Aerial view of Keswick in Cumbria, England - where the wolfs roam! Photo from Wiki Commons
’A....i oow oow ooo ooo!” The back-to-pack wolf cry goes spiralling around the forest and in seconds, two wolves come tearing through the trees. They rush up to the pack leaders, eager to know what the emergency is. When they find there is none, they seem momentarily miffed but soon content themselves with pulling some classic wolfish poses on conveniently situated tree stumps. I’m a few yards from them, snapping away with my camera. Being photographed clearly stokes the smouldering coals of their vanity.
This brand new walking-with-wolves experience is a world away from your usual wolf-spotting trip. The latter has to contend with the fact that normally this noble creature, being a blithe and wily spirit, cares nothing for the fact that you have a limited amount of annual leave and an onerous bucket list to tick off.
It thus cannot be relied upon to turn up at a prescribed venue at a pre-arranged time, but is happy to condemn you to days of aimless wandering across godless far-flung tundra in the hope that at some stage, your guide will point towards a distant wood and cry: “There’s a wolf! That little speck to the right of the ... oh, gone now.”
When my friend Kat and I went to see timber wolves Maska and Kajika we didn’t even leave the British mainland – we simply hopped on a train to the Cumbrian resort of Grange-over-Sands. Furthermore, after some sniffing, licking and gentle biting of our outstretched fists, the wolves let us join their incipient pack for an afternoon’s sortie, which was pretty obliging really.
We met up with the surrogate leaders of the pack, human bipeds Dee and Daniel (who had howled the back-to-pack cry) at their farmhouse at Ayside, a few miles north of Grange.
A swift Land Rover ride later and we were in a pine wood above lake Windermere, the largest natural lake in England, where brothers Maska and Kajika piled out of the back to begin an instant recce of the area.
This isn’t quite the return of the wolf into the English wilds after 270 years, though, as Dee explains: “These are timber wolves with some Czechoslovakian wolf dog bred into them because it’s illegal to let pure-bred wolves run free in Britain.” Such a spoilsport, the government.
The siblings, just 24 weeks old yet already larger than full-grown Alsatians, are vying for the position of alpha male. Maska is bigger and edges the rough-and-tumbles we watch, but size isn’t everything in the lupine world.
“Kajika is the one with the natural leadership abilities,” Daniel points out, “so he could end up as the leader with Maska as his enforcer.” Apparently there are alpha, beta, gamma, delta and even omega wolves, so Maska and Kajika are keen to nab the top roles before their pack gets any bigger.
As we strolled through the pines the rivals foraged about beneath the trees, building up a mental map of smells while trying to outdo each other, not only in shows of strength but in their ability to make clever decisions and discover important information about their surroundings.
We watched them fascinated and, I confess, somewhat smug that we were privy to what was going on in their great big heads. And great big they are, too – the brothers will double in size over the next 18 months, weighing in at up to a huge nine stones.
While Dee fed the boys a treat of cheese straight from a tube (it simulates a mother’s teat, apparently), Daniel regaled us with wolfy facts – they have eight distinct howls, for example, and their hearing is nine times better than the average dog’s – and taught us how to stroke them safely.
This is essential knowledge when their bite can exert a pressure of 1,500lb per sq inch (1,054 tonnes per sq m). With my hand at Kajika’s jaw-line, I slowly worked my way upwards until his flattened ears gave me the “yes, you can stroke my head” signal. I can tell you, gaining the trust of a wolf is the new swimming with dolphins.
It’s fitting that the first place in Britain you can walk with wolves is close to the spot where England’s last wild wolf was reportedly killed, in the 14th Century. On a tour of the Unsworth’s Yard micro-brewery in the nearby village of Cartmel, we were shown a copy of Mrs Jerome Mercier’s tale of the killing. It involves a spurned son, a dashed romance, a mysterious knight and a happy ending for all – except the wolf.
It’s all good courtly stuff. The only fly in the ointment is that wolves are known to have roamed England as late as the 1740s. A more plausible story is that a local landowner organised a mass hunt for a wolf, who was finally cornered on a promontory called Humphrey Head.
On a starlit walk along the promenade we saw Humphrey Head’s huge bulk lowering in the darkness. But what was that sound we could hear on the breeze? The wind playing over the marshes perhaps? Or was it the ghostly howl of England’s last wolf calling out to England’s newest pack? – Guardian News & Media
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