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"He has not killed for 11 days": I walked 1000 miles in the footsteps of Europe’s lone wolf – here’s what Slavc taught me – TGO Magazine
Sep
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Lone Wolf tells the true story of a wolf called Slavc, born in the south of Slovenia, and collared with a GPS tracker by biologists researching wolf behaviour. In late 2011, at just 18 months old, he left his pack behind and set out on a walk of more than a thousand miles through the Alps. He crossed Slovenia, and then Austria, where wolves had been extinct for centuries. He crossed six line highways, swam huge rivers, and traversed mountain passes in the very depths of winter.
In spring he came to Italy, to mountains just north of Verona, and there he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. Astonishingly, the only two wolves for thousands of square miles had somehow found each other. When they bred, they became the first pack in these mountains for more than 100 years.
Three years ago, I set out to walk the same path that Slavc had taken, following in his footsteps. Unlike Slavc, I had two young kids at home when I set out on my journey and so I did the walk in several stages, going home in between. I began in winter, on the snowbound mountains of the karst in southern Slovenia. It was here that Slavc was born, and I walked his path through bare beech forests and mountain villages, where outlandish, week-long carnival rituals are still enacted to hurry along the spring.
His path grazed the edge of Ljubljana airport before turning north for Austria, and here we came to some of the highest mountains of his trip. The seasons were turning and the livestock were returning to their summer pastures. I camped beside them and spent nights with herders, who were furious at how the wolf’s resurgence has upended their lives.
By the time I made my way into the Dolomites it was the peak of summer. They were some of the most beautiful mountains I had ever seen, cratered and pinnacled, desperately dry in the summer heat. I slogged on, slowly descending to the foothills as the temperatures continued to climb. Slavc finished his journey in Lessinia, very similar to the landscape that he left from. Today there are four wolf packs here, and the ecosystem is more intact than it has been in centuries. Yet for those who live on and work the land, there is little to be happy about.
Wolves are making a remarkable comeback across Europe. I followed Slavc’s path because I wanted to see how those living alongside the wolf once more, the shepherds and the hunters, were coping with its presence. But I also wondered what Slavc’s journey could tell me about other changes now happening in Europe. It was Europe’s hottest summer on record, a year of abject drought. Young people no longer wanted to farm and their parents were abandoning the land, driven off by the weather and the impacts of war, the rocketing costs of energy and feed.
Those same crises – weather and war – were driving migrants to Europe, some of them settling in these remote Alpine towns. And the far-right parties that were finding a foothold in this upheaval were upending the very ideas that held the continent together. I was drawn to Slavc in no small part because he had walked a line through all of this, carving a path through Europe’s mountainous hinterlands, and some of the places that were feeling these changes most acutely.
When we speak about the wolf, I would learn, we are never only speaking about wolves. Lone Wolf looks at those grappling with the animals’ return, as their own worlds shift about them at an ever-accelerating rate.
The wolf left in the winter.
The days are short at this time of year and the nights are very long. Since dawn the light has been held within a fist and now it is close to extinguished once again. The wolf makes his way along the shallow gully, moving counter to its gradient, loose- limbed, his ankles loose and flickering. Were you to balance a glass of water between his shoulder blades, it would not spill a drop. There are no birds, and the bare poles of the beeches recede into the darkening wood, push up into the thin, metallic sky. The snow down here is grey for lack of light. There is nothing moving, no life, except for him.
The wolf moves precisely. Each print that he leaves is the size of a saucer. This small pocket of wood makes up one stretch of the western boundary of his pack; its other perimeters are many kilometres away. He has been moving all day, pacing its border on a southerly bearing, alongside the railway track. Since dawn he has scarcely broken pace. He is an animal built for motion; this is, perhaps, his supreme quality.
He has not killed for eleven days, but that does not matter much; he can go for far longer than that. Beneath his fur he is taut and lean, but his coat is as thick as it will get all year, a dense under fur clad by a thick layer of guard hairs, and however thin he gets he will not be cold, not yet, not until he begins to metabolise his muscle. For now he is only keen and focused. His coat is tan and steel and crow-black and snow-white, a palette drawn from the colours of the landscape, and he has black markings that accentuate his muzzle and run the length of his back as though he has been marked by kohl. It is unimaginable that the wolves were once gone from this place because no animal could belong here more completely. His breath clouds in the cold, hard air. An agglomeration of fine blood vessels engorges his toes and prevents his feet from freezing solid.
He moves across land that is very old. Beside a trunk he halts and lifts his leg and urinates, and then he paws at the ground with all four feet to smear the sweat from the apocrine glands between his toes over the snow. This scent speaks of many things. To another wolf that encounters it, it narrates his gender and his age (a yearling, male); his subspecies (Canis lupus lupus); his social status in his pack (subordinate); his sexual readiness (he is fertile). It gives indications as to his health and diet.
