Wolfish, page 22
Except for one college student working on a thesis about wolf behavior, the five other “Work Experience” student researchers were all unpaid interns assisting Mike with farm maintenance as much as animal upkeep. The slots had been highly competitive, and the recipients knew they were lucky. One intern, a college student who arrived promptly each day with eyes painted like an Arctic’s and lipstick the color of their dinner, had moved back with her mother to take the position. Another woman, a few years older than I, with a flamingo-colored ponytail and a heroic tolerance for the muckiest tasks, drove forty-five minutes each way to university accommodations where she had rented a room so she could make this work. The lone guy, a long-haired nineteen-year-old, biked an hour each way to and from a tent he had stocked with canned food. He was perpetually soggy from the rain, but he told me he loved it so much he was going to ask if he could come back during the Christmas break. That was the thing about the Trust. People fell in love. The wolves ran circles in your head.
On “Public Days,” while the interns directed parking and led arts activities for kids, I lurked by the enclosures to chat with the visitors. Mike had told me that when student groups arrived for tours, half raised their hands when he asked who was afraid of wolves, but nobody raised them when he asked a few hours later. This was testament to what the Trust was trying to do—to slim the adjectives from the “Big Bad Wolf”—and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most visitors who made the pilgrimage seemed already ecstatically onboard. An elderly man in a Celtic-motif T-shirt told me we feared snakes instinctively from birth, spiders because we learned it from our mothers, and wolves only because we thought we should. “I’m on the side of the wolves,” he said cryptically, tipping his head toward me in a little nod. “You know, I hope they win.” A father who had come from Sweden swallowed shyly when he said his name was Ulf, the old Viking word for wolf, and his blond daughter, who stood beside him like a little echo, was Ylva—female wolf. “It’s an honorable warrior in our culture,” he said as they watched a wolf root the ground with a crumpet-sized paw. Except for a few children hiding behind benches while they peeked at the enclosures, fear seemed very far from the headspace of most visitors. One woman told me it would be amazing to be a wolf; another said she wanted to hug one because it looked passive; another watched one pace the fence line and then, shifting in her espadrilles while she nodded at her husband, told me, “We’d love to have one at home.”
The visitor interaction I remember most clearly was when a man in a leather jacket and hair like a wet gray cat approached a wolf lazing with one eye open just beyond the fence. I couldn’t help thinking of Bumble, the golden retriever who lived down the block from me growing up, who spent his days dozing in the driveway, looking stoned, a knockoff sentinel lion. The man leaned toward the wolf, rocking on the balls of his feet. “I’ve got a pocketful of sausages, come on back with us,” he said, his voice the sort of hiss some men mistook for alluring. “That’s right, come into my trunk, pretty.” He was joking, but it wasn’t clear to what end. The man seemed blisteringly aware of the power differential: a female predator caged at his feet. His face twitched with a waxy sneer. The woman who was with him snorted and stepped away, but the man didn’t move until the animal, after what seemed like an interminably long stare, blinked her other eye shut. In some Japanese and Inuit beliefs, wolves are revered as judges of human character, possessing an ability to parse good humans from bad. After the man left, I lingered beside the wolf for a minute, watching. I half expected to share a look—to enact that old knowing eye roll—but her eyes stayed shut. In his research about wolf sanctuaries, Hoffman cites the work of Stefan Helmreich and Eben Kirksey, who “have noted [that] nonhumans may also act as anthropologists by studying the actions and mannerisms of humans.” The wolf, in other words, was evaluating us. She smelled the man, she smelled me. It was unclear what difference, if any, she noted between us, but my reparative intent did not register. I was just one more two-legged beast beyond the fence.
* * *
It was impossible not to think of Yolande. I thought of her in the mornings when I tunneled through the empty fields and in the evenings when I walked the empty sidewalks. I thought of her because I was trying not to, and because as with most victims of murder, her only memorial was the thing I had built in my screaming brain. “Perhaps we have to dwell on the worst in order to keep it at bay; to imagine it in order to will it away, to pre-empt it and ward it off,” wrote critic Katherine Angel in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Did I pass the farm where Yolande had worked as a nanny? Had the killer seen her around before that night? Did I walk by the field where the farmer had found her body? And that night, had she relished that moonlit walk alone to the pub? At what point in the evening did she feel afraid?
