The Man Who Lives with Wolves
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My concern for foxes put me at odds with the rest of the community. The farmers hated them because in extremis a fox will take a newborn lamb, and the gamekeepers hated them because they took pheasants. So the local hunt was given a free rein to go wherever the scent took them, and it was a popular sport. The results were sickening.
Many were the times I came across a den where the vixen had gone to ground and the huntsmen had dug her out and gassed and killed the kits. The deadly smell of poison would still be lingering in the air. Sometimes it was a family I had watched for weeks, seeing the kits grow stronger and more adventurous. All of them gone, wiped out, given no chance of escape—all because of a reputation that the fox didn’t deserve and a few people’s desire for sport.
My gran used to tell a story about how she had been spring cleaning the cottage one day with both the front and back doors open, and a fox ran through the yard and straight in one door, through the house and out of the other. Moments later the entire pack of thirty-odd foxhounds followed. They were like a tidal wave sweeping through, jumping up and over tables and chairs as they followed the scent, and they wrecked the place. She had all her best china out of the cupboard and the whole lot was smashed. Shortly afterward the huntsmen came past on their horses, all dressed up in their pink coats, and when she asked what they were going to do about it, they simply doffed their hats and galloped off.
No one would listen to me when I tried to protest that foxhunting was cruel. And as a young boy it was hard to argue with my elders without being disrespectful, but it seemed to me that if you didn’t want foxes to get into your henhouse, then you needed to build an enclosure that was foxproof. It seemed totally unjust to set foxhounds to kill foxes because human beings were too lazy to take proper care of their chickens. Whenever I tried to speak to anyone about it, I was told to mind my manners, what did I know? I was just a child.
It was years before I was vindicated and foxhunting was banned in England and Wales. During the debate that raged beforehand, I was involved in researching the effects hunting had on the fox. The prohunting lobby said that they only caught old and sick animals, but that was simply not true. I examined foxes that had been caught and among them were carcasses of eighteen-month-old foxes—animals in the prime of life—too young to know how to save themselves.
Another myth was that the lead dog brought down the fox and it was all over in seconds with a single bite. The truth was they ran the fox to exhaustion until its brain boiled and swelled, its lungs bled, and the fox drowned in its own blood. They were often dead before the hounds even touched them. It was the most horrific death.
But back in the sixties, as a child no one would listen to, I very quickly grew to be deceitful. I went out with the dogs and as long as I came home with a couple of rabbits or pigeons, I could be gone from very early morning until after dark and no one asked any questions. I spent my days studying foxes, sitting for hours and hours watching and waiting; and all the wonderful things I saw and experienced and learned about foxes and their world I kept to myself. I knew that no human could be trusted, that if I told anyone where I had been watching families at play, they would go straight to the den and kill every creature inside it. Without knowing it, I became what the Native Americans call a keeper of the wild.
It was the beginning of a bad time for me. My world that had seemed so safe and secure, so happy and so loving, began to fall apart. I came home from school one day to discover that my grandfather had had a stroke that left him paralyzed down one side. I had not prepared myself in any way; it had never crossed my mind that he might ever be anything other than fit and strong, teaching me about the lore of the countryside and making the decisions for the family. I couldn’t imagine him any other way and didn’t want him any other way. But suddenly he looked old and frail and could no longer do all the things we used to do together. His mind seemed to have gone. Sometimes he remembered who I was; sometimes he seemed to have forgotten. And where once I had depended on him, he now depended upon others.
It wasn’t long before he had a second, massive stroke and died where he lay on the settee at home. My gran covered him with a jacket and sat with him, refusing to move, until the undertakers came to take him away. They must have been married for more than sixty years and had been so close and loved each other so dearly that I think his death broke her heart. They’d gone everywhere together, done everything together, and I had never once heard them argue or say a cross word to each other. If Gran went down to the shops, he would always go to meet her and they’d walk home together or he’d take his bicycle.
I remember them laughing. On washday she would always take the wet sheets up to the garden to squeeze them in the mangle. She would put them in and my grandfather would turn the handle and one day he said something to her that made her laugh so much she couldn’t get the sheets into the rollers.
I was just thirteen when he died. He was eighty and had lived and worked in Great Massingham all his life. He had been a popular man, and St. Mary’s Church, where the funeral was held, was packed, but among the familiar faces was a family of strangers sitting at the back. When the service was over, they came up to my grandmother and the stranger explained why they had come. He said that many, many years earlier he and his sister, as children, had been hungry, starving, and my grandfather had taken a loaf of bread for each of them from the back of the baker’s cart and told them to stuff it inside their jackets. The man no longer lived in the area but said he had never forgotten the kindness and had wanted to come and pay his last respects.
My grandfather was buried in the churchyard under the shade of the horse chestnut tree where I used to collect conkers.
