The Man Who Lives with Wolves

I grew up on the land and I was fascinated by the natural world. There was no money for outings, treats, or toys when I was a child; the hedgerows, fields, and forests were my playground, and the dogs were my companions. I roamed for hours; I explored the thickets for bird nests, I knew when rabbits had young, I watched hares boxing in the springtime, I knew where to look for fox dens and badger setts. I could recognize owls in flight and knew the difference between kestrels and sparrow hawks. I couldn’t have crossed a busy London street or found my way around a subway at the age of ten—and to be honest, I still feel uneasy in big cities in my forties—but there was not a lot I didn’t know about the wildlife on my doorstep.

My home was north Norfolk, a remote part of a remote county on the most eastern coast of England, famed for its fens, its pheasant shoots, and its flat, fertile farmland. Those who own the land are among the richest in the country; those who work it are some of the poorest. My family was the latter. They were farm laborers and we lived from hand to mouth, a very simple life. We caught what we ate and ate what we caught; and my job as the youngest member of the family—when I was too young for gainful employment—was to catch it, with the dogs we had on the farm. They were my friends, but they were working dogs. Apart from Whiskey, they lived outside in the barn, and I was never allowed to be sentimental about them. In our world, every animal had a purpose. We couldn’t afford to feed any creature that didn’t earn its keep—and Whiskey was a skillful courser.

Our neighbors lived in the same way. Country folk were caring but not sentimental. When I was about eight, I remember going with my grandfather to visit a gamekeeper friend of his. This man had the most beautiful black Labrador. He was the gamekeeper’s pride and joy. His coat glistened and he had the softest mouth; he could pick up an egg or anything else he was asked to retrieve without leaving a mark on it. He was immaculately trained; he seemed to know this man’s every thought. One day the man discovered that his two sons had taken the dog ratting in the barn, and all the work and training that he had so patiently done with the dog was lost in less than a morning. The first time the Lab went for a rat, the rat bit him on the muzzle and he was so traumatized he shook from then on. The dog was ruined; so the gamekeeper shot the dog and beat the two boys. He knew that he’d let the dog down, that he’d failed to protect him from his sons, but he couldn’t repair the damage and he couldn’t afford to keep a dog as a pet. I was horrified; the dog’s death seemed so meaningless. But that was the reality of the world in which I grew up.

My grandfather—Gordon Ellis, my mother’s father—taught me everything I knew. He was sixty-seven when I was born, but he and my grandmother, Rose, brought me up, and although my mother lived in the cottage with us, it seemed to me as a child that she was never there. As a result, I felt far closer to my grandparents than I ever did to my mother.

The truth, I discovered when I went back to Norfolk very recently, after years of being away, is that she was simply always out earning our keep. She was up and out of the house in the mornings, often before dawn, to work in the fields—long hard days of back-breaking drudgery for very little money. She would be collected by a gangmaster who drove her and the other women of the village to whatever farm had need of labor. Sometimes they might drive for an hour or two to the other side of the county to harvest peas or potatoes or soft fruit, whichever the season dictated, and be delivered home at the end of the day, exhausted. After a meal she would go straight to bed. If she didn’t work, she didn’t get paid and we struggled. As a single mother, she had no alternative.

I didn’t realize as a child just how unremittingly hard her life was; I didn’t appreciate what she did for me—and how I wish I had. All I knew was she wasn’t there and my grandparents were. My grandfather was my hero. He was gentle, wise, and wonderful, and if he had asked me to walk over hot coals, I would have done it for him without even asking why. He was a thin, wiry man, his face weather-beaten. His hands were gnarled and leathery from decades of hard, manual work, but inside he was a true gentleman and I reveled in every moment spent by his side.

He and my grandmother had had eleven children, six girls and five boys. Most of them had left the village by the time I was born, on October 12, 1964, and I never met them. A few stayed, but apart from one sister, Leenie, who was very close to my mother, I don’t remember seeing any of them. I think my arrival, out of wedlock, caused a rift in the family.

The cottage we lived in felt huge to me as a small boy, but in reality it was very modest, with low ceilings that I hit my head on whenever I tried to bounce on my bed. It was a typical tied workman’s cottage made of the local red brick, set back from a narrow lane and looking on to a meadow at the back, with dense forest beyond. At night I would lie in bed with the window wide open and listen to the noises of the night—scarcely any of them man-made. There were no major roads or motorways and no railway lines within miles. The only thing that sometimes broke the silence was the noise of jets screaming overhead from one of the many air bases in the county. The air bases are still there, but Norfolk is still, forty years later, one of the least populated counties in England, and is still one of the most inaccessible corners of the country.