Finally, on my first Saturday at Alice’s, I gave in. There were so many things I would never know about Yolande. Why not chase the things I could? The rain was gravel on the crofted roof. Armed with a stack of chocolate digestive biscuits, I curled on the wicker couch and typed her name. Yolande Waddington. That’s when I saw the Telegraph headline from 2002 that asked, “Can a Village Ever Get Over a Trauma Like This?” That’s when I understood Yolande hadn’t been the only one.
* * *
Roger Palmer, the late founder of the Trust, had always been an animal person. As a kid, he tended a menagerie of pheasants, parakeets, snakes, capuchin monkeys, and white rats in his family’s ancestral Buckinghamshire home, an estate used in films such as Elizabeth: The Golden Age. His family had lived there for thirteen generations, once overseers of the cultivation of England’s first pineapple, and now stewards of what its visitor website referred to as a “timeless rural bastion confronted beyond its watery borders with encroaching suburbia.” How could you grow up in such a place and not inherit a sense of your own sway? A conviction that you, like your regal ancestors, had not only the power but the duty to steer your country?
When Roger went to school at nearby Eton, he brought the rats with him. They escaped and made a home beneath the floorboards of the science laboratory, but Roger was the sort of guy who could get away with it. After Cambridge, where he stoked a lifelong love for hunting, he spent a year chasing animals around Africa then began work as a stockbroker in London. While on vacation in Alaska in his early twenties, he had his first encounter with a wolf. Less than a year later, in 1972, he adopted a pup from a wildlife park in Norfolk and brought it home. Multiple people told me Roger had seen it advertised in an aviary magazine and bought it with a wad of cash.
Separate a wolf from its mother when its eyes are pink slits and you can be the first thing it sees when it opens them. Imagine seeing Roger: milk bottle in hand, hair like young Lennon, brows like dark hyphens. He named that first pup “My Lady.” Three months later, he asked a blond teenager on a date, offering to make her dinner while she played with the pup. I had thought the Trust might conceal this story because I didn’t understand how an international wolf conservation group could own its roots in a gilded history of wolves-as-lapdogs and romantic barter, but I was wrong. In the informational movie that played for visitors in the Trust’s barn, Teresa “Tsa” Palmer tells the story of their first date with shining eyes. The promise of the wolf, she says onscreen, made it “irresistible.” Roger went on to breed the first European wolf cubs born in Britain since their extirpation in Scotland over two hundred years before.
A large black-and-white photograph of the couple hung in a corner of the Trust’s gift shop. Tsa and Roger are each crouched behind a wolf and holding a tether of rope. Tsa looks delighted, young and glamorous in light flare jeans, a black turtleneck, and a boyish 1970s chop. Roger wears a tweed Sherlock Holmes hat and an expression steeped in something harder, one hand perched atop each wolf. Somehow, six eyes are on the camera. Only Tsa looks above it, presumably at the face of the person taking it. The photo seemed to suggest two possible conclusions: one, that wolves can be gentle pets; and two, that these humans are powerful, superlative animal whisperers. Though I was aware this had all happened long ago—in an era where you could buy a tiger cub in Harrods department store, say—time did and did not neutralize the evidence of a very particular kind of coexistence. Of a wolf like a dog and a human possessing it.
“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear. I thought of the blind faith of the visitors who had told me they wanted to hug the wolves or take them home. These feelings seemed as dangerous as vilifying the wolves, but I couldn’t entirely blame visitors for having them. The wolves did seem especially doglike at the Trust, a place where they had once lived with Roger and Tsa, and where I heard fond recollections about volunteers cuddling and feeding them ice-cream cones or taking them for walks to the Six Bells Pub, or of Tsa keeping a pup in a cardboard box under her office desk. Though the Trust was clear the wolves-as-pets legacy was past tense—that visitors should, under no circumstances, try to replicate the founders’ early lifestyle—the history was neither hidden nor particularly accounted for. I thought of that line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” The wolves at the Trust weren’t tame, but they were captive. Their enclosures had been specially constructed with mounds and viewpoints and dens, but run far enough and you’d still hit a fence. In the wild, wolves move through feast and famine, gorging themselves one day then sleeping it off for the next few. Here, their starve days and times of feeding were indeed randomized, but still, like children, they watched us, waiting to be fed.
