It was dusk and my daughter and I were sitting on a hill above a forest, watching for wolves, when I noticed a blurry grey shape in the gloaming. Could it be? I gripped her to me as my heart started to thump. I'd been so focused on the idea of seeing a wolf, I hadn't thought to ask our guide what to do if we actually came across one. Should we stand our ground, or run? Suddenly, the mother-daughter trip I'd been so smug about taking my wolf-obsessed 10-year-old on seemed woefully irresponsible.
Lyra's fascination with wolves began a few years ago, when she watched a cartoon called Wolfwalkers, about a girl tasked with hunting wolves who ends up befriending them; the counter-narrative to the Little Red Riding Hood canon she'd previously been fed. Since then, she's collected a small library of wolf books, requests wolf merch for every birthday, and her favourite item of clothing is a "WOLF GIRL" T-shirt she screen-printed herself. The apex predators appeal to her, she told me, because they're "misunderstood". "People are scared of wolves," she said, "but they're more like humans than we think."
Humans have always had it in for wolves. "As soon as we became herders, the wolf was cast as thief," writes Adam Weymouth in his gripping new book, Lone Wolf, tracing one animal's thousand-mile journey across the Alps, "and there have been bounties on its head since the coins have existed to pay them."
By the end of the second world war, we'd managed to wipe them out from central Europe and Scandinavia. But in the last few decades, wolves have made a remarkable comeback, not through reintroduction schemes (as is a common misconception) but simply by migrating from the Carpathians, Russia, Finland and the Baltic states. Their population, says Weymouth, has increased 1,800 per cent since 1965, to over 21,500.
Not everyone is celebrating the migrants' arrival. Contrary to all those fairy tales, attacks on humans are vanishingly rare, but wolves do kill thousands of livestock each year. They also have a taste for ponies, as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, discovered when her beloved Dolly succumbed in 2022. They picked the wrong pony; this year, the EU downgraded the predator's status from "strictly protected" to "protected", paving the way for more lenient rules on hunting.
Nowhere is the wolf debate more heated than in Sweden, where the government has pledged to halve its modest canis lupus population from around 355 to 170. Conservationists are fighting back, with some scientists warning that such drastic reductions could not only threaten wolves' long-term survival but have wide-ranging environmental consequences: the grey wolf is a keystone predator, meaning it has a disproportionate influence on its ecosystem.
Reading about the country's wolves, I came across a company called WildSweden, which offered tracking experiences just a few hours outside Stockholm. I decided to take Lyra before wolf numbers dwindled any further, and her surprisingly enduring interest in them did, too. We would camp in their territory for two nights and venture deeper into their habitat with a guide. We were unlikely to see a wolf; they are, as Weymouth puts it, "the shyest of creatures," but with a bit of luck, we'd hear them. When I told Lyra about our expedition, it felt as if my failure to score Eras tour tickets had finally been forgiven.
After an afternoon in Stockholm, where I drooled over the maximalist floral textiles at design store Svenskt Tenn ("too much," was my daughter's verdict) I introduced her to the two cultural keystones of fika and, that evening at our hotel, Villa Dahlia, sauna. The next day, we took a train an hour and a half west, to Köping, where we met our guide, Simon Green, and the rest of our small group, including a Danish mother and her 12-year-old daughter.
Despite his English-sounding name, Simon was born and bred in this part of Sweden and had the strawberry blond moustache and plaid-shirted, hipster woodsman look to prove it. Simon accompanied his father on the bird-spotting tours he ran when he was a child, studied guiding at university and led polar bear tours in Svalbard before deciding to return south, to the wolves he'd grown up hearing. If anyone was going to find them for us, it was him.
A short drive brought us to our camp in a Scots pine and Norwegian spruce forest: a dozen two-man tents dotted around a firepit, overlooking a glassy lake (we were asked to keep the exact location a secret to avoid drawing too many wildlife spotters -- or hunters). As we carried supplies from the van, we paused to pick bilberries and lingonberries, sidestep tiny brown toads and marvel at crimson toadstools. A bracing swim followed, before a briefing over cinnamon buns and campfire coffee, which Simon filtered through pine needles. So far, so fairy tale.
WildSweden monitors the movements of local wolves, and Simon, who was also our chef, driver and forager, plucking golden chanterelle mushrooms from the forest floor, told us that a pack of around seven wolves had been living in the area all summer. The family consisted of the breeding pair, who mate for life, a couple of one-year-olds and at least three pups. He'd seen three wolves and a pup on separate occasions, and often heard family members howl. But in the past fortnight, their calls had changed in tone, "from commitment to uncertainty", and Simon hadn't heard the pups at all. Had the family gone their separate ways in search of food, or had something more sinister happened?
