Columnist Zahra Barri chats to Ramsgate travel and nature author Adam Weymouth about the ever-entwining world of wolves and humans

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When I interview the travel and nature writer Adam Weymouth, I can tell immediately that he has ants in his pants (he makes Bear Grylls seem sedentary). Furthermore, the culmination of his anecdotal cultural, climate and conservational comments give his idols Michael Palin and David Attenborough a run for their money.

This instantaneous character observation was brought about by the technicalities of our meeting. Unfortunately, on the day of the interview, I was unable to get to his hometown of Ramsgate. This was ironic, given the subject matter: I had to dog-sit a husky. In appearance the canine was not unlike Slavc, Weymouth’s wolf protagonist. So we are forced to Zoom. Yet Weymouth is quick to resist such physically restrictive communication: “It would be nice to not stare at a screen and get out on my feet. It’s a beautiful day in Ramsgate. Can we do a phone call instead?”

He sends a carrier pigeon to tell me this. He doesn’t really, he WhatsApps, but I get the impression that if he could, he would. It’s refreshing to find a person who values the in-person meet, while also being actively out in nature.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew a nature and travel writer would, by default, love nature and travel, but it all felt so literal. It’s akin to Jilly Cooper asking to meet in Anne Summers or Roald Dahl in a chocolate factory.

I reply from my sofa - the reason I became a writer is because I love sofas. But I’m quick to see that Weymouth is a different breed. Where I slob about, staring into a blank screen while systematically binge-eating bowls of Shreddies, fleeting between ASOS and You Will Not Believe What Sabrina the Teenage Witch Looks Like Now tabs, Weymouth has an entirely different and far more wholesome writing routine. Unlike me, he doesn’t swig back bowls of complex carbohydrates as fast as Bukowski does a whiskey bottle as a writing vice. Instead, his vice isn’t a vice at all, it’s a virtue-nature! This is coupled with, as aforementioned, a far healthier writing idol than my Bukowski, by way of travel guru and national treasure Michael Palin.

Weymouth tells me he writes on his feet. So we talk on the phone. I sit and scribble and he walks and wonders. I hear the crunch of the gravel as Adam walks around Ramsgate. I imagine him in hiking boots, bushy beard and holding a large stick as if it’s a gigantic pen that he punches into the earth with the same ferocity as Angela Lansbury stabs letters into her typewriter. He waxes philosophical on his complex thoughts about the natural world, the past and future of farming and science and, of course, while I dog-sit my own lone wolf, he talks about his. Slavc.

Lone Wolf is Weymouth’s cross-cultural European travelogue of Slavc, the solitary wolf who broke out of scientific labs and trekked across Italy, Slovenia and Austria and upon finding his Juliet wolf becomes responsible for repopulating his breed back into Europe. He’s the Genghis Khan/Kris Jenner of wolves.

We just so happen to be talking on the day after the EU has chosen to downgrade the wolf’s degree of endangerment. “They’re no longer a ‘strictly protected species’ - they’re now just ‘protected’,” Weymouth tells me before commenting on populist figures using the wolf, which is now a ‘woke’ topic among governments, as a form of political scapegoating.

Instead of politicians helping to navigate the threat of the wolves to farmers’ livelihoods and thus enable an environment where man and nature live as One, they’re simply changing the semantics of how ‘endangered’ such species are. By moving the goalposts, politicians skirt the issue.

What is enthralling about Weymouth’s expeditious tale is that by retracing Slavc’s steps, he himself becomes Slavc. The proverb says that ‘Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes’. Weymouth says instead “Before you make eco-critical decisions on the morality of wolf population control, at first retrack the paws of the scientifically studied Slavc”, but I’m not sure that’s as catchy.

Yet by Weymouth retracking the wolf’s footsteps, he emphasises the complexities of the argument. Although he is largely impartial, weaving the intricacies of the issue brilliantly, what is unique about his epic narrative is that through Weymouth’s almost anthropomorphic transformation/becoming Slavc he creates, as all great literature does, empathy for Slavc. It’s not often we feel such understanding for these creatures.

We are predetermined by fairytales such as Little Red Riding Hood to see wolves as a threat, a danger to our grandmas. They are in our popular vernacular as evil villains; if someone is deceptive, they are a ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’. They instigate impending doom in our culture as they howl up at the moon - cue dark nights of the soul, Weinstein levels of horror.

Yet as he tracks Slavc he inevitably also creates a counter-argument. Weymouth meets farmers on his trail and keeps a close conversation with scientists, conservationists and environmental academics, too. What is constantly highlighted is that the situation is deeply complex. Although Weymouth urges that “coexistence is possible”, he cites the internal division between farmers as yet another issue, explaining how some farmers are putting up electric fences and working with guardian dogs but as a result become ostracised by opposing farmers who see this as an act of capitulation.

“If you’re going to start protecting your flock, then you’re essentially accepting that the wolf is there to stay,” he says

One of the most interesting insights Weymouth exposes is not merely the political debates that are raised around the evolutionary ethical arguments between farmers and scientists but also that the dispersion of the wolves mirrors human politics.

For example, he writes about how the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism enabled, once again, wolf dispersion. In our chat, Weymouth explains to me how in Donald Trump’s first administration the wall that goes along the US-Mexico border “is the most harmful border on the planet, not just for people but for animals as well - the wolves that live on either side of the Mexican border and there’s literally hundreds of other mammals as well that are being impacted.”

He goes on to tell me these walls are only exacerbated by climate change because species are now trying to move farther north. He also recognises similar climate effects of various walls along China and Myanmar, as well as the India-Pakistan border.

In short, Weymouth displays how man-made political mechanisms play out in not just the human world but the natural world. By doing so, he reminds us of the pivotal role we play in the entire ecosystem. Lone Wolf is essential reading not only for keen readers of travel, nature and animal writing but for anyone interested in history and geopolitics.

Lone Wolf is published by Penguin Random House.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448173/lone-wolf-by-weymouth-adam/9781529151947

ABOUT ZAHRA BARRI