“I think the best thing about this kind of place is being incredibly transparent or open and honest,” Mike told me one afternoon. He acknowledged the rhetorical challenges, but he didn’t see the Trust’s past as a liability. “We have nothing to hide.” Still, he admitted that since Roger had founded the Trust on a principle of de-mything the monster side of the wolves, the pendulum had started to swing. “We’ve done such an efficient job of dispelling the stories about wolves being these big monsters that it’s almost swung the other way back to ‘I want one in my home.’ That’s a bit of a problem now.” He rolled his eyes and mentioned some guy named Rick Miracle, who had recently made headlines for owning a wolf-dog hybrid that bit a kid’s arm off. “If you have a wolf for a pet, it never ends well. Ever. There’s not a single case of it ending well.” The captivity of a home did not agree with the instincts of a wolf. When I brought up Tsa and Roger, Mike raised his eyebrows, half a grin and half a shrug. Roger had understood wolves weren’t meant to live fully in houses, Mike told me, and he had never forgotten what they were capable of. Roger didn’t demonize them, but he didn’t forget their wildness either. “They didn’t so much have problems with them, but they were really, really good about looking after them.”
This was the slippery paradox of the Trust. The organization was built on an exception to a rule. Visitors walked past a photo of the owners’ leashed wolves and were told the animals were not evil but also not gentle, not enemies but also not pets. To understand an animal exists neither to kill you nor cuddle you is to untangle your ego from its life—to see it as complex and wild, worthy of existence independent of your feelings about it. This requires reframing the world into something less human-centric, reimagining both animal and self. Maybe it was reverence the Trust needed to cultivate, or maybe it was just an open-minded tolerance toward sharing habitat with a species so often seen as human competition and threat. We needed a spoonful of empathy, a spoonful of curiosity, a spoonful of healthy fear. The Trust’s main challenge was in dosing that last emotion. I knew the challenge well.
* * *
They were nine years old and had gone to pick primroses. All of April 1967 had been an exceedingly chilly mess in Beenham, but the afternoon of the seventeenth was sunny, almost balmy without the wind, and Jeanette Wigmore and Jacqueline Williams set out on their bicycles, the earth turning and warming beneath their rubber wheels, the sky a dumb blue witness above them. I wonder if one of their mothers had been there when they left. Be careful! Be back soon! As if a parent’s warning could be a flare, something that could help you, something more than just a fading sound.
* * *
How to live in the shadow of your history? That was the question of my summer. It was the question of the Trust, of Beenham; of the wolves, of our changing climate, of my own reactive anxiety. “I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident,” explains the narrator of Alexandra Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. I was thinking of Kleeman’s metaphor a lot that summer—about the things we could not help snaring and dragging around with us—but when I got to England, the image metastasized in my brain, becoming not just about one’s personal history but also about the broader social and environmental histories we grew into, or tried to hide, or just hauled beside us. The things that were or were not our own faults but had happened or happened to us. That stuck to us like burrs.
The legacy of the wolf in Britain was knit with violence. How could you untangle that? Henry III had granted tracts of land to those who could kill the wolves upon it. The last English wolf was likely exterminated when Henry VII was in charge. Wolves survived a bit longer in Scotland and Ireland, perhaps another few hundred years, as late as 1743 and 1770, respectively, but it wasn’t much. In a climate where the countryside could see twice as much crime as the city, slaughtering wolves had long been viewed as a step to both financial and emotional security. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes in Landscapes of Fear, his exploration of the spatial aesthetics of fear, Europe’s deeply lopsided wealth distribution had created a plentitude of “vagrants and vagabonds, beggars, thieves, cutthroats, and bandits.” It could be terrifying to travel through the countryside, but ameliorating poverty was not only hard, it was, to the ruling classes, a loss. Better to make the enemy non-human. Better to make it wolf.
