Shaun Ellis - The Man Who Lives with Wolves

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.

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.