In the 1960s, it was like a place that time forgot. While the rest of the country was enjoying postwar prosperity, people in the village of Great Massingham were living as they had lived centuries ago. There were several farms in the locality, most of them mixed: they had dairy herds, sheep, pigs, and beef cattle as well as cereal crops, vegetables, and fruit. The land was broken up at that time into small parcels divided by tall, thick hedges and forestry that kept the worst of the Arctic weather at bay—and provided perfect cover for wildlife. And almost all of the farmers laid down pheasant chicks in the spring and ran shoots during the winter months.

Winters were harsh. The cold blew in from the Urals to the east and the Arctic to the north, bringing huge quantities of snow and ice. The hedges stopped most of the snow from drifting, but at times the roads were completely impassable and the landscape was white for weeks and the ponds in the village turned into skating rinks.

At that time there was very little machinery, although that changed as I grew older. Tractors had already taken over from the heavy shire horses—but it hadn’t been so long ago. The old horses from our farm lived in happy retirement in the meadow at the back of our cottage. There were no combine harvesters, no chemicals. The work was done by hand. Each farmer had his own workers, most of them living in simple cottages like ours, on the farms, and during the harvest, gangs of laborers were driven from farm to farm to weed and pick and bale.

My grandfather worked at Ward’s farm. Ward was one of the biggest landowners in the village, and my grandfather had had the cottage for as long as he’d had the job. There was no inside sanitation, no hot water and no heating, and the old iron window frames were rusty and ill fitting. The privy was in the garden and I remember Sunday nights were bath nights when the old copper bath tub would be brought into the living room in front of the fire and filled with water heated in a big copper pan that hung over the coals. We took turns bathing, and being the youngest, I was last.

There were people living in our village who had never left it. And they had no reason to. The village was self-sufficient. There was a butcher, where my grandparents traded vegetables from the garden for meat; a baker with delicious fresh bread at any time of the day; a dairy; a shop that sold general provisions; a hairdresser; a primary school; a fire engine; five pubs; and a blacksmith who shod horses and fixed machinery. It was a farming community through and through. And the sort of community in which everyone knew everyone else—and knew everything about everyone else.

There were no tourists in those days, no strangers wandering about the village, except when the circus came. Even the gypsies who came at harvesttime were the same ones who made the journey year after year. And there was no crime. We all left our houses open, and people would come in without knocking and put the kettle on while they were passing through to say hello. It was a genuine community. The worst that might happen was when someone had a chicken go missing and would report it to Phil, the village policeman. He knew everything; he knew exactly where to find the culprit and would pay a quiet visit. The next day two chickens would mysteriously be delivered to the aggrieved party.

Shirley, my mother, had given birth to me at the age of twenty-four, knowing that she would have to bring me up alone and unsupported. At that time and in that sort of tight-knit community, to have a child out of wedlock was extraordinarily brave, but her parents were apparently very supportive. Sadly, I don’t know the story; I don’t know whether she was in love with someone who was unattainable for some reason. I don’t even know whether my father knew I existed. All I know is that she never had or wanted another partner. So I don’t know who my father was. Even now, forty-five years later, my mother won’t talk about it.

My guess is he was a Romany—not to be confused with the tinkers and travelers who have given gypsies such a bad name over the years. The gypsies we knew were wonderful people, scrupulously clean and honest, with a very strong sense of family and strict codes of morality. They used to travel about the countryside in their traditional prettily painted wooden wagons, drawn by horses, going wherever there was work. They would pick hops and fruit in Kent and vegetables and soft fruit in Norfolk. Occasionally they would graze their horses on the village green, but they had a permanent site on a piece of common land just outside the village, next to an old Roman road called Peddars Way.

Every summer I used to go and play with them. We would go out with the dogs and catch rabbits while the farm workers were combining. They had lots of dogs, big lurchers. One in particular, I remember, was called Scruff; he was crossed with a wolfhound, so huge, and he would chase rabbits until he dropped.

A little farther up the Way was a wagon set on its own that belonged to an old gypsy woman who, it was said, bought illnesses. She was very old and wizened, with long gray hair and gold hoop earrings, and looked like the old-fashioned gypsies you see in picture books. People who were ill used to go to see her. I don’t know whether she made them better, but I don’t imagine anyone would have dared say if she hadn’t because it was said she would put a curse on anyone who spoke ill of her.

I felt very much at home with the gypsies, and although she never said anything, I have a strong feeling that my mother was pleased. I think, in retrospect, that she may have been trying to introduce me to my father’s family. It was unusual for village children to mix with gypsies. They were never liked by the village people and were made to feel distinctly unwelcome in the shops and pubs. I knew how it felt to be treated like an outcast.

I was a solitary child. I attended the little primary school in Great Massingham until the age of eleven, but I don’t remember many friends from that time although I must have had the odd one because I do remember throwing sticks into the horse chestnut tree in the churchyard to get conkers and being told off by the vicar—and I don’t imagine I’d have been doing that alone. But with no father, I think I may have been viewed as a bit of an outcast myself. Maybe I felt I didn’t need friends; I had Whiskey and the farm dogs and they were much easier than my peers. Dogs don’t pick fights or bully or make unkind remarks.

