Shaun Ellis - The Man Who Lives with Wolves

Wolves, I discovered, do exactly that. They will always make sure they change the environment to bring the odds into their favor before taking on an opponent. I’ve seen three wolves successfully take on a seven-hundred- to eight-hundred-pound bear and remain in control throughout just by waiting until it was pitch dark for the final assault. Being nocturnal animals, the wolves could still see clearly, but the bear, which is fundamentally a daytime creature, was at a disadvantage.

My unit didn’t go to Afghanistan or Iraq; the only active duty we did was in Northern Ireland, but we did a number of “hearts and minds” tours with the United Nations. I remember in particular being in Cyprus, where the UN was maintaining a buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish parts of the island. I went to the Turkish side one day to deliver food. I was the driver and I had a mate with me, but once we arrived, we were redundant. Local henchmen stepped in and started handing out the food—and violence if there was any trouble. I felt cynical about the whole exercise; it seemed to me that all we were doing was helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

As I was standing around waiting, I noticed an old lady struggling to wheel a wooden cart down a cobbled alleyway toward the lorry. She had a lined and weathered face and was dressed in black, as so many of the women were. The henchmen didn’t seem to be paying her any attention, so I quietly loaded her cart with food and while she followed, muttering, I pushed it back up the hill to her cottage, which must have been six or seven hundred meters away. I didn’t speak a word of Turkish and she didn’t speak a word of English, but when we reached her door, she thanked me by holding my hand in hers. Then she did the most incredible thing: She reached into the cart and took out a precious apple, which she insisted I take. I tried to explain that I didn’t need it, that I had plenty of food, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I was so moved; this old woman had nothing and I had three square meals a day. Her generosity of spirit was humbling. Her culture and upbringing made it impossible for her not to repay an act of kindness, and much as I admire the billionaires who give millions to charity, there’s nothing quite like the gesture of someone giving away a piece of fruit that could mean the difference between life and death to her.

There were many reasons why I loved the Forces, and moments like that were certainly among them. Having been a solitary child, I also enjoyed the sense of camaraderie. I loved the outdoor Action Man lifestyle and I believed in everything the military stood for. It suited me down to the ground. I felt secure in the routine and discipline. I felt a sense of family among my colleagues in the ranks. I imagined I would be there for a very long stint. I even tried to get into the notoriously difficult Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS).

Normally you could only apply for the SAS if you were in the army, and the SBS if you were in the navy, but the government had begun a trial to allow crossover. I volunteered to take part in the trial. The SBS training was tough but then I went up to Wales for the SAS training and that was carnage. I got through the first stage, but I didn’t get to Hereford, where the unit is based. It was disappointing, but I was comforted to have made it past the first day. Out of 150 people who started, 40 had fallen by the wayside before nightfall. Their exhausted bodies were lying over the Brecon Beacons like sheep dung.

I obviously wasn’t destined to join the Special Forces but it turned out that I was not destined to make a long-term career of the army either. Instead, it proved to be a valuable apprenticeship for the real job I was going to do in life.

Ever since my extraordinary encounter with that big cream-colored wolf in the zoo near Thetford, I had wanted to see and know more about these creatures that had so preyed on my imagination as a child. I began reading natural history books, and a lot of what I had learned about foxes from years of watching them seemed applicable to what I was reading about wolves. Foxes were being cruelly and systematically persecuted because of a reputation I knew they didn’t deserve; mankind had gone one further with wolves and exterminated them from most parts of the world. I began to wonder whether all the negative stories I had heard about wolves as I was growing up were any more reliable than the falsehoods I had been told about their small, red cousins.

Wolves used to be everywhere. Once upon a time they were second only to humans in the breadth of their distribution across the globe, and when humans were hunter-gatherers, they hunted the same prey as wolves and successfully lived alongside each other, to mutual benefit. They were respected as powerful fellow hunters and given mystical and magical properties. Native North Americans still believe that the spirits of their ancestors live on in the guise of wolves. They won’t sign a treaty unless a wolf, or these days a dog, is present. There were countless legends through the centuries about wolves suckling human children. Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome, were supposedly rescued and nursed by a she-wolf who found them in a basket floating down the river Tiber.

But when man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and wolves started preying on his livestock, the wolf swiftly turned from hero to villain. They were demonized, persecuted, and hunted, in many places to extinction. Despite being endangered, they are still hunted in some parts of the world and still widely feared as savage creatures that hunt by the light of the moon, snatch babies from cradles, and tear Russian peasants from the backs of sleighs.

I had felt such intense and curious empathy with that wolf in the zoo that on the basis of nothing more than instinct, and a habit of identifying with the underdog, I felt an overwhelming need to find out the truth and do whatever I could to help and stand up for these creatures.

It quickly became an obsession. I discovered the Dartmoor Wildlife Park near Plymouth in the village of Sparkwell, which had a pack of wolves, and at the first opportunity I made my way there and got chatting with the keepers. I went there repeatedly on any free days I had from the regiment, and offered to lend a hand at times when they were short staffed. I came to know the owner of the park, Ellis Daw, who lived in an imposing house in its midst, and was soon volunteering to work over Christmas and during other holiday periods when the regular keepers wanted time off. There was a flat in one wing of the house that the keepers lived in and I was able to stay there. Whenever we had leave, and my friends and colleagues went off home to see their families, I went to Sparkwell. I didn’t go back to Norfolk for more than ten years. I felt the wolves were my family.

The park was on a hillside, about thirty acres in all, backing on to Dartmoor National Park. The wolf enclosure was at the top of the hill, running alongside the perimeter fence. It was a small enclosure, not much more than an acre for six wolves, and was fenced with heavy-duty six-foot-high link wire with a double gate to prevent a wolf accidentally escaping when the keepers came and went. Although the area was small, it was quite heavily wooded, and there was a bank toward the back under the shade of the densest trees where the wolves had dug an underground den. Otherwise there was a low rectangular hut by the gate that looked like an air-raid shelter and another smaller structure with a flat roof that the wolves seemed to enjoy lying on during the day. The keepers took carcasses to the animals every few days. Otherwise, their only human contact was when one of the animals needed veterinary attention. The keepers certainly didn’t make a habit of being on the wrong side of the wire for any length of time and no one ever went near the wolves at night. The park closed before dusk and the keepers all went off duty.