadors to teach people about wolves. I’ve worked in wildlife parks with captive wolves and maybe I could help out with them and that would pay my way through the internship.”

“There are only so many hours in the day,” he said. “How are you going to do it?”

“How about if I work all day and study at night?”

“Hang on a second,” he said. “Let me get this right. You want to come over here and work all day and study all night for your internship?”

“Yes.”

The phone went dead for what felt like hours while he went away to consult with colleagues.

“Okay,” he said. “Buy your ticket, come over, and we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t until later that I discovered how much they’d laughed at this mad Brit who was prepared to come over on a wing and a prayer on the promise of nothing but a tent to sleep in, but my idiocy had appealed to them.

A week later I was on the plane, and I admit I was terrified. I didn’t know what I had let myself in for. I had sold my car, my trinkets, my knives, most of my equipment and clothes, and had scraped together the money for the fare. If it all went wrong, I had nothing to return to.

I flew into Boise, the capital of Idaho, which lies in the southwest of the state, where I was met by a tall Texan cowboy named Rick who was married to Cathy, a volunteer at the Center with Levi. I was to spend the night with them and the following morning she would drive me up to Winchester. After a very pleasant meal and a comfortable night at their home, Cathy and I, and a friend she took along for company for the return journey, set off at first light for the reservation. Rick stayed behind to look after their young child. It was a drive of about 250 miles, and the slight flurry of snow we left in soon became a more serious storm. We stopped several times along the way to put snow chains on and take them off again when the road was clear, but by the time we hit the Rocky Mountains we were into deep snow and the chains were on permanently. We were now into wolf country—rocky terrain, lodge-pole pine forests, and snow-capped mountains—and most of the traffic on the road was associated with the logging industry: huge lorries driving back and forth moving timber. We were in the car for most of the day and as we drove, Cathy explained the work that was being done at the Center and how the release program worked.

This program had been a political hot potato for many years, ever since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which was responsible for protecting endangered species, proposed a recovery plan for the wolf in 1980. The wolf was officially classified as endangered in forty-eight states in 1978. The plan was to reintroduce wolves in northwestern Montana, central Idaho, and Yellowstone National Park, but it had been thwarted again and again by legal action, largely by farming communities afraid that wolves roaming wild would kill their livestock. Finally, in 1994, after much argument, the secretary of the interior signed the release plan, which called for state agencies to manage the wolves once they had been released, but all three states declined to cooperate. Finally, the Nez Percé came up with a management program for Idaho, and in January 1995, after fifteen years of debate, fifteen Canadian gray wolves were released into about thirteen million acres of national forest in the Rockies. Two years later they released another twenty and they were doing so well that the biologists were already predicting that it would take no more than seven years before they could be taken off the endangered species list.

We arrived at the Center just as it was getting dark and everyone came out to welcome us. I think they were keen to take a look at the madman who had traveled all the way from England. It was about half an hour’s drive out of the town of Winchester up a windy mountain track. The whole area was breathtakingly beautiful, with mountain trails through forests of giant ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The main attraction was a big lake that brought tourists to the area as well as eagles and fish-eating birds. In summer the lake offered canoeing and water sports and in winter, ice-skating and ice fishing. The population of this little town was less than three hundred people and the facilities amounted to a canteen, a pub, a grocery store, and a gas station, and that was where we went each week to stock up on supplies and to have a shower and launder clothes.

There was no running water in the camp and no electricity; drinking water had to be carried in and cooking was all done on propane gas appliances. One of the biologists showed me around. The accommodation comprised a cluster of individual tepees, one smaller one that was the toilet, and one larger tent, set apart from the main living quarters, which was the kitchen and canteen, where there was always a big pot of coffee available. It was set apart because bears frequently came out of the forest in search of food, and any food had to be either buried or hung up to try to prevent them from taking it. The tepees were allocated in order of seniority, those at the heart of the camp being the most prestigious. There was one, I noticed, that couldn’t have been farther away. It was right on the edge of the forest; it had a hole in the roof, moss growing up the sides of the canvas, and a door that was hanging off. Pity the poor devil who has to live in that one, I thought to myself. And yes, I was that poor devil.

The tepees were semipermanent. Each one had a wooden floor, a wooden platform bed about three feet off the ground, and a little wood-burning stove, which was essential in those temperatures. That night I sat in my tent listening to the wolves that I would meet in the morning, and stoked the fire with logs. I was broke, I had none of the right equipment because I’d had to spend everything I had on airfare, and I had borrowed a friend’s sleeping bag that was far too short. I had no pillow and no creature comforts like those that adorned the other tepees, but by the time I put my head down, my nerves had dissolved and I had a very good feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt that this could be what I had been searching for.

The next morning I was awake before anyone else, too excited and too uncomfortable to sleep. I pulled on my army boots, put on fewer layers than I would have liked, and stepped outside into the cold of first light; it must have been about minus fifteen degrees. I thought that I could compensate for poor-quality clothing by my knowledge of survival, the golden rule for which is to be aware of your body temperature and resist the temptation to put on every garment you have. If you warm up and sweat, everything becomes wet and then icy cold. As the sun started to rise over the Sawtooth Mountains, I could see the full beauty of my surroundings. The snow was two to three feet deep and crisp underfoot and lay heavily on the tops of the trees—the most magnificent trees with huge trunks that rose more than a hundred feet above my head and smelled faintly of vanilla. It was so silent you could have heard a pin drop; I had arrived in paradise.

The wolf enclosure was at the center of the camp, near the visitor center, where members of the public came to see the wolves and learn about them and the history and culture of the Nez Percé. It was one of the main tourist attractions of the area, but also very useful as a way of countering the fear and prejudice that so many people held toward these creatures. They had eleven timber wolves in captivity living in forty-eight acres of forest that was double fenced with a strip between the two fences. It became my job to walk around between the fences in the early morning looking for breaches or for frozen drifts of snow that could bring the ground high enough for the wolves to escape over the top.

After the small enclosure at Sparkwell it was good to see these wolves had so much space to roam, although on subsequent visits I realized that even these wolves could suffer from the behavioral problems I had seen in small enclosures and always attributed to the cramped conditions. On the face of it, these animals had everything that nature intended and yet they began to have difficulty living with one another. It was a valuable lesson that space was not the most important factor. What was missing, I came to realize, was a rival pack. Just as human beings pull together in the face of a common threat or enemy, so do wolves. If life is too easy for them, food is plentiful and there is no immediate danger, they start to turn on one another.

Once back from my dawn patrol I would go into the cooking tent and fill in the log book, noting any unusual findings. Then I’d pour myself a mug of hot black coffee, or if no one else was up, I would brew the first pot of the morning. Coffee was the only thing that was provided. Everyone bought and cooked food individually, but there was coffee ready throughout the day and for the first three weeks, I lived on black coffee and Jujubes, a sugar jelly sweet that I discovered I could buy very cheaply in the grocery store in Winchester. I used to go down there—the walk took about two hours—and buy three pounds at a time, which only cost a few cents, and which saw me through the coming week. They were packed full of sugar, of course, which gave me an instant high followed by a terrible low. It wasn’t an ideal diet to be living on when working eighteen-hour days in subzero temperatures, but I didn’t have enough money for anything else and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I wouldn’t even be able to afford the Jujubes.




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