His death changed everything. We had to leave the cottage because it was tied to my grandfather’s job, and for some reason that was never explained, we split up as a family. My grandmother, whom I looked upon as a mother, went to live on her own in a council house on Jubilee Terrace, where she was near her oldest son and his family, and my mother and I went to a tiny new bungalow, owned by the council in Summerwood Estate at the end of a cul-de-sac. I was miserable and angry, and I was grief stricken. I felt as though I had lost everything. My mother had never been the one who cared for me or cooked for me; she hadn’t been the one who spent time with me, who’d taken me for walks, or who’d taught me what I needed to get through life. It had been my grandparents and they were both gone. I didn’t want to be with my mother and I blamed my grandfather for dying and leaving me when I needed him most. I was terrified; I didn’t know how I was going to cope without him.
It was only when I went back, at the age of forty-four, and looked at the headstone on my grandfather’s grave that I discovered my grandmother had lived for another thirteen years after his death. I thought she had died within months of him. I have no memory of seeing her again after we moved. All I remember was the need to get away from anything that reminded me of what I’d lost.
I must have been very difficult for my mother. I took out my anger and my grief on her. I was at a secondary school in Litcham by then, which was about seven miles from Great Massingham, and she was out at work every day, working long hours as usual. I became very independent and shut her out of my life. I traveled back and forth on the school bus, which was a big blue double-decker run by Carter’s of Litcham. It was the oldest bus in the company’s fleet and the only double-decker. The kids from all the other villages came on single-deckers, and whenever there was snow, which could be five feet deep or more, there was just one bus that managed to struggle through, bypassing stranded cars and lorries along the way. To our annoyance, it was ours.
I seldom saw my mother. When I came home from school and on weekends, if there was work going, I went harvesting, baling, driving tractors, plucking turkeys, castrating pigs, helping cows give birth—anything and everything. And if there was no work, I would go off with Whiskey, my dog. I would go off for days sometimes, sleeping in barns, not thinking about how worried my mother might be. I became a bit of a recluse, a bit feral, wandering in the woods, being at one with the wildlife in a world where, increasingly, I felt I belonged—the only place where I was able to cry.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Misspent Youth
A part from playing on the school sports teams, which I loved, my time at Litcham Secondary School was undistinguished. I had friends, but my best friend died of an asthma attack. I remember the headmaster calling the whole class together one morning and breaking the news. I felt at that moment as though I were destined to lose everything.
I was a regular visitor to the headmaster’s office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen. I needed to get out and earn a living and I wanted to get away from home. I was still angry and hurting and wanting to forget. So rather than look for jobs on the land, I joined a roofing company called Western and Bolton Roofing. It was hard work, carrying tiles and running up and down ladders all day, but it made me strong and fit and it took me to building sites all over the county. Sometimes we would be on a job for weeks if not months and I’d stay in a bed-and-breakfast or in hostels, only going back at weekends, and then I wouldn’t necessarily go home but often would stay with friends.
It was through work that I began to make my first friends and develop a social life, which largely revolved around pubs. There were a lot of good pubs in the area and once every three months, on a Saturday night, there was a disco in the little community center in Fakenham. It was the place to go. All the top DJs in Norfolk played there and people came from miles around to hear them. There was great music, drink, pretty girls that we’d take outside and kiss against the wall, and plenty of fights—all the good things in life. Then we’d make our way haphazardly home.
I remember one night the fog was so thick you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face and one of my mates said he knew the road so well, he could do it blindfolded. We all followed him on our little 150 cc motorbikes—I was on the back of one, as I usually was—and he missed a bend. He drove straight into a deep ditch and we all followed him into it one after another, no one noticing until we were up to our axles in water.
Fakenham was the fashion capital of Norfolk. On disco days, we would go into town in the morning and buy all the gear we needed, have a few pints, go home, play soccer for a couple of hours, change into the new clothes, go back to Fakenham, have some fish and chips in the early evening, then move on to The Crown for some beers, then to the Rampant Horse, which was as rough as hell—anytime you wanted a fight, you’d go there—before hitting the disco later.
One of my best friends was a tiler named Benny Elson, who lived in Weasenham, a neighboring village, and through him I met my first girlfriend, Michelle Pearce. Benny was older than I was, as most of the guys I worked with were, and Michelle was his wife Jac’s niece. She was visiting their house one day when he and I were getting ready to go out and asked who I was.
I started frequenting the Fox and Hounds in Weasenham, where she lived, and she would come in after school and hide behind the bar, and Skiffy, the landlord, would signal to me and we’d go off into the woods together and sit and talk for hours. We wrote each other little notes and I used to walk her dogs for her. She said all the things I needed to hear, and life didn’t get much better. Her father was one of the Queen’s pigeon keepers—I built him a pigeon loft in their garden—and I remember arriving at their house one day to collect Michelle and finding everyone in a state of great excitement because the Queen had just been to visit.