To his own pack (which at this moment comprises seven other individuals: his parents, four pups from this year’s litter and another older, unrelated male) it is an olfactory fingerprint unique to him. To other wolves it says keep moving; it says this territory is taken, carry on. If it does not snow again, this marker will last weeks. There are other, older scents upon this tree, and most recently a female, dominant, in good health. This is his mother. He shakes himself and carries on. In a couple of minutes he stops to mark again, and then he continues, moving upwards, through the naked wood.
He is still young, he is nineteen months old, but he will not be young for much longer now. Winter is the hard season, but the snow places a finger on the scales in favour of the wolves. The rangy deer punch through the drifts up to their hocks, while he appears to glide over its surface with a deftness that belies his weight and bulk. He is full grown now, forty kilos and standing seventy five centimetres at the shoulder. He trots across the snowpack, pausing to sniff, pausing to listen. This track that he follows reeks of deer but they are several days ahead. The balance is weighted in the wolves’ favour, but this winter has been hard. The competition for food has been intense. Last winter, when he was a pup, his pack had let him feed. Now there is a new litter to care for. And so increasingly he spends his time alone.
Eating a dormouse, eating a fox, eating whatever is left of a carcass once his pack and the pups have had their fill. Poor food.
He pads on. He follows a concertina of twisted razor wire that maps the curvature of the land, still climbing. He knows to avoid its blades; he knows the places that are slack where he can cross. This land has seen the redrawing of borders and the movement of its peoples since the beginnings of recorded time and longer, and the wolf cares for none of this. But sometimes a deer will get hung up on the fence and that is worth something to him. He snaps at a falling leaf, misses it, and surprised by his own silliness, he trots on.
The wolf moves across the landscape and he seems terribly small within it. His species was sharpened on such environments; whetted by mountains and by limber, rangy ungulates, and honed, too, by his relationship of persecution with man. Wolves seem most wolfish when they are in the grip of struggle – in the winter; in human worlds. He climbs the slope with the same true movement and in time he emerges at the crest. The trees thin and he stares out, his eyes resin-yellow, the stone- black pupils interred within them like mosquitoes fixed in amber. All the familiar landmarks: the television mast, the jagged hills, the sea. The hills that drop away in pleats and down there, beyond the shoreline, the many scattered ships and a chill wind scouring the surface of the water.
His territory is sliced by a four-lane highway, and from here he can pick up its incessant thrum. It is the main road from the capital to the coast and the traffic does not let up. Even if you could hear it – you, with your vastly inferior ears – it might still sound like the wind that barrels from the inland slopes and charges for the sea, or like the background drone of the universe. But to the wolf these man-made sounds hold a particular, charged place. The logging trucks downshifting through their gears on the inclines, their air brakes gasping. Since he was young he has learnt how to navigate this road; to find its culverts and the rips in its chain- link fence. Along with how to hunt and his place within the pack, these are things that young wolves here must know. They are the things that their survival is predicated on.
Everything about this land is utterly familiar. The smells, the sounds, nothing out of place. He learns through difference. In essence, the wolf is a conservative species. He retains a sharp memory of the trap, last summer, his forefoot clamped and the utter terror, and of later waking, woozy, and the awful, human scent all over him, and the thing awkward around his neck. Sometimes he is still aware of the collar that he wears. He will not make such a mistake again.
His brother was shot. He saw it happen. One third of them, at least, die before their first year is out. Already he is a wolf that defies odds. He is conservative, but he is driven, too, by an irrefutable force. A force to eat, a force to breed, a force to live. This, too, his survival is predicated on. And it will be on this same night, 19 December 2011, just after three-thirty in the morning, when for the first time in his life he will set foot outside the boundary of his territory. He will take a bearing north-north-east, following a logging road along the Bukovica ridge, sloping away from Slavnik’s summit. Eighty kilometres away, in a room on the second floor of the Biotechnical Faculty in the University of Ljubljana, a GPS point will appear on a computer screen.
Did the wolf know, in those first foreign steps, the journey he was embarking on? Was he scared of the newness, the strangeness, the difference? Did he know these were the first steps on a journey of several thousand kilometres, a journey of many months? Did he know, right there at the beginning, that he would never be coming back?
Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth is published by Penguin Books (hardback, £18.99)
Adam Weymouth is a travelling writer and author. His first book, Kings of the Yukon – which tells the story of a five-month canoe trip across Canada and Alaska – won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Centre for Writing as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.
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16th September 2026
Arguably no animal is more associated with wild places than the golden eagle. I recall exceptional moments in over a decade’s journey to photograph this elusive bird of prey.
by James Roddie
15th September 2026
by Chris Townsend
14th September 2026
Taking in the two worlds of south Snowdonia – mountainous and coastal – Francesca Donovan traces a route from peak to shore, starting with a wild camp atop Cadair Idris.
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© 2026 Kelsey Media Ltd . kelsey.co.uk
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