Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness

An illuminating account of a lone wolf journeying across the Alps into Italy, and what the resurgence of wolves says about our connection to nature, immigration, and one another—from an award-winning journalist.

“Lone Wolf is a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told.”—Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of Underland

In 2011, a lone wolf named Slavc set out from his home territory of Slovenia on an epic journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he walked over a thousand miles. In Italy he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own—the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles—and when they mated, they formed the first pack to call these mountains home in over a century. Today there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.

In Lone Wolf, writer Adam Weymouth walks the same path through the mountains of Central Europe, interrogating the fears and realities of those living on land that is being repopulated by wolves and exploring the economic, political, and climate upheavals that are seeing a centuries-old way of life being upended.

Weymouth endeavors to understand how wolves—vilified throughout history and folklore—are recolonizing lands where they have been unknown for centuries and how, as the wolf has returned, the fear and hatred have come back, too. Slavc is one more outsider in a region now wrestling with an influx of immigration and a resurgence of the far right, alongside impacts of climate change that are already very real. It is here that questions of how we see the other and treat the Earth cannot be ignored. Examining the political dimensions brought to light by this individual animal’s trek, Lone Wolf tells a newly resonant story—one about the courage required to seek out a new life and the challenge of accepting the changing world around us.

Sharply observed, searching, and written in precise, poetic prose, Lone Wolf explores the thorny connection between humans and nature, and indeed between borders themselves, and presses us to consider this much-discussed creature anew.