Not that I had much time for friends. I always had to hurry home after school to chop wood for the fires or bring in coal or feed the animals, and I was often taken out of school for several weeks at a time to help with the harvest or whatever farmwork needed to be done. The school never seemed to mind my absence—I was never going to be top of the class, and I wasn’t the only child at the school who was taken out to work on the land at busy times. The teachers seemed to focus on those children who obviously had an academic future and didn’t pay too much attention to the rest of us. And so I worked hard at the subjects I enjoyed, which apart from art were animal related—biology and other sciences—and sports. Those were things I really could do and I was in all the teams for soccer and rugby and cricket. I loved anything played with a ball or anything athletic.

I also loved fishing. In the village there were three big ponds we used to fish. One of them dried out one summer and we rescued the fish in buckets and ran to put them into the other ponds before they died. North Norfolk has dozens of little ponds, or “pits,” as they were called, often in the middle of fields, with tall trees surrounding them. It was a curious feature of the landscape in that part of the county. There were all sorts of theories about how they came to be there. Some people said they were craters caused by German bombs dropped during the Second World War; others said they were left over from some sort of mineral excavation. Whatever caused them, they were full of fish, such as carp, roach, pike, and bream, and provided hours of entertainment for children like me.

Sometimes we would fish farther afield. One pit we were particularly fond of was in a field by the side of the road about four miles from Great Massingham. It was full of gold-colored fish, but every time we got ourselves set up, the farmer would come running out of the farmyard across the field, shouting angrily and waving a stick at us, and we would leap on our bicycles and race away.

I had a green Chopper, which was just the coolest bike at that time. I think my grandfather must have found it on some rubbish pile. It looked as though it had been run over by a steamroller and was all rusty but he restored it for me, painted it, found it a new seat, and it became my prize possession.

A doctor’s surgery was the only facility missing from the village. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk away, in the village of Harpley, where Dr. Bowden had his practice. It was a route I knew well. I was seldom ill but I was accident prone and often needed to be stitched up after bad falls or being bashed during soccer and rugby games.

I didn’t care for doctors much, but dentists I loathed with a passion. I have only been to a dentist once in my life, for a checkup when I was about eleven at a practice in Fakenham, a town about twelve miles away. The dentist said I needed a back tooth removed and although he gave me a local anesthetic, I have never felt pain like it. He had his knee on my chest as he wrestled to pull out that tooth. It was the most horrific experience. I couldn’t bear it. I hated the smell, I hated the noise, I hated the injection, and I couldn’t stand the pain. I vowed I would never go near a dentist again, and I haven’t. On the positive side, it did make me clean my teeth properly and the only teeth I’ve lost since then have been knocked out by overboisterous wolves.

Hospitals have been less easy to avoid. I fell through a roof in my late teens and broke a wrist, and I went through a car windshield soon after I learned to drive, but my first hospital stay was at the age of nine. I lost my grip on the school climbing frame and fell onto the hard ground beneath, shattering an elbow. I was rushed to the hospital in King’s Lynn, where I languished in the children’s ward with my arm suspended above my head for three weeks. There was a boy in the next bed who had slipped and fallen under the wheels of a double-decker bus.

I have no memory of my mother’s visiting, but she tells me that she gave up work for those three weeks and took the bus early every morning into King’s Lynn, which was fifteen miles away, to sit by my bedside until early evening, when she took the bus home again.

One day the sister in charge of the ward came up to her and said, “You’ve been coming here every day for nearly three weeks and I have never seen you have anything to eat. Today you are going to have some lunch. I have organized it with the kitchen.” The sister had rightly surmised that having been off work all that time, with no wage coming in, my mother couldn’t afford to feed herself.

But at home we ate well. My grandmother was a good cook. Sundays were her baking days and wonderful smells would waft into the yard. In preparation she would buy eggs to supplement those our chickens laid. One Sunday she couldn’t find the eggs she had bought, and after looking all over, she had to abandon her baking. That evening my grandfather came into the house and said, “I’ve found your eggs, Ma. They’re under the chicken at the top of the garden.” I had taken them and put them under a broody hen to see if she would hatch them.

My grandmother used to sing as she baked, and I will always remember her wearing a blue floral dress. There was always a big stew or a casserole on the stove, made with vegetables that my grandfather grew in the garden and game of one sort or another that we had shot or coursed on the land. I learned to shoot at a very early age, and could always use a knife. I was never squeamish about killing and could skin and gut.

By the age of eight or nine my job was to bring home our meals. My grandmother would make me coarsely cut cheese sandwiches and some cold tea—we never had hot drinks for some reason—and send me out with a penknife, a piece of string, a ten-pence piece—what that was for I have no idea—and tell me I was equipped to conquer the world. And off I would go with the dogs and not come back until I had plenty for everyone to eat.

