Sarah Hall - The Wolf Border

The Land Rover clears another bracken-covered ridge. Thomas Pennington pulls over and croaks the handbrake on, kills the ignition. He rolls the window down. Wind stirs the yellow grass. Below is the lake, six intricate miles of it, pewtered at its head as clouds move over from the Atlantic.

So, Rachel. I appreciate your time and I’m very glad you’ve visited Annerdale. May I ask your thoughts?

She looks towards the central peaks. There are grand and celebrated elevations among them, but after the Pacific-Northwest, the Rockies, and the arboreal plains, they seem diminutive.

Well, she begins. Thank you for the opportunity to see the project.

She has planned what to say. All she needs to do is stick to the speech. She knows he will be convincing, and the money hinted at is unusually generous. Nevertheless.

I have a good team at Joseph, she says, and reliable funding. Our new visitor centre opened last year — we’ve got quite a few educational programmes. But with the amount of hunting now in the state, we have to be more vigilant. It’s not a good time to be a wolf in Idaho. The scheme here — well, it’s captivity, for all its merits. It would be a step backwards for me.

This is more than she has said all morning and the speech is delivered without pause. She looks at him, hoping to avoid awkwardness. There were no guarantees; he knew that. He returns her gaze, considers what she has said, nods.

Of course. England lags terribly in terms of ecology. We’ve barely got our ‘toad crossing’ signs up. But it’s an exciting time, things are changing; we’ve already changed them.

We , she thinks. Who is this we ? This is his dominion, his private Eden. She looks away. Greyer clouds are heading up the valley on a brisk wind. The ground darkens beneath them. She can smell the rain coming, like tonic in the air.

You must like being home again, he says. It’s such a special place, isn’t it? It’s somehow gloriously in us.

What do you mean?

His question feels too intimate, inappropriate. Again she feels peculiar being so close to a man of such power — even the tribal councils, with their elders of utmost gravitas and authority, do not disarm her as much. She suddenly wishes she could get out of the Land Rover and walk back to Pennington Hall.

I mean it has a resonance, he says, and sighs. I used to dislike being away, even as a young man, and I was away a lot, boarding and London and whatnot. I still dislike being away, when the House is in session. This is a unique area. ‘The form remains, the function never dies.’ We are so very lucky, you and I, to belong here, Rachel.

She has no inclination to enter into a sentimental discussion. She tries to remain focused.

I’m not sure what that has to do with it.

Thomas Pennington smiles. His teeth are capped and polished. He is gearing up to make his case; she can see the signs, the poise, the mental garnering of argument. Let him say his piece, she thinks. He’s paid you.

I know you’re a woman of honesty — I admire that. So let’s be honest. This is a real chance for environmental restoration in a country that desperately needs it. The whole process has been incredibly bureaucratic. All the things one has to prove about wolves: previous inhabitation, suitable territory. God forbid they should be able to hunt their own prey! Government has become extremely adept at legislating its urban squeamishness — my chaps too, I’m afraid to say. Anyway, we got there.

He makes a dismissive, swatting gesture, as if cutting through and casting aside the opposition.

If we were going to be anything less than a self-sustaining enclosure, I wouldn’t have prevailed upon you. I wouldn’t have wasted your time, Rachel. Or mine.

He turns his hands over, palms facing upward. Behavioural assay of state, she thinks: humility. He is appealing to her dominant position. He is not without guile, nor lacking sincerity — the consummate politician, perhaps.

I know getting you back would be a coup. America has everything you need. But, if I may say it, America isn’t the real challenge. America has wolves walking back down from Canada of their own volition. Aren’t you just overseeing what already exists? Here, even behind my ridiculous fence, they will be able to hunt and breed; they will be able to do what they do, and for the first time in centuries! Isn’t that extraordinary? Imagine what it all might lead to. Perhaps even full reintroduction.

It is raining lightly now. The windscreen begins to speckle. The shadow of the clouds arrives, darkening the Land Rover’s interior. The Earl’s eyes are greenish-brown. There’s Huguenot in him. His nails are manicured; his eyebrows shaped. The tweed in his coat is probably customised. Yes, she thinks, it is extraordinary. But there’s something about him, something about his energy, that she does not trust. The waxing and waning — the peaks and troughs. Almost bipolar, and she is familiar with that condition. The mania. The terrible aftermath. They are a convincing breed, made charismatic by ideas and self-belief, with plans so persuasive that it’s hard not to be swayed. Hard too when the life gust is vented and the black mask slides down. Oran. The day she and Kyle found him sitting by the Clearwater River in his pick-up, a loaded gun on his lap, the radio blaring. Just watching the steelheads swimming , he said.

Full reintroduction. In thirty years maybe, and not in England. She shakes her head. She has not come professionally unprepared.

The Highland studies are speculative — I know, I advised on one them. This country isn’t ready for an apex predator yet, won’t be for quite a while. The Caledonian Park took ten years to get off the ground, and then it was dismantled. The issue is just too divisive for Britain.

Eight years, the Earl says, quickly. But Campbell messed it up. He didn’t spend the money. You have to spend the money.

She shakes her head again.

I don’t want money. No one in my line of work does it for money.

No. That’s not what I meant.

Thomas Pennington’s smile broadens, becomes enigmatic. Does he mean a bribe? Or perhaps he is alluding to the returns he might make if he offers wolf-watching tours in the enclosure. He is determined; she can see that. And he has excessive confidence.

People here don’t care about the countryside in any deep way, she says. They just want nice walks, nice views, and a tearoom.

That may be, he says. But I have an exciting vision. Sometimes a country just needs to be presented with the fact of an animal, not the myth.

Now there is pathos in his argument; he knows he has failed to win her over. Still, he seems hopeful. The eleventh Earl of Annerdale. He could almost be another species. Specialist cologne. No wallet carried in his back pocket. Regardless of democracy, the greater schemes are led by those in the upper echelons, the moneyed, she knows that. Perhaps he will do it. For a moment she thinks about the possibilities. She looks ahead, through the misty smirr, towards the lake, which would, she thinks again, be a good territorial boundary, if this were wilderness. The rain lisps and taps on the Land Rover roof, old and sensual, an influence long before language. The smell of it — so familiar — iron and minerals, the basis of the world. But she is not ready to come back, and may never be.

She faces him, holds out her hand, and after a moment Thomas Pennington takes it. They shake.

I’m sorry, she says. But best of luck.

The Earl smiles.

I hope we can still count you as a friend of the project.

Of course, she says.

*

After their meeting she is offered lunch at the hall, which she declines. It seems unnecessary to linger. Her host is, in any case, leaving to go south — there’s a helicopter standing on a hardpad near the back of the hall, its blades bowed, the helmeted pilot sitting in the cockpit. Leaving the estate, she tries to spot finished sections of the enclosure barrier, but the trees have yet to lose their leaves fully and it’s cleverly hidden from view. The cost must have been astronomical: millions, perhaps. There are other estates in the country with small wildlife parks, housing bison, boar, and wildcats, but they are not free-ranging, they are fed, cared for — glorified zoos. Nothing as ambitious as Annerdale exists.