In early 2022, as the pandemic slowly receded, the journalist and travel writer Adam Weymouth arrived in southern Slovenia to follow in the tracks of a wolf. After leaving his territory one night in late 2011, aged nineteen months, this wolf had walked alone for 100 days, covering 2,000 kilometres on a route across Slovenia, west into Austria and southwest into the Italian Alps.

We know this because, a few months before the wolf left, he had been fitted with a GPS collar by researchers at the University of Ljubljana. Through DNA analysis and tracking technology, these

researchers have built a detailed profile of Slovenia’s wolf population, which has grown to more than 130 from just thirty-four in 2010. Many wolves stay local but, for reasons even experts don’t fully understand, others embark on epic solo walks: the record, held by a Mongolian male, is 7,245 kilometres in a single year. Slavc (pronounced “Sh-lough-ts”), as the researchers named him, proved the second kind of wolf.

In this moving, vivid account, Weymouth follows Slavc’s 635 GPS points across central Europe. An adventurer with a deep feeling for nature and animals, he encounters the full spectrum of human attitudes towards wolves, from farmers and politicians

intent on their extermination to academics devoted to their preservation. As in his first book, Kings of the Yukon – an account of his canoe journey up Alaska’s Yukon River, for which he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2018 – Weymouth explores the fragile relationship between nature and humanity, how ecosystems and remote communities are coping with tensions between the ancient and the modern.

Weymouth’s gift for description, especially of landscapes, is evident on almost every page. In northern Italy, he walks through a “field of boulders fallen from the cliffs above as though the world is still in the process of being born … The bluff above me is sheer and leonine, weeping colour”. He captures the mixed emotions of solo, long-distance hiking. Crossing a 2,700 metre-high ridge in Austria’s Polla Tol valley, he feels “chilled and sunburnt and filthy and alive”. At dusk, he is often “overcome by the adventure and all the possibilities of the world, or it can happen that I feel acutely lonely”.

Fitting Slavc with the GPS collar that made Weymouth’s journey possible wasn’t easy. Wolves detect the slightest alterations to their terrain, and can pick up a scent several kilometres away. Soft-catch traps have to be boiled in a “forest broth” of leaves and rotting wood and buried in the ground for months so that they take on the smell of the earth. The shovels and gloves used in their setting, as well as the bags in which they are transported, are also boiled. Even then they’re not indetectable: researchers have found tracks that swerve off course hundreds of metres before a trap, before returning to the trail on the other side. They have also found traps “with a tidy shit deposited, impossibly, on top. Fuck you”.

Such details make it easy to admire the wolf, or at least grudgingly respect it, as some of the farmers in this story do. But a lot of them want to exterminate a carnivore that kills between 30,000 and 40,000 farm animals a year across Europe. It was above the Italian village of Grezzana, near the end of his journey, that Slavc claimed his first domestic prey – a sheep, two goats and, amazingly, a horse, which he forced off a cliff and devoured at the bottom. Every year, the EU distributes around €8 million in compensation for animals killed by wolves; but payments can take months to process and farmers have to prove that they tried to protect  their stock. Many farmers want to be able to take matters into their own hands without fearing fines or prison sentences.

A Slovenian farmer who lost 120 sheep in a year to wolves tells Weymouth that “the wolf is owned by the state . . . These guys from Ljubljana tell us how the farmer and the wolf will live together . . . But they do this from behind a computer”. The  

wolf, for these farmers, is a symbol of the urban elite, protected by politicians with no understanding of country life. Right-wing parties, such as the Freedom Party of Austria, are channelling his rage, portraying rural communities as the souls of their nations. Far-off Brussels, backed by wolf-loving, city-dwelling lefties, constitute the enemy. A 2022 German study found that wolf attacks led to far right gains of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent in local elections.

Recently, though, there has been a subtle shift in the EU’s wolf policies. When European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen’s favourite pony Dolly was killed by a wolf in Lower Saxony in the autumn of 2022, she ordered an investigation into

the carnivore’s status. In March 2025, on the basis of this report, the wolf was downgraded from “strictly protected” to “protected”. Packs across Europe, one imagines, are cursing Dolly’s assassin: of all the ponies, he or she had to choose that one. Conservationists are concerned that wolf populations will fall; but for anyone who agrees with Peter Ebner, mayor of the Austrian town of Stall, the change won’t be enough. “Every single [wolf ]”, Ebner tells Weymouth, “should be shot down. And of course our government should contact Brussels and tell them we must do that.”

This is not the first time the wolf has become politicized. In its ferocity and virility, it has proved a useful symbol for fascist dictators. Adolf Hitler loved wolves (his first name is derived from Athalwolf  in Old High German – “noble wolf”) and in the 1930s Germany became the first modern country to protect them: “It is a difficult truth”, writes Weymouth, “that Nazi environmental policies were impressive, even for today”. In 1872, two years after the Kingdom of Italy annexed Rome and made the city its capital, a live wolf was installed on the Capitoline Hill, a tradition embraced by Benito Mussolini when he took power in 1921. Kept in a cage, these pacing wolves were sometimes said to die of heartbreak. The practice was discontinued in the early 1970s, but the rusting cage is still there – a “testament to sadness” on the Via del Teatro di Marcello.

Weymouth comes face-to-face with a wolf just once, in a closely supervised encounter at Austria’s Wolf Science Centre. It’s a thrilling moment: “I am shocked by the heft of him, the massive bulk . . . I cannot shake the sense that he is operating on some other, higher plain”. Walking as he is over a decade after Slavc passed through central Europe, Weymouth never glimpses his subject in the wild. But he does see him ambling up a hillside in a short video, filmed by a ranger in Lessinia’s National Park, where the wolf’s journey ended. And he was no longer alone. In the mountains north of Verona, four months after leaving home, Slavc had encountered a lone female. Juliet (as his new mate was named by local media) wasn’t fitted with a tracking collar, but researchers theorized that she had probably also walked hundreds of kilometres, eastbound through the Alps. Two trails in the snow, coming from opposite directions, met, then continued together up the mountain, one following the other in a straight line; but coming down on the other side, the paw-prints were smudged and erratic. They were playing. Weymouth wonders if these two wanderers had any notion of the odds stacked against their joyful collision. “They must have; in some way, they must have.”

At the end of the Second World War, after centuries of persecution by humans, there were no wolves left in Central Europe or Scandinavia; but today, mainly thanks to EU conservation efforts – to protect not just wolves, but also some of their prey, such as wild deer and boar – there are more than 21,000, making the grey wolf a species of “Least Concern” for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More than a hundred wolves now live in northern Italy, all of them descendants of Slavc and Juliet.