I fell madly in love with her, but she was too pretty for me and in the end she left me for someone else and broke my heart. We were both very young, but there was definitely something there and I often wonder how things might have been if I’d pushed a little harder or been less of a prat.
Skiffy’s real name was Freddy Scarf and he was a character. He didn’t turn a hair when I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the pub—after years of illegal underage drinking—but then he had been regularly paying me in beer for the game he had on the menu that I and a couple of mates had brought in through the back door in sacks! I had been taught to poach by Pete, someone I knew from working on the land. He was married with a family—I never really knew much about him except that he was an expert on pheasants and how to get them illegally, which he had learned from his grandfather.
Pete had a brother and the three of us used to go out with an old 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, a genuine poacher’s gun that broke apart so you could conceal it. It had been handed down in his family from one generation to another. It went off with a terrible crack and smoked like mad, so the safest night of the year to fire it was November 5, Bonfire Night, when everyone was setting off fireworks.
Pete tried to make a silencer for the gun but the first attempt, out of copper pipe and baffling, was too heavy to lift. The modified version was much more successful until one day Pete was shooting a bird directly above him. The silencer must have become misaligned as we climbed through a hedge and ended up right in the line of fire. So when Pete pulled the trigger, flames shot out of the barrel and the burning silencer shot into the air and came straight down on his forehead, almost knocking him out.
It was dangerous business—and not just because of flying silencers. If we had been caught, we could have gone to prison—and we came close time and time again. One night I felt a massive hand in the small of my back push me down into the hedge. I knew better than to yell. Pete and his brother were lying flat on the ground beside me, facedown, and I lay there not moving a muscle for several minutes. There was not a sound to be heard; then I saw the outline of two pairs of water boots walk past on the track less than five feet from my face—gamekeepers patrolling their patch. My heart was pounding; I was convinced they’d hear it. It must have been four or five minutes before we dared move again. I asked how on earth they had known the gamekeepers were coming. They knew all the tricks; Pete’s brother had smelled the gamekeepers’ cigarette smoke.
We always tried to avoid the areas where the birds were released because that was where the gamekeepers expected poachers—they put down traps and they patrolled. And Pete taught me never to shoot a white pheasant, although they were obviously easier to see in the dark. Gamekeepers bred them specially, he said, because they were easy to count and if one was missing, they’d know a poacher was in the area and would intensify their patrols.
So we walked for miles across fields, heading for pits, then we’d crawl through the undergrowth to the bottom, which was usually filled with water, and lie there out of sight. You could look up through the trees above you, where roosting pheasants were perfectly silhouetted against the sky and shoot them straight off the branches. As the youngest, it was my job to pick them up from wherever they fell, which was usually in the water, and put them into the bag. Pete did the shooting and his brother held the torch and did the spotting.
I was enjoying my new life, but there was always something missing. I was one of the lads and I liked getting dressed up to go out and having a good time—they used to say I looked like George Michael in my white jeans—but I never lost the need to go off on my own with the dog and roam the countryside, watching foxes, spotting birds, looking for signs of other wildlife. There was always a part of me that remained separate from my mates.
One day I took the bus and went to visit the local zoo, just outside Thetford. I saw animals I had never seen before. I was so excited I felt like a child—and then I came to the wolf enclosure, and standing less than ten feet away were the creatures that had filled me with such terror night after night.
There was one in particular, a beautiful creamy-colored male with lovely golden-yellow eyes that immediately locked onto mine. We stared at each other, and in those few seconds I felt that he touched my soul. I felt as though this magnificent creature understood everything about me, knew my secrets, could read my deepest thoughts and fears, and could see all the hurt and pain. I felt he had the power to heal those wounds and make me whole again. It was an extraordinary connection and I knew that what I was looking for in life was right there in front of me.
He probably looked at every member of the public in that way in the hope that they might throw him a piece of food, but I don’t imagine that everyone would have felt what I felt, or have seen what I saw. Maybe it was all those years spent with dogs and with foxes, living with one foot in their world, always being slightly at odds with the human world. Or maybe it was something deeper. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of a lifelong contract. I knew that everything I had been told about this creature was a lie and that he and I had a lot in common and were both living out of our time.
I felt I needed to get back to the land, so I gave up the roofing business and applied for a part-time job as a gamekeeper’s assistant on an estate that ran a big commercial shoot. It was good to be back among the hedgerows, but the work flew in the face of everything my grandfather had taught me. He had ingrained in me that you kill to eat; you don’t kill for fun. On this estate, so many birds were laid down, you could scarcely put your foot on the ground without treading on a chick; and when it came to the shoots, there was no skill involved—it was slaughter. It was harder not to hit a bird than to hit one. They didn’t want to fly; you had to throw them in the air to get them to go anywhere.
