Hunt for the shadow wolf
With Derek Gow
Much more than any other native species, the ghosts of the wolves we slaughtered in the darkest times of our past still haunt the landscapes of Britain.
In Norse, Gaelic Welsh and English the place names that recall their former presence are everywhere. While some of these are positive, like Ullock in the Lakeland fells – the clearing where the wolf cubs play – most are of a neutral sort such as wolf ford or hill. However, the grimmest are widespread like the tall granite wolf stones on the high Yorkshire fells which mark, without doubt, the finales of hunts or the locations of the deep stone-lined wolf pits where they were captured for torture to death.
Because the wolves killed our valuable sheep, our ancestors hated them with a venom that proved so enduring that it was applied with a genocidal zeal by our ancestral colonists of other lands to other wolves, wolf-like creatures and the Indigenous People they termed as wolf-like. They exterminated them for opposing our ancestors’ selfish interests. In Western Europe, we nearly killed them all.
In Modern times, following their protection, wolves have returned into highly utilised landscapes, like Holland, Belgium and France, to playfully chase cyclists, predate on pet kangaroos and once again encounter their nemesis the sheep… Will we meet them again with swords, poison and pitch burning bright? Or, at the dawn of the twenty first century, are we prepared, with better understanding and informed education, to refurbish a new relationship with the wolf?
Hunt for the shadow wolf is the first in our series of Wild Talks, chaired by Manchester Museum’s Curator of Entomology, Diana Arzuza.