Memories of the animal’s presence lie across Britain’s cartography like a faded tattoo: Wolfmere, Wolferton, Wolfscote, Wolfhamcote, Wolfstones, Wolfenden, Wolferlow, Wolfs Castle, and Wolfpits, the last a likely burial place for Welsh wolf carcasses. In Beckermont, Cumberland, there’s a hill called “Wotobank,” allegedly named when a lord, lady, and their servants went wolf-hunting, realized at some point that the lady had disappeared, and eventually found her lying on a bank while a wolf shredded her body. “Woe to this bank,” called the lord. And thus it was.
I read these details in the Trust’s library, a corner of the educational barn with a few bookshelves stuffed with international wolf-related texts and a blue plastic chair where I could drink PG Tips tea and take indecipherable notes. Many of them were gleaned from a slim 1880 book, A Short History of the Wolf in Britain, by James Edmund Harting. It was hard to believe the story of Wotobank, but it was also hard to imagine the Saxons had called January “wolf month” because “people are wont always in that month to be in more danger to be devoured of Wolves than in any season else of the year,” or that, in the mid-1600s, an Irish woman walking home with a new griddle stopped to chat with a friend, heard a rustle behind her, and, in the words of the newspaper Harting quotes, “brained” the wolf as it ran toward her, delivering “a blow on the skull with the full swing of her iron discus.” The allegations of mutual violence in these stories awed me. As I watched what looked like a dog-and-human cuddle-puddle of Mike doing a health-check on one of the larger wolves, I could almost trick myself into thinking I was witnessing a long-awaited truce: the cease-fire between two carnivores who had once kindled an equal desire to kill one another. This narrative, of course, was wrong.
Large-scale wolf reintroduction in Britain was a distant prospect, and not even the Trust’s conservationist goal. It was not just a question of if the wolves were good for a place, Mike told me one day, it was a question of if the place was good for the wolves. “They would get hit by cars here. We just don’t have the wilderness for them yet.” Ocean on all sides, too many highways, too many sheep, too many us.
Tsa was a bit franker, referring to English reintroduction as “detrimental.” “It’s trying to re-create something that was here 500 years ago,” she told me. “It’s better to work with what we’ve got.” I didn’t bring up that this same argument might be made about some of the foreign countries where the Trust was helping to fund reintroduction, especially former British colonies like India. The question of “rewilding” such landscapes will never be a neutral issue, especially given residual links between fascism and conservation, from Mussolini’s pledge to reforest so as to make Italy colder and the Italians more “warlike,” as J. R. McNeill writes in Something New Under the Sun, to the Nazis’ dream of converting Poland into an extension of tribal Germany, filled with primeval forest and animals. To rewild is, by nature, to “rewind” time, often in an effort to “undo” human influence, but as with rewinding a tape to record over it, the act necessitates an erasure. Whose influence are you erasing, and whose are you “going back” to? It is acceptable to aspire to the 1872-level of “wild” in places like Yellowstone, writes Emma Marris, but advocates should be “honest about the fact that this date emerges from history, not ecology.”
The question of contemporary English reintroduction is influenced in large part by public opinion, which, for wolves, is still largely about inherited fear. Surveys revealed that the older a person was, the more likely they were to view wolves negatively. It seemed likely that, as with exposure to a toxin, those individuals had just consumed more outdated fairy tales and fewer reparative retellings. “Traditionally, people with the most positive attitudes toward wolves have been those with the least experience,” wrote a group of transatlantic researchers, reviewing surveys about attitudes toward wolves conducted between 1972 and 2000 in the United States and Europe. By this logic, I assumed the Brits would feel rosy about a creature that had not only been gone hundreds of years but now existed only across the cold artery of the English Channel. I was wrong. Though Europe has seen almost no wolf attacks attributed to non-rabid wolves in the last century, in a study from 2009, about fifty percent of teens in the mainland United Kingdom self-reported being afraid of wolves, and sixty-five percent in Northern Ireland, compared to only thirty-five percent of teenagers in the “wolf regions” of rural Spain. In general, people were more afraid of wolf attacks in those parts of central and northern Europe where wolves had recently returned, as opposed to the southern and eastern parts of the continent, where populations never disappeared.