The plot thickened when Simon told us that a moose calf carcass had been spotted by the side of the road, not far from our camp. It might hold clues about the pack's whereabouts. Hiking boots laced and binoculars at the ready, we set off to find what was left of the moose.
As we followed Simon silently through the undergrowth, stepping gingerly over spongy moss and branches, through purple heather and ferns, no moose revealed itself. Had the wolves gobbled it whole? Then, Simon caught sight of a shoulder bone, crunched and sucked clean of marrow. Several metres on, Lyra noticed a jawbone, crawling with maggots. The experience was beginning to feel less We're Going on a Bear Hunt, more True Detective. "This is so exciting!" Lyra whispered as we all peered at the jawbone. Several scat (excrement) spottings followed, far more revealing than any paw print, Simon told us, pointing out moose hair in one. A black woodpecker rat-a-tatted ominously nearby.
We trekked on for a couple of hours, following the subtle paths of bent grass the wolf, or wolves, had left, like snail trails on glass; eyes peeled for an 80cm-tall beast with yellowish fur (grey is a misnomer) and a black-tipped tail. But the killer remained at large. Still, we were on a high when we headed back to camp. We had been where they had been. Lyra had picked up a "wolfie vibe" and had a useful lesson, I thought, in delayed gratification. As Simon pointed out, and she repeated at bedtime, "the only thing that separates us from them is time."
After supper, a tasty vegetable stew topped with ruby red lingonberries and the chanterelles Simon had picked and Lyra had fried over the fire, we climbed to a hilltop overlooking the forested "rendezvous site"; what Simon believed to be the pack's current HQ. I sat with my back to a rock, Lyra between my legs. Mosquitoes whined; cicadas clicked. Simon spotted a moose -- our pack's next prey, perhaps -- and we heard a tawny owl's twit-twoo. We'd been there about half an hour when I spotted the grey shape off to the left, sending me into paroxysms of terror. In the end, though, studying it through binoculars, I discovered that what I had thought was a wolf was, in fact, a lichen-covered rock. The irony at being giddy with relief at not seeing one wasn't lost on me.
Simon gave us a tutorial in wolf dynamics the next morning, using the same plastic figures Lyra keeps on her bedside table, and I was struck by the parallels between our species: they are highly social, use tonal calls to communicate, and form strong emotional bonds. Next, we went to check on WildSweden's camera trap, trained on a tree stump smeared with wolf catnip (castoreum and lanolin), on the edge of the rendezvous site.
When Simon downloaded the data, we were treated to a black-and-white clip of a year-old wolf skulking past on a recent night, like a bank robber on CCTV. Lyra daubed the stump again before we set off into the undergrowth. This time we felt like experts, helping Simon to identify claw marks on branches and cloven moose spores in the peaty soil; deducing, from the colour of the scat we found, what the wolf had had for supper.
That evening, our last, we were back at the scene of my rock sighting, hoping for another sign. It was a cold, still night and we were shivering in our raincoats and waterproof trousers. After an hour of silence, I wondered if I should suggest we call it quits and return to camp for the s'mores the girls had been promised.
Then Simon got to his feet and cupped his hands around his mouth. He'd told us that his father had taught him to howl like a wolf when he was a teenager, and sometimes one would howl back, but I'd forgotten he'd said he might do it for us. He tipped his head back and gave a loud, Thriller-style yowl, and then another.
For about 30 seconds, all was quiet again. Then the entire pack -- adults, yearlings, excitable, high-pitched pups -- howled back from their posts within the forest, the closest a couple of hundred metres from us.
I'd imagined, if we'd been fortunate enough to hear a wolf, that it would be faint, a could-that-possibly-have-been, spine-tingler. But the reality was raucous, a three-and-a-half-minute symphony that set the valley alight, and it wasn't scary in the slightest. The wolves sounded like what they were; a close family looking out for each other and making their presence known. They had reunited. It was one of the most magical things I'd ever heard. "They've reunited!" said my own pup as we squeezed each other in the darkness.
As we parted at Köping station the following morning, I asked Simon what his advice would have been if the shape I'd seen that first evening had been a wolf after all. "Stay still," he smiled, "and watch with joy."