I didn’t kill indiscriminately. My grandfather had taught me which animals to take and which ones to leave. I knew to leave female rabbits that were nursing their young. From fifty yards, he could spot “milky does,” as he called them, by their lack of condition and the absence of fur on their underbellies. He knew they had young underground that would die if their mother was killed. Instead I learned to go for the young bucks that would otherwise overpopulate the area.

My grandfather’s whole philosophy was about sustainability and about maintaining a balance in nature. Younger farmers wanted to kill off the rabbits because they were so destructive to the crops, but he wanted to protect them, knowing that if you drastically reduced one species, another would take over. He would say that problems arose only when human beings interfered.

CHAPTER THREE

A Wolf at the Window

In bed at night, when I was small and the lights were out, I was convinced I could see a wolf outside my bedroom window. I suppose it must have been the way the branches of a tree fell. As an adult, of course, the idea of a wolf being tall enough to look in through a second-floor window is patently ridiculous, but as a young child, I was convinced. And I was terrified. Every night, to escape, I hid my head under the coarse black blanket that covered me, but then I couldn’t resist peeping to see if it had gone, and would scare myself all over again. It was just the wolf’s head, ears erect, looking to its left; but by morning, in the daylight, there was no sign of it.

I knew a lot about the wild animals around my home when I was small—probably much more than most children of my age—but I knew nothing about those in the wider world. I didn’t see wildlife programs because we had no television, and I didn’t visit a zoo until I was in my late teens because there was no money for that kind of thing. So the only knowledge I had of big and dangerous wild animals was from books and fairy stories. And all I knew about wolves was that they were sly, sinister, fierce, and deadly; and the images of the stories my grandmother told me preyed on my imagination. It was a long, long time before I confronted my fear.

Foxes, on the other hand, were familiar and although they also had a fearsome reputation, I was not scared of them. One night I was startled from sleep by the noise of the old shire horses thundering back and forth across the meadow behind the cottage. There was a full moon, as bright as I’d seen. It was almost like daylight outside, so I pulled on some clothes, told Whiskey to stay under my bed, and crept out of the house. I quietly made my way down toward the edge of the forest to see what was agitating the horses.

What I saw was pure magic. By the time I reached them, the horses had begun to settle and playing among their giant hooves was the most beautiful vixen with four young kits. They were so busy leaping on one another and tearing around that they seemed quite unaware of my presence, so I sat down a short distance away and watched their game unfold.

It was the most exciting sight. I had never watched a fox at close quarters before. All I had seen were glimpses of reddish brown from afar or a tail, with its distinctive white tip, disappearing into the hedge as the animal ran for safety when I was out with the dogs. Out there in the dark—in their environment, not mine—I felt as though I were witnessing another world.

I went home and told no one what I’d seen, but the next night I went back and there they were again. I can only assume that their den was just inside the forest and this was their playground. Once again I sat a short distance away and watched, and once again they ignored me, but allowed me to be there. This went on for several months as the kits grew bigger and stronger preparing to take their part in the world.

Every night I went out for my secret rendezvous—it was intoxicating to find myself welcome among creatures that were instinctively so afraid of man. In time, they were playing in a small semicircle in front of where I sat, but although they showed no hint of nervousness, they never seemed to pay me any attention. Until one night there was a rustling behind me and one of the boldest of the four kits had started to play in the bush behind where I sat. He burst out into the open and raced around me and playfully ambushed one of his siblings. I was no longer an observer; I had become part of their game.

I learned so much about foxes in that time. I watched the vixen bring food for the kits. It is a myth that foxes kill for fun, that they go into a henhouse and kill far more than they can eat. We think that only because they are usually caught in the act and frightened away. If left undetected, the fox will take one hen from the coop, which is all they can carry at a time, and then go back again and again until they have collected everything they killed. They will eat as much as their family needs that day and bury the remainder in the ground, where it keeps. Nothing is wasted. I know because I saw what they did and saw how well this mother looked after her young and taught them how to take care of themselves.

Six months later I saw a sight that filled me with grief and horror. Walking in the woods with the dogs I came across the limp and lifeless body of this boldest fox kit swinging from a tree. It was held by the leg in a crude trap, having died a painful and lingering death. The fact that this creature that I had come to know so well over the months, which had been so majestic, so beautiful, so full of energy, could have been deprived of life in this vile and cowardly way made me embarrassed for my species. I felt sick. I was so angry that some ignorant human being had taken this vibrant young life for no better reason than because he could.

Native Americans would say that that was the moment when my fate was sealed. They say that you sign nature’s unwritten contract to work with animals at a very young age as a result of some experience, either good or bad, that happens in early childhood. Looking back, there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox—my friend—hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.