Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness

In this scintillating travelogue, journalist Weymouth (Kings of the Yukon) reflects on humanity’s relationship with wolves by retracing one canine’s circuitous thousand-mile trek from Slovenia to Italy. He recounts how in 2011, biologists at the University of Ljubljana outfitted the yearling wolf Slavc with a GPS collar that tracked his movements as he struck out from his ancestral territory, found a mate, and sired one of the first wolf packs in Italy in over a century. In following Slavc’s trail, Weymouth threaded snow-packed Alpine peaks, camped under the stars, and traipsed through the edges of countless towns. Speaking with locals along the way, he found ambivalence about rebounding wolf populations. On the one hand, he describes meeting Slovenian farmers who feel that legal prohibitions against harming the endangered canines make it difficult to protect livestock. On the other, Weymouth visited such conservationists as Kurt Kotrschal, whose Wolf Science Center outside Vienna hand-raises wolf pups to understand how dogs became domesticated. Weymouth is an ace travel writer whose immersive prose brings to vivid life the characters and settings he encounters (“There are drifts of chestnuts, and the beech leaves are blazing yellow in the late autumn, early afternoon light,” he writes of a northern Italian forest). It adds up to a penetrating analysis of wolves’ contested place in a human-dominated world. Agent: Sarah Fuentes and Veronica Goldstein, UTA. (June)