Once There Were Wolves
By Charlotte McConaghy
Blurb
A wild and gripping novel about one woman's quest to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands at any cost
Inti Flynn arrives in the Scottish Highlands with fourteen grey wolves, a traumatised sister and fierce tenacity.
As a biologist, she knows the animals are the best hope for rewilding the ruined landscape and she cares little for local opposition. As a sister, she hopes the remote project will offer her twin, Aggie, a chance to heal after the horrific events that drove them both out of Alaska.
But violence dogs their footsteps and one night Inti stumbles over the body of a farmer. Unable to accept that her wolves could be responsible, she makes a reckless decision to protect them. But if the wolves didn't make the kill, then who did? And can she trust the man she is beginning to love when he becomes the main suspect?
Propulsive and unforgettable, Once There Were Wolves is the spellbinding story of a woman desperate to save her family, the wild animals and the natural world she loves, at any cost.
Our Review
I have always been of the mindset that wolves are a much misunderstood and fascinating creatures so Once There Were Wolves felt like it was written for me. Charlotte McConaghy's writing is exquisite, I devoured Once There Were Wolves, I stayed up until midnight reading it as I couldn't bear to put it down unfinished.
This outstanding climate fiction based fiction packed an emotional sucker punch both in terms of its emotive and vivd descriptions of the wolves, but also in the human elements of the story as well. The rich descriptions of rewilding the Scottish wilderness left me breathless at times. It was a truly wonderful book.
Inti and her sister Aggie were inseperable as children, Aggie feeling she needed to look out for Inti due to a neurological condition she has which means she can feel everything she sees, a condition which made Inti extremely vulnerable. For Inti, her time spent with their survivalist father in British Columbia had a massive impact on the path her life has taken. It was whilst living with her father that she first saw a wolf and learnt essential lessons on how to track them. It was also here that she learnt a healthy respect for nature and the importance of minimising our impact on the natural world. Now Aggie is part of a team aiming to reintroduce wolves to a remote area of the Scottish highlands.
"And within these roots and trunks and canopies, there ran wolves.
Today, wolves once again walk upon this ground, which has not seen their kind in hundreds of years."
Unfortunatey, for Inti and her team, many of the locals are farmers and see the introduction of the wolves as a threat to their livelihoods and to their family.
"There is a woman in the audience holding a sign that reads CIGARETTES AND WOLVES, KILLERS THAT COME IN PACKS, and a kid waving one that says WILL THERE BE ANY DEER LEFT WHEN I GROW UP?"
The Cairngorns wolf project talk with the locals about the environmental advantages of reintroducing the wolves and tell the locals they will be financially compensated in the unlikely event that a wolf kills one of their livestock. They are also told that in this case, if they can prove it, they are able to shoot the wolf in question. Some of the locals look excited at this prospect and I was alongside Inti in her condemnation and dislike of them.
Something has happened to Inti between the innocence of her childhood and the adult we encounter in the Scottish Highlands, something to do with Aggie who has clearly encountered some sort of trauma.
"Dad used to tell me that my greatest gift was that I could get inside the skin of another human. He also taught us that the most important thing we could learn.If omeone hurt us, we needed only empathy, and forgiveness would be easy.
My mother never agreed. She had no kindred ocean of kindness inside her, no forgiveness. She had a different knowledge of what people do to each other. I shied from it. It felt rough and hard. and these were not the instincts I was born with. I chose to live by my dad's code, and it was easy until it wasn't.
It's obvious to me now and has been for a while. Mum was right, she was so fucking right I am embarrassed, and now I have had enough, I have no more forgiveness left."
One of the things that struck whilst reading Once There Were Wolves was the bluntness with which we learn quite how dangerous our ignorance about wolves can be to them.
"The world is hard on wolves, if they don't die of illness or starvation, if they are not killed in fights with other packs or in some disastorous accident, they are shot by humans. It seems their lot in life to die young, for seldom do they reach old age."
The above struck me as such a sad truth, one moment among many that brought tears to my eyes.
Once There Were Wolves was filled with riveting information about the wolves and how they communicate with each other. The author had clearly done her research well.
This is most certainly a book that will stay with me and as soon as I finished I went online to see if there had been any progress in plans to reintroduce wolves to the UK (there hasn't.)
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 12 Times.
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