I stuck it out for about sixteen months, but when I heard on the grapevine that Morton’s farm estate, a much smaller enterprise, was looking for an assistant gamekeeper, I went there. It was one of the farms in the village where I’d worked many times over the years, and the job came with a little one-room cottage, which was perfect. Monty, the head gamekeeper, was a craftsman of the old school, and I knew I would learn a lot from him. He trained me and was very good to me; he put a lot of trust in me, which to my shame I abused. But I was in the wrong job.
He wanted me to kill the foxes to stop them taking the young birds. Instead, I killed pheasants and the rabbits and fed them to the foxes. There was a particular vixen I had watched over for months. She had built a den on the tree line where she raised a litter, and I watched her move the entire litter to another den she built on another tree line in a different field, across a road about five hundred yards away. For some reason she must have decided they were no longer safe at the first site, and so carried them one by one, holding them by the scruff of the neck in her mouth, across the fields under cover of darkness.
It was four months before I was caught. Monty found the evidence one day and confronted me. I felt I had let him down badly. When I told the story to Pete, my poacher friend, he said, “You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.” He was right, and the episode did nothing to improve my popularity among the locals. To them, foxes were vermin and I was despised for my views.
I was out of a job and a house, but very quickly found work in the building trade again and rented a little cottage in the village, which I moved into with Sue, a girl I’d been seeing for some time. I don’t think it was a passionate love affair for either of us, but we got on well for a while and we married, without a great deal of ceremony, and had a little girl together, Gemma.
During that time I started studying foxes in earnest. I knew I wanted to work with animals, not bricks and tiles, but I couldn’t see how I was going to do it, and the laboring jobs paid the rent. So I read books and went into the forest at night and on weekends.
One evening there was a knock at the door and I discovered that not everyone in the village was against me. A woman stood there with a young fox kit hidden under her coat that she presented to me. The kit couldn’t have been more than two weeks old and she had found him starving, cold, and close to death. His mother had presumably been killed. I told her I would keep him until he was old enough to fend for himself and then release him into the wild.
I named him Barney and made a little den for him in the barn out of a large drainage pipe lined with straw and set about teaching him what I’d observed vixens teaching their young. When he was old enough for solid food, I fed him on rats, mice, and rabbits, which I skinned and minced, making the meat as much like the nourishment his mother would have regurgitated, and gradually introduced him to fur and whole animals. I then showed him how to defend his food—I opened my mouth wide and made a fast cacking sound, which is what I had seen wild foxes do. He picked it up quickly and was soon defending his food from me. I played with him as I had seen so many kits do with one another: chasing him, rolling him over, and having mock fights.
Eventually I decided he was ready to be released, but first I spent several nights out in the woods with him so he could listen to the sounds and get his bearings before I left him to fend for himself. When the moment came to release him, I had no idea whether my training would be of any use to him. He made a dash for the trees, turned for an instant to look back at me, and was gone.
Imagine my joy when I spotted him again many times in the next few years and knew that all those hours as a child spent sitting, listening, watching, and learning had saved this young creature’s life.
CHAPTER FIVE
For Queen and Country
Looking back, it seems that everything about my early life was preparing me for my future with wolves, though at the time there didn’t seem to be the slightest connection. Not long afterward, I was in King’s Lynn with three mates. One of them needed some money in a hurry, so we were in a backstreet stealing car radios—not something I am hugely proud of—when someone spotted a couple of policemen heading our way. We ran off into the High Street with two policemen in pursuit, desperately looking for a busy shop to disappear into. It must have been an early closing day because nothing was open except for the army recruitment office, which had a welcoming light inside. We dived in breathless and panting, and announced that we had come to sign up. I don’t imagine they had seen so many people all week; they welcomed us with open arms and ushered us swiftly into a back room to see a video about life in the army. Perfect.
We were all impressed by what we saw, and it became my life for the next seven years. We signed up that afternoon, but I was the only one who went the whole way. I had never considered joining the army and, had I not been dodging the police, probably never would have done so, but the more I learned about it, the more it seemed the perfect career for me.
My relationship with Sue was at an end. I was too wild, too angry, too disconnected. I was twenty-two and I wanted to get away from Norfolk; I didn’t feel there was anything left for me there. I liked the outdoor life, I enjoyed physical exertion, I had been used to discipline from an early age, and I was good at taking orders without question. These were all qualities I had learned from my grandfather and all were essential components of a successful soldier. In one of the interviews, I was asked why I wanted to join the army and I told them about the car radios. I think they probably thought I was joking.