cry wolf

All images by Jonathan Gregson

MIDWINTER IN THE FOREST IN THE DEEP DEAD dark of night. Nothing stirs. The land is hibernating, curled up until spring trundles over the horizon and sweeps the earth of snow. Even the lakes sleep, still beneath their thick green blankets of ice. We peer out wide-eyed into the gloom, straining to catch some hint of life out there – conjuring up mysterious beasts in the hulking silhouettes of granite boulders and in the spindly bobbing arms of the spruce trees that rear up around us. Save for the steady poink-poink of ice melting from their branches, all is silent.

And then it comes. A long lingering wail, flying around the trees, rising and rising, louder and louder, before it cracks and fades into a mournful whine, and the forest falls silent again. We draw closer to the fire. Caught by a sudden gust of wind, it crackles and hisses. Marcus Eldh, blonde hair tucked neatly under a woolly hat, clears his throat and laughs, taking a blackened kettle from the flames. ‘Perhaps the forest is full of human beings howling at each other tonight.’

Marcus has been leading wildlife tours in his native Sweden for over 10 years, taking the curious into the woods of Bergslagen, in central Sweden, in search of elk, beavers and bears. But the creature that exerts the biggest pull is one that has terrorised mankind in fairytales for centuries: the wolf. Marcus has learnt to mimic them from nights like this in the wilderness. Often, they follow his calls with their own. ‘I’ve heard the wolves howl so many times, and I just feel the urge to reply to them,’ he says, pouring coffee into tin cups. ‘And if they reply back again, it gets a bit addictive. I can hear if they sound anxious, but mostly it feels like the wolves are having fun and they really like to howl.’

They are quiet for now, though it’s hard to shake off the sensation that they are all around us, watching, ready to slide silently out of the shadows when we least expect it. It takes only a few hours in the woods to realise that we are in their territory, not they in ours.

OVER THE COMING DAYS, THE forest slowly reveals its secrets. Gangly elk stand at the edge of fields, nibbling at birch bark, ready to lumber into the safety of the trees at a moment’s notice. Puffed up against the cold, a Tengmalm’s owl watches over a bog, its yellow eyes scanning fallen branches and brown pools for voles. Whooper swans drift down the black streams that still flow between banks piled high with snow. A great-spotted woodpecker hammers a pine cone wedged in a telegraph pole, the rap-rap-rapping of its beak pronounced in the still cold air.

 Everywhere, there are small round footprints – tripping across frozen lakes, leaving a neat trail along the road, weaving between the distinctive red wooden farmhouses of the region. In Swedish folklore, these are left by the tomte – small bearded creatures that pad about farms at night while everyone is sleeping, to feed the animals and generally keep things shipshape.

‘NO-ONE HAS EVER SEEN HIM, BUT THEY know he is there,’ goes the story by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. ‘Sometimes when they wake they see the prints of his feet in the snow. But no-one has seen the tomte.’ Jan Nordström has a more prosaic explanation: ‘We have several thousand fox in Sweden – their tracks are everywhere.’ Jan met Marcus in the forest as they each looked for wildlife, and has worked as a guide for him ever since. All of Swedish nature calls him – he bounds along a trail left by capercaillie and points out ground disturbed by wild boars – but it is the wolves that capture his imagination. ‘There are maybe 400 wolves in Sweden, and four wolf territories in this area,’ he says, sitting by a lake shrouded in fog, keeping a watchful eye on the cinnamon buns and lingonberry juice warming on the fire. ‘No-one can say for sure where the wolves are. You can track them but there is no guarantee you will see them. I like that.’ 

He settles against a tree trunk, checking for movement across the frozen water through a pair of binoculars: wolves have been spotted on this lake before. Large flakes swirl from the sky, and soon turn violent, flying horizontally in the gathering wind. The lake disappears as the weather rampages. We retreat to the forest to find it has become a place of refuge: dry, quiet, a carpet of pine needles and moss as spongy as pillows underfoot. Again, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something is watching us – perhaps some benevolent troll peering out from his burrow to see us safely on our way.

The elk was not so lucky. In a copse of fir trees, a confusion of animal prints rips up the earth. Branches lie scattered, sheared off their trunks. In the middle of the wreckage is the rib cage, a few shreds of meat hanging off the bones, the snow pink around it. ‘Wolves eat everything – meat, cartilage, bones,’ says Jan, standing over the carcass. ‘They start with the fat, the kidney, the heart, and keep coming back until the whole elk is gone.’

There is no sign of them now but it is the first of many such encounters, little moments of our worlds bumping up against one another. A short distance further north, a farmer has reported a wolf scaring his horses from their hay overnight. They are back in their field, ears twitching, by the afternoon, but the pair of scavenging ravens circling over the nearby woods suggests there’s a wolf’s dinner hidden in there somewhere.

UP IN THE HILLS TO THE EAST, where the mist is so dense it feels like the world has ended, we find our first prints. They belong to a male wolf, and are no more than a few hours old. We follow the trail down the road. ‘See, he is walking very slowly here. His tracks are close together,’ explains Marcus. ‘Then he stops for a bit here, perhaps sniffing the air.’ The prints cross a stream and disappear into the forest. ‘The angle of entry in the snow shows the wolf started to run. Maybe he heard our car. Imagine, he was right where we are standing now.’

There is a report of more tracks, that of a family, in a territory several miles away. We arrive to find the road abuzz with rangers, measuring the prints, checking for territorial markings, and collecting sour-smelling spores from the roadside. They are staff from Grimsö Forskningsstation, an ecology research centre housed in a jumble of farm buildings deep in the Bergslagen forests: the Swedish wolf population is the most closely monitored in the world.

Linn Svensson stands by the roadside, mobile in hand. As lead biologist of the Skandulv (Scandinavian Wolf) programme at Grimsö, she has been studying the animals since 2005. ‘I know this wolf population better than my own family,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know where they were born, where they live.’ The current population is thought to be descended from five or six animals that wandered in from Russia and Finland in the ’70s and ’80s; before that, there had been no wolves in Sweden for more than 30 years. With populations in Scandinavia now edging towards 500, tensions between man and beast are rising. A number of wolves are shot or run-over each year, and they’re responsible for killing far more sheep and dogs. Many farmers would rather there were no wolves in Sweden at all. Their plight seems precarious. ‘In the zoo, they live 15 or 16 years,’ says Linn. ‘In the wild, about 10 years. Most of them die in their first year. It is a rough life being a wolf.’

Marcus is so adept at shining a light into that life that the need to see a wolf – so crucial at the beginning of the trip – has entirely melted away by the end. It is enough to plunge into their world for a short while. He leaps from tree trunk to boulder, tracing the prints of a large wolf he has found just as the sun has begun to set, turning the sky a hazy purple. ‘In Sweden,’ he says, ducking under the branches of a spruce, ‘people are afraid of wolves just from one story, the Gösta Berlings Saga.’ In it, the protagonists are chased across a frozen lake by a pack of snarling bloodthirsty beasts – the demonic monsters of popular imagination. ‘But wolves are shy. They are afraid of people and they hide themselves away from us. I feel sorry for them really.’

It’s pitch black when we lose sight of the tracks. Marcus crouches in the snow, face turned up to the starlit sky. ‘Take out your ears and listen,’ he says, preparing to howl for a final time at the mysterious creatures lurking deep in the forest. ‘If we’re really lucky, we will hear them.’

His cry is carried off into the wind. Somewhere, out in the dark, a wolf pricks up his ears to listen, and slinks further into the night.